Racism and Welfare in America

June 5, 2017

[Note 10/11/22] I wanted to separately publish the fourth Part of the Universal Basic Income essay, since it’s the history, and that’s probably the only part worth reading today.

“America became white — the people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white — because of the necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying the Black subjugation…It is the Black condition, and only that, which informs the consciousness of white people. It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define Black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.” — James Baldwin, “On Being White and Other Lies”

What follows is a wildly abbreviated history of the racism of welfare in America. I use this specific program, welfare, as a synecdoche for the American safety net, which as a whole is too complex for the scope of this essay. This will be an abridged and pointed overview of an area in which there are excellent and under-appreciated books; please read the source books for this.

My intention in establishing this history is twofold: 1) to show that race, class, and gender are not distinct in the American context, but instead are co-constitutive; and 2) to show that the racism and misogyny (rarely two separate things) inherent in existing and historical welfare programs can be read in the conditions they impose upon their recipients. Therefore the unconditional nature of the basic income would be a radically antiracist departure from this history.

On nomenclature: I use the word “welfare” to refer to Aid to Dependent Children, created in 1935 under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, as the program was renamed in 1964. These were replaced by TANF in 1996. Today, TANF is so weak, the primary public support for low-income people is SNAP — food stamps, which are funded by the Farm Bill.

In both welfare policy and discourse throughout the twentieth century, we see the domination of what Kimberlé Crenshaw called “sexualized racism” at the intersection of race and gender. Dating back to the antebellum period — when slaveowners would accuse the women they held as chattel of being seductresses and “Jezebels” in order to excuse their rape habit and to explain the proliferation of mixed-race babies — there has been a pervasive anxiety about controlling Black female sexuality. Slavery stole the reproductive freedom of Black women, and transferred culpability for the sexual abuse they suffered and for the difficult lives of their children onto their own bodies. As Dorothy Roberts writes in Killing the Black Body, “regulating Black women’s reproductive decisions has been a central aspect of racial oppression in America…. It is believed that Black mothers transfer a deviant lifestyle to their children that dooms each succeeding generation to a life of poverty, delinquency, and despair.” Rather than fade with the end of slavery, this toxic trope become more virulent over time. Just as slave-masters outsourced responsibility for their sexual predation onto the bodies of Black women, today social policy outsources responsibility for poverty — an economic phenomenon — onto the bodies of Black women.

Most of the safety net programs that working and poor people depend upon today originated in a much more exclusionist and racist period in our history. The year that welfare and Social Security were enacted, 1935, eighteen Blacks were lynched in the US, Oklahoma passed a law prohibiting whites and Blacks from going boating together, and the same southern Democrats in congress that passed the New Deal blocked a national anti-lynching law.

Roosevelt was eager to make whatever concessions to the racist Dixiecrats he needed to in order for them to maintain power over both Blacks and women, who were characterized as unworthy of assistance.[1] The first iteration of Social Security excluded about half the workers in the American economy, including agricultural and domestic workers — categories that at the time encompassed 65 percent of all Black Americans in the workforce.[2] Today, almost all workers are covered by Social Security, which is today a model for our unconditional basic income in that it is not means-tested and therefore stigma-free. No one today needs to demonstrate his or her worthiness to get Social Security, and no one is ashamed to receive it.

But welfare, explicitly targeted towards mothers in need, received different treatment. The New-Deal era concession to Dixiecrats became deeply entrenched in the institution of welfare: states would administer the benefits, and set their own conditions, criteria, and limits on those benefits. States, in turn, tended to pass along responsibility to administer the benefits down to counties. In the South, where Black families were still concentrated, people in need of aid faced down the same local bureaucracies that denied them the vote, access to good schools, and so many essential aspects of civic life. The sociologist Frances Fox Piven writes, “Southern welfare laws and practices were designed to shore up a rigid caste labor system. Blacks were less likely to get aid, and when they did, their benefits were lower than whites so that the welfare check would compare unfavorably with even the miserable earnings of field hands.”

