Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

Introduction

Introduction joe soss, sanford f. schram, and richard c. fording Imagine what it would take for welfare politics in the United States to be unaffected by race. The social problems addressed by the welfare system—poverty, health, life skills, and the like—would need to be equally distributed across racial groups. The composition of welfare recipients, both in fact and in the public mind, would have to re›ect the population as a whole. The term welfare itself would be stripped of racial connotations, and mass media and public of‹cials would have to ‹nd ways to discuss the poor without an invidious racial subtext. To be unaffected by race, the political present would need to be shaken free of its past, so that the welfare system’s legacy of racial bias would not limit the possibilities or de‹ne the problems for contemporary political action. The formation of political coalitions would need to be liberated from the divisive effects of racial prejudice and residential segregation. Political representation, policy implementation, and the power to in›uence them would all have to be made innocent of color. The farther one takes this thought experiment, the clearer it becomes that welfare politics in the United States remains entwined with race. It also grows harder to imagine how people in this country could discuss welfare without taking race into account. Yet today, in a remarkable number of political venues, this is precisely what happens. Like the proverbial pink elephant at a cocktail party (the one that no guest will be ‹rst to mention), the “problem of the color line” is usually a subject of delicate avoidance when the conversation turns to poverty.1 Some politi- ⠂ cal elites and policy experts do pay close attention to the ways povertyrelated outcomes vary across racial categories. But even in this company, the discourse tends to stay within a narrow range; race is usually treated as a self-evident basis for classifying people and social outcomes. Rather than delving more deeply into the construction or consequences of racial categories, a wide array of actors in welfare politics ‹nd it useful to assert that race has limited relevance. Conservatives dismiss the idea that durable racial disadvantages explain patterns of welfare usage. Liberals are equally quick to reject images of welfare as a program directed primarily at people of color. Few public voices suggest that racial subordination (past and present) plays a fundamental role in the ways Americans understand and practice welfare provision. This book is about race in the United States and its distinctive effects on contemporary welfare politics. Over the past three decades, despite the lack of public attention to this issue, an impressive body of scholarship has grown up around the subject of race and welfare provision. Racial dynamics, in one form or another, played a key analytic role in a number of the classic works on welfare published between the 1960s and 1980s, such as Winifred Bell’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children (1965), Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s Regulating the Poor (1971), and Michael Katz’s The Undeserving Poor (1989). More recently, scholars have focused direct attention on the racial dimensions of welfare politics in a series of landmark books, including Jill Quadagno’s The Color of Welfare (1994), Robert Lieberman’s Shifting the Color Line (1998), Michael Brown’s Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (1999), Martin Gilens’s Why Americans Hate Welfare (1999), and Kenneth Neubeck and Noel Cazenave’s Welfare Racism (2001). Through these works, as well as a large number of important publications in scholarly journals, evidence and explanation have become more sophisticated, and the interplay of race and poverty politics has come into sharper focus. To assemble the relevant literature, however, one must ‹sh in separate disciplinary streams. Some questions have become specialized topics for historians; political theorists claim others. Much of the empirical research emphasizes ‹eld-speci‹c debates about the dynamics of public opinion, policy implementation, or some other dimension of political life. This division of labor offers some advantages, but it also discourages an integrated understanding of how race has shaped the past and present of U.S. social policy. A major goal of the present volume is to counter this tendency toward balkanization. By bringing together diverse scholars with overlapping substantive concerns, Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform 2 we hope to encourage a richer dialogue centered on the role of race in U.S. welfare politics. The need for...