A pointed reinterpretation of the history of antipoverty policy,
arguing that racism most explains why our welfare state is feeble
compared with other industrialized nations. Quadagno
(Sociology/Florida State Univ.; The Transformation of Old Age
Security, not reviewed) proceeds with several case studies, which
could have used a bit of leavening with political context and
journalistic verve. The author notes that black agricultural
workers and domestic servants were denied Social Security
protection because of white political opposition in the Roosevelt
era. Similarly, New Deal programs seeking to bolster the housing
market actually reinforced housing segregation. The Office of
Economic Opportunity, the main engine of Lyndon Johnson's War on
Poverty, didn't receive enough funding, nor did it establish a
policy of redistribution, the author notes. Her discussion of
government job-training programs and affirmative action, in which
she attacks William Julius Wilson's well-known critique of group
rights, is not fully convincing; nor does it address some
latter-day issues like the "race-norming" of job tests. More potent
is her analysis of federal housing policy, which in the 1980s
retreated from its commitment to subsidizing housing for the poor.
Also, she shows how Richard Nixon's Family Assistance Plan, which
promised a guaranteed annual income to the poor, threatened
Southern political and business powers, who led the political
opposition. She does suggest that the country's lack of commitment
to universal child care can be blamed less on racism than on
general social conservatism. In the end, Quadagno establishes that
the US, compared to other industrialized nations, does the least to
fight poverty. However, she would have set the stage better for
discussion of solutions had she mentioned America's changing
multiracial landscape, debates about the impact of culture on
poverty, and current proposals for such policies as workfare.
Mainly for students and policy wonks. (Kirkus Reviews)
Thirty years after Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, the
United States still lags behind most Western democracies in
national welfare systems, lacking such basic programs as national
health insurance and child care support. Some critics have
explained the failure of social programs by citing our tradition of
individual freedom and libertarian values, while others point to
weaknesses within the working class. In The Color of Welfare, Jill
Quadagno takes exception to these claims, placing race at the
center of the "American Dilemma," as Swedish economist Gunnar
Myrdal did half a century ago. The "American creed" of liberty,
justice, and equality clashed with a history of active racial
discrimination, says Quadagno. It is racism that has undermined the
War on Poverty, and America must come to terms with this history if
there is to be any hope of addressing welfare reform today.
From Reconstruction to Lyndon Johnson and beyond, Quadagno reveals
how American social policy has continually foundered on issues of
race. Drawing on extensive primary research, Quadagno shows, for
instance, how Roosevelt, in need of support from southern
congressmen, excluded African Americans from the core programs of
the Social Security Act. Turning to Lyndon Johnson's "unconditional
war on poverty," she contends that though anti-poverty programs for
job training, community action, health care, housing, and education
have accomplished much, they have not been fully realized because
they became inextricably intertwined with the civil rights movement
of the 1960s, which triggered a white backlash. Job training
programs, for instance, became affirmative action programs,
programs to improve housing became programs to integrate housing,
programs that began as community action to upgrade the quality of
life in the cities were taken over by local civil rights groups.
This shift of emphasis eventually alienated white, working-class
Americans, who had some of the same needs--for health care,
subsidized housing, and job training opportunities--but who got
very little from these programs. At the same time, affirmative
action clashed openly with organized labor, and equal housing
raised protests from the white suburban middle-class, who didn't
want their neighborhoods integrated. Quadagno shows that Nixon, who
initially supported many of Johnson's programs, eventually caught
on that the white middle class was disenchanted. He realized that
his grand plan for welfare reform, the Family Assistance Plan,
threatened to undermine wages in the South and alienate the
Republican party's new constituency--white, southern Democrats--and
therefore dropped it.
In the 1960s, the United States embarked on a journey to resolve
the "American dilemma." Yet instead of finally instituting full
democratic rights for all its citizens, the policies enacted in
that turbulent decade failed dismally. The Color of Welfare reveals
the root cause of this failure--the inability to address racial
inequality.
General
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