Most states in the South had, by World War II, enacted “suitable home” rules which denied aid to any mother (almost always Black) perceived to have violated sexual norms by having children outside of wedlock or who was simply rumored to be sexually active. Gunnar Myrdal reflected at the time that “since all Negroes are believed to be ‘immoral’ almost any discrimination can be motivated on such grounds.”[3] Each locality had its own web of exclusions and exceptions, not all denials of benefits were explained, and supervision of the local administration of welfare was exclusively aimed at ferreting out perceived overpayments. As a result, in the first iteration of welfare as established in 1935, Black families were underrepresented relative to their need.[4]

The migration of Black families northward did not by itself solve these problems — there was racism aplenty in the north — but the Great Migration did usher in a new era of expanded services, first under President John F. Kennedy and then, most notably, with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Sociologist Jill Quadnago argues that the War on Poverty was conceived as “an equal-opportunity welfare state.”[5] Johnson expanded the availability of benefits significantly — the number of families on welfare rose from about three million in 1960 to almost eleven million by 1973. The role of the federal government in administering it increased as well, making the program more fair and accessible as power was removed from the local offices prone to local racism, especially in the south.[6]

But we must not ignore the new racial ideology that grew behind the scenes of the Great Society. A spectre haunted the Johnson administration, emerging from the ethereal realm of federal bureaucracy into the public eye, never since exorcised from the collective unconscious: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. His “Moynihan Report” (officially titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action) was leaked in 1965, the year after the War on Poverty was enacted. Moynihan spent the years leading up to 1964 as the chief architect of the War on Poverty, first under Kennedy, then Johnson. In this role, he was presented Labor Department data that showed that although unemployment was decreasing, the number of welfare applications, mostly from single black mothers, was on the rise. He attributed this to the “deterioration of the Negro family,” a phrase which apparently did not sound as nakedly racist then as it does today. He explained this lack of family values (to use the more contemporary phrase) as a cultural pathology leftover from the conditions of American slavery — an idea drawn from the historian Stanley Elkins, who according to social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew (as quoted in the Moynihan report) argued, “Since many slaveowners neither fostered Christian marriage among their slave couples nor hesitated to separate them on the auction block, the slave household often developed a fatherless matrifocal (mother-centered) pattern.” Moynihan argued that this pattern, and other traumas of slavery, became ingrained in the cultural DNA of Black Americans, to create a “Tangle of Pathology” in the “Negro American,” demonstrated by the emasculated Black male, who failed to provide for his family but rather abandoned them.

Some legitimate present-day scholars with whom I disagree have argued that the Moynihan Report was not all or even mostly bad, and that the backlash against it has counterproductively closed discussion of cultural forms. Indeed, the frank discussion of the unique horrors of American Slavery was cutting edge at the time, and welcome.

That said, the Moynihan Report utterly ignored the ongoing contemporary injustices and economic discrimination that Blacks were subject to, and instead provided an alternative explanation that placed all culpability on the long-ago past and all responsibility for change on Black “self-improvement.” This proved a durable template for liberals and conservatives alike.

This ideology of cultural pathology and self-improvement was disastrously manifest in the War on Poverty programs that Moynihan designed. Most immediately, welfare was wildly underfunded. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “It did not take long to discover that the government was only willing to appropriate such a limited budget that it could not launch a good skirmish against poverty, much less a full-scale war.”[7] Not only was it limited, the Great Society overall put more distance, socially, politically, and in funding, between the stigmatized “welfare” programs for the poor and the popular social insurance for the middle class, setting up “welfare” as a favorite punching-bag and Social Security as a sacred cow of American politics.[8]

The language Johnson and his administration used to talk about the program made things worse. As Johnson said in his 1964 State of the Union address, “very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom.” Influenced by Moynihan, at that point behind the scenes, Johnson meant that a cultural pathology had infected Black people, making them lazy. Although it has become a central pillar of neoliberal ideology, this core idea — that poverty is something other than a lack of money — is counterintuitive, even metaphysical. Is poverty a culture? An identity? A lifestyle? Perhaps, for Moynihan and his followers, all of the above. (White supremacy makes tortured logic seem utterly rational. Poverty is by definition a lack of money.)

