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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Area / regional studies
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From Slavery to Poverty - The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918 (Paperback)
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From Slavery to Poverty - The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918 (Paperback)
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The racially charged stereotype of "welfare queen"-an allegedly
promiscuous waster who uses her children as meal tickets funded by
tax-payers-is a familiar icon in modern America, but as Gunja
SenGupta reveals in From Slavery to Poverty, her historical roots
run deep. For, SenGupta argues, the language and institutions of
poor relief and reform have historically served as forums for
inventing and negotiating identity. Mining a broad array of sources
on nineteenth-century New York City's interlocking network of
private benevolence and municipal relief, SenGupta shows that these
institutions promoted a racialized definition of poverty and
citizenship. But they also offered a framework within which working
poor New Yorkers-recently freed slaves and disfranchised free
blacks, Afro-Caribbean sojourners and Irish immigrants, sex workers
and unemployed laborers, and mothers and children-could challenge
stereotypes and offer alternative visions of community. Thus,
SenGupta argues, long before the advent of the twentieth-century
welfare state, the discourse of welfare in its nineteenth-century
incarnation created a space to talk about community, race, and
nation; about what it meant to be "American," who belonged, and who
did not. Her work provides historical context for understanding why
today the notion of "welfare"-with all its derogatory "un-American"
connotations-is associated not with middle-class entitlements like
Social Security and Medicare, but rather with programs targeted at
the poor, which are wrongly assumed to benefit primarily urban
African Americans.
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