Decompiling Oppression #37
Sam McVeety
With the prospect of a return to workplaces and public spaces, there's also been some activity around how the economic recovery should relate to the emergency protections put in place for some of the most vulnerable people in society. Many of the same arguments around work requirements and incentives from the past decades are resurfacing, so I thought this was an important time to take a deeper look at the public welfare system. Naturally, this is a vast topic, so we'll just be focusing on two programs today, AFDC and TANF, and how the latter's replacement (in fact, more of a downgrade) of the former amplified some of the same vulnerabilities that we are seeing today, particularly through work requirements. We won't have a chance to get into resource and income requirements today (along with adjacent programs like SNAP and Medicaid), but hopefully will in the future.
When we talk about "welfare", AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) have existed for decades. The Social Security Act of 1935 established AFDC as a program for households with children without ready access to sufficient income. It evolved over the following years, but throughout, it was a federal program that was administered by the states, providing states discretion around some of the eligibility requirements. This state discretion can further erode protections, for example in Alabama, where aid was predicated on policing the relationships of single mothers (again amplifying stereotypes about Black women) until the Supreme Court struck down the practice in King v. Smith.
AFDC ended and TANF began in 1996 (with the promise of "ending welfare as we know it" under the Clinton administration), ramping up work requirements and placing a five-year cap on program eligibility. This same ethos of family policing underscores two of the four explicit goals of TANF: "(3) preventing pregnancies among unmarried persons; and (4) encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families." (Pause for a second -- here, the federal government is explicitly withholding aid based on condemnation of single motherhood and at the time, LGBTQ+ families.)
A throughline in poverty policy and law has been the racist, classist (etc.) idea of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, and the political contours of that determination. Essentially, the deserving poor are (seen as) those who can't help it, whereas the undeserving are those who would not be poor, but for some personal failing. Already, you can imagine how this concept has been racialized, gendered, and mobilized across other identities (notably disability as well). For example, many individuals with disabilities were often characterized as the deserving poor, which, while entitling them to some benefits, also denies them a sense of agency. Conversely, women of color (particularly Black women) were and are viewed as a source of labor, and thus are undeserving of government assistance.
Work requirements are at the heart of this deserving/undeserving determination. Inherent in work requirements is a gendered notion of what constitutes "work" and the erasure of parental and household tasks. For example, a single mother who is spending 10 hours a day on childcare doesn't qualify for work requirements, because childcare isn't recognized as "work". The coupling of work requirements to access to benefits has ramped up over time, mobilized by politicians and cultural stereotypes about welfare recipients. Reagan famously invoked stereotypes of Black mothers as "welfare queens", and campaigned against welfare in both his gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. Beyond the harmful content of these practices, they are also entirely divorced from reality.
Black mothers participating in ADC, which was renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in the early 1960s, were almost twice as likely to work as their White counterparts: 19 percent of Black mothers receiving AFDC worked, compared to 10 percent of White mothers. (Source)
The discretion provided to states shows up both in policy creation (as in Alabama) and policy enforcement, both of which manifest structural racism:
Other studies show that within states, Black families, and in some cases Latinx families and American Indian and Alaska Native families, are more like[ly] to be sanctioned for not meeting work requirements. Not only do people of color face employment discrimination ... research suggests that caseworker discretion also plays a role in higher sanction rates[.] (Source)
To tie that all together: we have racialized cultural notions about willingness and ability to work, that result in policy changes which disproportionately harm Black people and other people of color, and then those policies (already with structural racism built in) are further amplified by uneven enforcement. All this serves to obscure the fact that wage suppression and stagnation has meant that there are fewer and fewer jobs that can actually support a household, displacing the blame onto the victims of this system. We have to do better, and dismantle these harmful ideas of deserving and undeserving poor, replacing them with systems of holistic support and empathy.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Spend some time reflecting on the question, "Why are people poor?" Has your answer to this question changed over time? What has shaped your answer? (Credit to Elizabeth Hodges)
Communal: What kind of safety nets exist in your communities? What choices and risks does this support enable? When someone requires help, what systems exist to determine whether they are worthy of help?
Solidarity: Support Puget Sound Sage and their intersectional work towards equitable development, community leadership, and a healthy environment.
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