Therefore most Great Society programs were focused on educating individuals, not giving them concrete assets. Job training programs were the centerpiece of the policy, and they did train hundreds of thousands of Black men in trades such as construction. But as Black workers graduated from these job-training programs, they were systematically excluded from white trade unions, and thereby the workforce. White workers explained that their membership in exclusive unions was their sole valuable property right — in reality, their white privilege was the asset they sought to protect. Their anger fueled George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign,[8] as well as Nixon’s more subtle racism on the campaign trail that year. (That the white supremacist vote was large enough to be split between two of the three candidates that year and still propel Nixon to victory should be a sobering reminder for us as we parse the data on the 2016 election). This resentment is the antecedent for today’s backlash against affirmative action. Johnson and Moynihan would not acknowledge that if there was a cultural pathology behind Black poverty, it was white racism.

But the War on Poverty also provided tools and resources for Black activists. The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the chief administrator of War on Poverty programs, was bound by a “maximum feasible participation” clause, which mandated in specific terms the inclusion in decision-making of the people the program sought to help. These grants were used to create “community action” programs that ended up extending basic political rights to Blacks, especially in the rural South.[6,9] In the North, for example in Newark, New Jersey, this clause allowed the militant local chapters of SNCC and CORE to capture the OEO and directly challenge the white Democratic political machinery, including by convening “unruly” protests. The confrontations between OEO-empowered community action groups and the entrenched white power structures of cities including Chicago (where Mayor Richard Daley kneecapped the OEO), New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, led to a demand from mayors that Congress drop the “maximum feasible participation” clause, which they did in September of 1965, the month after the Moynihan Report was made public. In 1969 Moynihan published a bitter and angry book that lay the entire failure of the Great Society at the feet of “activist[s]” who insisted on “maximum feasible misunderstanding” by including community members in the program’s administration. By this measure alone — Moynihan’s ire — we can regard the OEO community action programs as a fleeting but significant progressive victory.

During the Nixon administration, Moynihan helped dismantle the OEO. He was the chief advocate of replacing welfare with what was called the Family Assistance Program (FAP). This program would have provided a guaranteed annual income to its recipients, replacing Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare with a promise from the government to make up the difference between the recipient’s earned income and the level of the annual income. [That info is from a fascinating primary document: Robert J. Lampman, “Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan,” Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, Madison, (November, 1969) 19.] On the face of it, this sounds close to our proposal for a basic income, and some present-day basic income advocates have looked back on this moment as a missed opportunity. The program was defeated by the Senate, attacked by the Right — as always — but also opposed by many liberals.

Although the program looks good by today’s standards, it was not an unconditional basic income. It carried an inflexible work requirement, that could mean, according to a New York Times postmortem, that “mothers of small children…might be ordered to work regardless of the adequacy of day-care facilities or the appropriateness of the job.” The amount of the guaranteed annual income was lower than the existing welfare payments in many of the Northern states that liberal senators represented, and they didn’t want to risk “putting the whole system up for grabs at a time of inflation, rising taxes and free-floating disgruntlement.” For his part, Moynihan supported the program because it would provide benefits to two-parent households, helping to assuage his concern for the “deterioration of the Negro family.” When the bill failed to pass, he wrote another defensive book blaming liberals for its defeat, and complaining, according to a reviewer in the Times, that “Beggars…can’t be choosers. No one appreciates a panhandler with an ‘exact change only’ sign.” He meant that the liberal Northern senators that objected to FAP because it cut payments to recipients in their states were being greedy on behalf of the poor people they represented. Between 1960 and 1980, participation in the unchanged AFDC program rose from over 800,000 families to 3.8 million families, as Johnson’s version remained in effect.

That takes us to Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen.” This trope gained prominence in Reagan’s 1976 campaign, and suggested not only that welfare recipients were unworthy of social support, sexually promiscuous, and lazy, but they were also scammers. As if welfare weren’t already stigmatized enough, this rhetoric made it seem like the act of receiving welfare was itself a crime.

The Welfare Queen narrative arose from a real, well publicized case, that of Linda Taylor, who was a legitimate con artist. Taylor was white, but in many of her various assumed identities, she posed as Black. Of course, hers was a single case — no systemic pattern of fraud has ever been found in American welfare recipients.

