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Chapter 11 Coloring the Terms of Membership Joe Soss and Sanford F. Schram M ost studies of racial and ethnic inequalities focus on how discrete, measurable things get allocated across groups. “Who benefits,” researchers ask as they examine the allocation of goods, “and why do some get more than others?” Such questions rightly lie at the heart of our collective effort to understand how inequalities persist and change. Yet they are not the whole of it. Disparities exist, not only in who gets more or less, but also in how social groups are positioned in relation to one another and major societal institutions (Tilly 1998). In this chapter, we explore racial and ethnic disparities associated with recent changes in U.S. policies toward low-income populations. We focus primarily on welfare policy and, secondarily, on criminal justice. Likewise, our analysis centers on African Americans, though we consider the positioning of other groups intermittently . Our chapter is not a study of distributive disparities; it does not focus on who gets more or less and why. Rather, it is a study of civic disparities: it asks how recent policy changes position different groups vis-à-vis major institutions of the state, market, and civil society. Civic and distributive disparities are, of course, related. We focus on the terms of a group’s societal inclusion partly because they are significant in their own right and because we assume that outcomes of the “who gets what, when, how” variety depend, at least partly, on how groups are positioned in relation to societal institutions. In this respect, our analysis builds on a long intellectual tradition of conceptualizing civic and distributive disparities as two sides of a single transaction. This is the tradition of Jane Addams (1902), who viewed poverty as a combination of economic deprivation and social marginality, and who linked both to processes of assimilation in which denigrated “others” were told to act “more like us.” It is also the tradition of scholars who have argued that poverty and inequality cannot be decoupled from the social question of solidarity (Heclo 1995), conceptions of social citizenship (Marshall 1949/1964), and processes of civic incorporation into so- / 293 cietal institutions (Lieberman 2005). This tradition invites us to rethink the theme of this volume, racial and ethnic disparities, in terms of societal membership. Specifically, we ask: in the United States today, how do welfare and criminal justice policies organize governance and establish terms of membership in distinctive ways for different racial and ethnic groups? Gosta Esping-Andersen (1990, 23) once observed that “the welfare state is. . . in its own right, a system of stratification.” Its policies can classify and locate social groups in ways that disrupt or consolidate preexisting patterns of disparity. In what follows, we suggest that contemporary U.S. policies intersect with race in ways that promote uneven patterns of civic incorporation. To be sure, race is less decisive for civic incorporation today than it was in Jane Addams’s time. Nevertheless , race continues to influence the kinds of societal institutions that individuals encounter and the kinds of institutional positions they occupy (King and Smith 2005; Brown et al. 2003). This interplay of race and policy has profound implications for the future of citizenship and democracy in the United States, and it deserves a central place in the study of how goods, risks, and opportunities are distributed across social groups in America. In addition to raising enduring questions of membership, the theme of this chapter is also a timely one. In recent years, arguments over societal inclusion have risen to the forefront of welfare state politics. Across Europe, debates over civic inclusion have gathered momentum as governments have struggled to cope with immigration, economic integration, changing domestic populations, and the shifting relationship between economic disadvantage and social marginality (Blank 2003). The language of social exclusion now routinely frames European discussions of unemployment and welfare (Silver 1994). Labor activation policies are cast as ways to bring marginal groups into the societal mainstream, primarily by assimilating the long-term unemployed into the consistently working labor force (Handler 2004). In the United States, the politics of welfare reform has followed its own politics of inclusion grounded in the new paternalism (Mead 1997, 2–3), a directive and supervisory approach to the poor that emphasizes the need to enforce civic obligations and present an appropriate “operational definition of citizenship” (Mead 1986, 7). Because the poor have failed to work and form families in the manner expected by “the societal mainstream...

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