UNITED STATES: Critics See Racial Politics in Welfare Reform

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 1 1996 (IPS) - When President Bill Clinton explained why the six-decade-old welfare system needed to be overhauled, he contrasted the widows who received welfare in the 1930s with welfare recipients today.

“When welfare was created, the typical welfare recipient was a miner’s widow with no education, small children, (her) husband dies in the mine,” Clinton argued Wednesday as he promised to sign the welfare bill conpleted this week in Congress. “(There were) very few out-of-wedlock pregnancies and births.”

That contrast between the symbolic miner’s widow of yesterday and the pregnant mothers of today is typical of the current welfare debate, Clinton’s critics say.

Racially charged code words and election-year politics, they claim, forced the decision by Clinton and Congress to roll back the welfare state, first put in place by Franklin D. Roosevelt 61 years ago.

The scrapping of federally guaranteed welfare programmes will cut an estimated 55 billion dollars annually going to the country’s poorest families, and replace it with varying state-run programmes.

“I think ‘welfare reform’ is itself a code word for racial politics,” says Chester Hartman, director of the Washington-based Poverty and Race Research Action Council. “The standard picture of a welfare recipient is some black woman with nine children…sitting and eating bonbons.”

Racially coded issues like affirmative action and welfare have long been crucial to influencing voters on racial grounds without specifically attacking blacks or Latinos, adds Ron Walters, a professor at Howard University in Washington. The result, he argues, is mass public support for “a punitive form of welfare: it’s not really welfare reform, but welfare elimination.”

“There’s an understandable backlash against welfare,” says Philip Coltoff, executive director of the Children’s Aid Society in New York. “We believe, I think wrongly so, that it’s welfare people who are responsible for our problems.”

But Hartman argues that, although Latino and African Americans are disproportionately represented on the welfare rolls, the majority of the 12.8 people now receiving welfare are white.

Nor do the savings involved in cutting welfare amount to much, Coltoff adds. “All of welfare counts for less than two percent of the federal budget,” he argues. “The savings is probably less than the cost of one nuclear submarine or one aircraft carrier.”

“It saves money,” concedes Deborah Weinstein, director of the family income division of the Children’s Defense Fund, a leading opponent of the welfare bill. “But what makes it so outrageous is that there haven’t been any cuts in any other area — just in this area, which affects so many poor children.”

Yet the symbolism of welfare — particularly as a vulnerable issue for Clinton’s Democratic Party — has loomed larger than the actual size of federal welfare programmes. Clinton knew full well that he would attract criticism from his Republican challenger, Robert Dole, if he did not fulfill his campaign promise in the 1992 elections to “end welfare as we know it.”

The U.S. political debate on welfare for years has centred on what former President Ronald Reagan called “welfare queens”: young black women bearing out-of-wedlock children. A recent cover of ‘The New Republic,’ a weekly political journal which urged Clinton to sign the Republican-backed welfare reform bill, featured a black woman with a child, smoking a cigarette.

Hartman contends that such racial politics, on the eve of an election, helped prod Clinton to back a sweeping repeal of welfare that he initially opposed. “Clinton basically feels black voters have no place to go, so he feels he can do this with impunity,” he says.

Clinton in fact vetoed Congressional welfare reform bills twice, arguing they were too harsh; but the president himself admitted that, while the latest version was an improvement, the legislation is still “far from perfect.”

The Urban Institute, a think tank which had provided the Clinton administration with data about earlier welfare reform bills, contends that the latest version could push about one million children below the federal poverty line.

Some 10 percent of all U.S. families will lose at least some income as a result of the welfare cuts, Weinstein says. She adds that Children’s Defense Fund studies estimate that as many as eight million families could lose an average of 1,300 dollars a year in reduced welfare money and food stamps.

Other reports indicate that Clinton’s main promise — “to give people on welfare a chance to draw a paycheck, not a welfare cheque,” as he put it Wednesday — will also be hard to fulfill.

Clinton claims that, by ending federal welfare programmes like the large Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and putting the money into state welfare programmes, different states will be able to offer innovative new efforts to transform welfare recipients into workers.

But a study of the employment environment in Illinois by Nikolas Theodore of the Chicago Urban League and Virginia Carlson of the University of Wisconson-Milwaukee disputes that claim. The authors say that, for every job opening in Illinois, there are four workers in need of entry-level jobs — and the ratios are even higher for cities like Chicago.

“Many, perhaps most, welfare recipients who are dropped from the rolls won’t be able to find private sector jobs,” warns Hugh Price, president of the National Urban League.

“Many jobs in manufacturing, the industrial sector, and even the low end of the service sector are gone, and gone forever,” Coltoff adds. “You can have a good work ethic, but unless you’re trained for the modern economy, you’re not going to get a job.”

The changes in welfare will allow states to require adults to work for their benefits after two years of receiving welfare. Many recipients will also be liable to lose all benefits after five years on welfare, while legal immigrants and their families will be denied a range of benefits.

“What are welfare mothers who cannot find work supposed to do for family income when the time limits expire?” asks Price. “This measure will leave families who need assistance at the mercy of the states, which, with few exceptions, do not have acceptable track records in providing the aid that was available under the old federal programme.”

“There is an enormous amount of racism at the state level, particularly in the South but also in the northern governments,” argues Hartman. State governments, he says, may differ dramatically in what they will offer the poorest families.

Southern states with large black populations, for example, have the lowest average monthly payments for AFDC recipients under the existing federal programme, which allows states to determine the range of payment levels.

In 1994, Mississippi allowed only 120.90 dollars per family each month, and Louisiana allowed just 164.28 dollars. By contrast, Alaska allowed 760.65 dollars per family, while New York gave out 546.35 dollars.

The price of allowing Clinton political breathing space on the welfare issue could well be to enshrine and exacerbate such disparities in funds marked especially for children, say critics. “To be dumping on children this way — it’s a real low point for this administration,” Hartman says.