In the public narrative of the “Welfare Queen,” there was no question that she was Black — indeed, the “Welfare Queen” was Black before she was Linda Taylor, because the narrative itself predated Taylor according to historian John Hinshaw: “The Welfare Queen driving a pink Cadillac to cash her welfare checks at the liquor store fits a narrative that many white, working-class Americans had about inner-city blacks. It doesn’t matter if the story was fabricated, it fit the narrative, and so it felt true, and it didn’t need to be verified.” Even twenty-three years later, in 1999, sociologist Franklin Gilliam, Jr. found that listening to audio from Reagan’s campaign speech about the Welfare Queen reliably aroused racist sentiments in test subjects. Once in office, Reagan enacted draconian cuts to welfare programs, cutting aid to most working parents, and slashing benefits for poor families with no other sources of income.

By the time Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, welfare was so racially coded that, according to sociologists Kenneth J. Neubeck and Noel A. Cazenave, politicians were able to “exploit racial animus to promote their political ambitions and goals simply by speaking the word welfare.”[10] This was useful to Clinton as he ran a racially-charged campaign that sought to woo whites back from Reagan’s Republicans, with campaign stops at Stone Mountain, Georgia — birthplace of the KKK — and back in Arkansas to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled Black man. Clinton’s promise to reform welfare became a central plank in his platform. So when Newt Gingrich and his cohort outlined the policy that was to become TANF in their Contract for America, Clinton only needed to present a thin veneer of resistance before essentially granting his Republican opponents their promise to “Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility.”That sentence from Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” serves as a summary of the welfare racism related to this point: anxiety about black women’s sexuality; the idea that black women use their sexuality and childbearing to defraud the system; that the best way to handle the impoverished Black mother is to be “tough;” that they are lazy and must be forced to work; and that they lack “personal responsibility.” The conditions to be imposed on welfare benefits are the molding-cast for the most powerful racist stereotypes of the time.

And so it came to pass. With the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996, welfare became Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), an entirely different beast than its predecessors. TANF was administered as a block grant to states, so the federal government would give states money, with some specific conditions to be imposed on all aid recipients, but it also gave total freedom to states to impose their own conditions, rules, and bureaucratic systems.

The nationally imposed conditions included a lifetime limit on the total amount of time a family could be on the program (five years), and a two-year limit on continuous aid. Immigrants — even legal immigrants — were barred from the program, and recipients must do specific “work activities” — generally 35 hours a week, or 20 hours a week for single parents — or have their aid penalized or terminated. The subsidized “work activities” do not generally allow more than a year of a GED or a secondary education, leaving the remainder to be done on your own time (though if you get financial aid from your educational institution, that can count as “income” and disqualify you from the program).

At this point in the American political discourse, it was assumed by all sides that the goal was primarily to shrink the welfare rolls, not to help people or make sure that kids weren’t growing up in poverty. So the legislation included strong incentives to states to withhold aid. States could re-allocate unused portions of the federal grants to fill other holes in their budget, or to fuel unrelated ideological crusades. The journalist Bryce Covert showed that seven states use TANF money to fund “crisis pregnancy centers” that try to prevent women from getting abortions by misleading them about their medical options. This incentive was bolstered by a “caseload reduction credit” that lowered the obligations states had to meet for their programs if they reduced their welfare rolls. So states could get free money from the federal government by kicking people off the program, and then the federal government would reward them by then lowering the standards for the program. To further this end, the federal law explicitly asserted that states have no obligation to provide assistance to any individual or family.

By this measure it was a “success.” In the twenty years from 1996 to 2006, the average monthly caseload of the program fell by almost two-thirds — from 4.4 million families in 1996 to 1.6 million families in 2006. The percentage of impoverished families that receive assistance has declined from 68 percent to 23 percent. Hillary Clinton, a strong advocate of TANF, proclaimed proudly that former welfare recipients were “no longer deadbeats — they’re actually out there being productive.” She had no empirical basis to say that; all she knew was that there were fewer people receiving welfare.

One of the big selling-points of the TANF welfare reforms on the Left was that it would fund childcare for families on the program, allowing women to get jobs in the market economy and thereby achieve economic “independence.” This allows the economy to get the full benefit of women’s labor without “wasting” their time on informal, unpaid care work, and commodifying the care work that replaces this unpaid labor. Perhaps some women would prefer to work for a wage than receive payments and be able to stay home — but TANF, with its work requirements, refuses poor women that choice, forcing them to use the childcare provided by the Child Care and Development Fund, which receives partial funding from TANF block-grants. It essentially replaces a wages-for-care work scheme under AFDC (though AFDC did fund childcare, including Head Start, at a lower level) with a wages-for-labor scheme. It assumes that the unpaid work of mothers raising children is essentially worthless. And families on TANF find themselves in a real trap either when the parents’ wages exceed the eligibility requirements — almost universally, still well below the poverty line — or when they time out of the program and so lose their childcare. There’s no good way out of that situation unless they can rely on some other program for childcare.

Within the TANF framework, states have nearly limitless power to determine eligibility, type and level of aid given, conditions for receiving aid, and enforcement mechanisms. This is what allows the sexualized racism manifest in TANF to rise to a fever pitch. In some states, TANF barely exists at all: in Georgia, which has the sixth highest poverty rate in the nation, only 7 percent of families in poverty receive any TANF benefits.

In San Diego, the city enacted a program that allowed investigators from the Public Assistance Fraud Division to conduct preemptive, unannounced searches of the homes of any TANF recipient, even to look for “fraud” in the form of a “secret boyfriend” who might be paying the bills on the sly, according to an unsuccessful lawsuit challenging the practice. One inspector barged into the home of a naturalized refugee, and, according to reporter Matt Taibbi, “reached into her underwear drawer and began sifting around. Sneering, he used the tip of the pencil eraser to pull out a pair of sexy panties and looked at her accusingly. If she didn’t have a boyfriend, what did she need these for?”[11] The lawsuit against the practice details not only one-off searches, but dogged harassment of TANF applicants, forcing applicants to empty their trash cans and sort through the contents in front of the investigators, and even intimidating applicants into signing forms that withdraw their benefits.[12] This lawsuit failed when the appeals court ruled that you give up your Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches when you receive public assistance. [13]

Many such invasive programs are excused as anti-fraud efforts. In reality, welfare fraud is a very small problem. Numbers are hard to come by, but conservatives cite a range of Inspectors General reports from different states that find “improper payments” in the range of 20–40 percent of TANF cases, but when you drill down into “improper payments” it is almost always bureaucratic incompetence (or bureaucratic malevolence disguised as incompetence). “Eligibility and payment calculation errors” or “documentation errors” are used to deny people aid even if they’d been receiving it already, or even to demand that they repay back aid. Most estimates put true welfare fraud at somewhere between 1–2 percent of all TANF payouts. Unemployment insurance fraud, which is marginally easier to commit because UI is less conditional, is at 1.9 percent.[14] Yet, when sociologist Arlie Hochschild asked a couple of Tea Party supporters in Louisiana for her book, Strangers in Their Own Land, “what proportion of people were gaming the system, the woman estimated 30 percent while her husband estimated 80 percent.”[15]

As of 2015, thirteen states, representing all regions of the country, require TANF applicants, and often food stamp applicants, to submit to drug testing. These policies are clearly written in response to a public narrative that drug use and poverty go hand-in-hand. Going back at least to Moynihan, the idea that poverty is a moral disease pairs nicely with the perception of addiction as a moral disease.

But it does not reflect reality. In a survey of 10 states that had the drug testing programs in place over 2015, there were only 321 positive tests total — a rate of positive tests to total welfare applicants of .3 percent. As Liz Schott, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explains: “What this is really doing is creating more of a roadblock, yet another hurdle to get over when you’re trying to get on benefits. The more hurdles you put in front of an applicant, the greater the share of people who won’t make it over all those hurdles.” The block-grant system provides a strong financial incentive for states to erect these hurdles, with the bonus that they stoke racial resentment that can be useful on Election Day. Even as these programs are challenged in the courts, as Florida’s was, more states are pushing for drug testing programs.

So here we are. Families who apply to TANF face a bewildering gauntlet of bureaucracy, all animated by a strong incentive to refuse them aid. All too often this bureaucratic system becomes a moralizing one that shames people, especially Black women, for their desperation. In Georgia, Teresa, a single mother of a two-year-old, fled from an abusive relationship to a domestic violence center. When she applied for aid, the welfare officers asked, “Wouldn’t you rather work?” Teresa remembers, “I was sitting there crying — I just didn’t know what else to do.” It didn’t matter; she was rejected for filling out her paperwork incorrectly. Other women who did get into the program were further degraded; one woman who was seven months pregnant was ordered to take a waitressing job that would force her to be on her feet all day, or lose her benefits. Another woman was told that if she applied for TANF while living in a shelter, her children would be taken away by the State. Another was told, “If you can’t find a job, we’ll have you shoveling shit at the dog pound.”

Since TANF replaced welfare, there has been a fifty percent increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty, or on less than $2 per day. This population overlaps significantly with the group of people, especially mothers, considered “disconnected” — who are not employed and do not receive TANF or Social Security SSI benefits. In 1996, when welfare reform was passed, one in eight low income single mothers were disconnected, but by 2007 — so as not to count the recession — it was one in five. Many of these women had been timed out of TANF after reaching either their two-consecutive-year limit or their five-year lifetime limit; though many of them had jobs while they received TANF, when they lost the childcare services provided by the program, they had to quit. They are largely left with only food stamps — SNAP benefits — and if they need anything besides cold food, they must sell their food stamps on the informal market.

TANF is American racism enshrined in public policy. It is experienced differently by every person it affects, and this diversity of experience, plus the patchwork of state-driven policies and programs, makes it hard to have a national conversation about it. Meanwhile, its daily operation reinforces and entrenches racism. It creates a growing class of desperately poor people who must struggle every day to maintain their dignity or become a player in what Frances Fox Piven called a “theater of racial degradation.”

The unconditional basic income is the best way out of this system and our current broken social contract.

Now read Part 5

Notes given for book references; online references linked

[1] Caroline Fredrickson, Under The Bus: How Working Women are Run Over, The New Press (New York: 2015).

[2] Ibid., and Larry DeWitt, “The Decision to Exclude Agricultural and Domestic Workers from the 1935 Social Security Act,” Social Security Bulletin, vol. 70 no. 4, 2010, https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n4/v70n4p49.html. (DeWitt unconvincingly argues that because not all policymakers involved in the 1935 passage of the bill were explicitly racist, these exclusions were not racially motivated. But he’s got a great summary of the facts and data that support the mainstream view that they were racist.)

[3] Frances Fox Piven, “Why Welfare is Racist,” chapter in Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform, Sanford F. Schram, Joe Soss, and Richard C. Fording, eds. The University of Michigan Press, 2003, pgs 324, 326. https://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472068319-ch13.pdf

[4] Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, New York: Harper & Bros, 1944, pg 360. https://archive.org/stream/AmericanDilemmaTheNegroProblemAndModernDemocracy/AmericanDelemmaVersion2_djvu.txt.

[5] Martin Gilens, “How the Poor Became Black” Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform, University of Michigan Press, 2003, 101, 105 http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472068319-ch4.pdf.

[6] Jill Quadnago, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Quadnago quoting Gosta Espig-Anderson, Pg 8

[7] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967, Pg 86.

[8] Brendon O’Conner, A Political History of the American Welfare System: When Ideas have Consequences pg 67.

[9] Quadnago; See also, William S. Clayson, Freedom is Not Enough: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas (Austin: Texas University Press, 2010).

Reviewed by Mary C. Brennan, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 115, Number 2, (October 2011) 230–231, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/454236.

[10] Kenneth J. Neubeck, Noel A. Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America’s Poor (New York: Routledge, 2001), v.

[11] Matt Taibbi, The Divide (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2014), 11.

[12] Sanchez v. County of San Diego. First Amended Complaint, №00CV-1467 JM (JFS) Document 13, filed 09/12/2006.

[13] Sanchez v. San Diego County Department of Health and Human Services, №04–55122, Decided September 19, 2006.

[14] Hon. Cameron Findlay, “Testimony before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the House Committee of Ways and Means,” U.S. Department of Labor, June 11, 2002.

[15] Arlie Hochschild, Strangers In Their Own Land (New York, The New Press, 2016) 148.