Roberta Pergher

The Color of Welfare

Prior to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, black people were openly and blatantly discriminated in American society. Most political decisions relied on manifest racist perceptions even when racial issues were not at the heart of the resolutions striven for by policy makers.  Hence, the resulting laws and policies were often flagrantly racist undermining the otherwise cherished American notions of equality and freedom for African-Americans. However, the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s collectively dismantled de jure the racial segregation in American society and enfranchised millions of African-Americans who previously were denied the rights of electoral participation. In addition to these legal changes, public attitudes towards blacks changed as well. Only very few people still endorse bigot beliefs of black genetic inferiority, while most Americans seem to embrace the social and political integration of African Americans. Nevertheless, the battles of racial politics are not over. As Hurwitz and Peffley remark, they are merely "fought on a field marked by fuzzier lines" (Hurwitz and Peffley, 2). According to the editors of Perception and Prejudice, the conflict over racial issues shifted from guaranteeing equal rights to African Americans to launching programs designed to compensate for the wrongs of the past. Social welfare programs, affirmative action, and equal treatment policies all assist minorities and among them blacks in particular. Because these policies are widely recognized as endorsing racial equality, opposition to welfare and affirmative action is often interpreted as a more subtle continuation of the overt prejudice displayed in earlier decades. However, not all conservatives contesting welfare programs can be labeled as symbolic racists. Even though racist perceptions engender some people's hostility towards welfare policies, others base their opposition to welfare on values and beliefs-such as individualism, self-reliance, work ethic, discipline, and animosity towards the government-which conflict with the central notions of a welfare state. However, in light of the complexity of racial attitudes still persisting in American society today, the question of a possible connection between racial prejudices and political positions remains. The link between racial perceptions and policy choices has been explored throughout the century showing that the politics, the economy, and the culture of American society have been shaped by whites' pejorative images of blacks (Hurwitz and Peffley, 5). In this paper, I intend to investigate the interrelation between racial stereotypes and the structure and content of welfare programs. Even though welfare is not an explicitly racial issue like affirmative action, it becomes linked to race insofar as white Americans tend to see the typical welfare recipient as being African American. In fact, popular rhetoric and symbolism surrounding welfare are overwhelmingly negative, and they rely heavily on racial imaginary that is sometimes quite explicit. I think it is important to note that not all the components of the American welfare state are equally charged with racial prejudices.
Americans generally support assistance programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance, while they disapprove of programs like Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (formerly Aid to Family with Dependent Children) which are commonly referred to as "welfare"(Lieberman, 3). As a matter of fact, these policies are frequently the object of racially focused antagonism and resentment.

In their study, "White's Stereotypes of Blacks: Sources and Political Consequences," Hurwitz and Peffley analyze the images white Americans hold of blacks by examining the content of such beliefs as well as their antecedents and political consequences. The content of stereotypes refers to the mental pictures produced by generalizations about social groups and by ethnocentric biases enhancing one's own group and disparaging outgroups. The antecedents of prejudice relate a person's racial perceptions to his or her educational background, regional location, socioeconomic status, and social and political orientation in order to uncover the roots of stereotyping. The consequences of racial stereotyping unveil the conditions under which racial stereotypes affect political judgements. Hurwitz and Peffley found that a substantial portion of whitesagrees that most blacks are lazy (31 percent), not determined to succeed (22 percent), and lacking in discipline (60 percent). These numbers suggest that a substantial minority of whites views blacks as a hostile underclass of the undeserving poor. While stereotyping showed to be more prevalent among people from the Southern States and those with less education, citizen's core beliefs and values had a greater impact on the extent of their prejudices than demographic explanations. Ethnocentrism, social intolerance, and anti-Semitism were the strongest predictors of
white prejudices against blacks illustrating the correlation between different types of prejudices. But how relevant are stereotypes and prejudices in shaping whites' political views on welfare? The results of Hurwitz and Peffley's study clearly demonstrate that racial stereotypes play a powerful role in biasing the social perception of welfare recipients and the political evaluation of programs assisting them. Whites who embrace negative stereotypes display a discriminatory double standard in judging black targets more harshly than similarly described white targets. When confronted with counter-stereotypical behavior, these whites respond favorably only when the discrepancy between the stereotype and the described welfare recipient is very pronounced. Black welfare mothers who graduated from high school confront roughly the same negative stereotypes as high school drop-outs. On the other hand, blacks who are described as willing "to work their way our of their problems" are supported by whites who generally display racial prejudices. By contrast, whites who reject racial stereotypes manifest consistent responses regardless of the desirability of blacks' social attributes suggesting that these respondents actively avoid stigmatization across the board. The authors assert that while chances of actually changing negative stereotypes are dim, identifying persuasive counter-stereotypical behavior may be one of the few feasible means for separating racial stereotypes from welfare policy judgements that benefit African Americans.

However, Hurwitz and Peffley dismiss the likelihood of this possibility because of media coverage portraying welfare recipients as black and political debate being coded in racial terms. I think that the tactic proposed by Hurwitz and Peffley can enhance the acceptance of welfare policies, but I am not sure that confronting people with counter-stereotypes will undermine racism per se. Sociological research has shown that the capability to recognize exceptions from the perceived racial rule can be employed as a mechanism to deny one's own prejudice by being able to conceptualize "good" blacks while simultaneously disparaging most others. In another chapter of Perception and Prejudice, Martin Gilens' experiments illustrate results similar to those obtained by Hurwitz and Peffley. In Gilens' study, white respondents perceive blacks to be more violent, less patriotic, less intelligent, poorer, lazier, and more likely to prefer living of welfare rather than to be self-supporting. These negative views of blacks are strongly reflected in white's responses to welfare. Gilens shows that even race-neutral antipoverty programs fall prey to racial stereotyping thus inhibiting welfare support among whites. The belief that blacks lack commitment to the work ethic is especially widespread. Hence, Gilens suggests to endorse programs that enhance self-sufficiency and build on discipline and work ethic in order to attract popular support for welfare. While I agree that the popularity of a program should be an important determinant in its design, I think that aiming at the successful alleviation and prevention of poverty is more critical.

In Shifting the Color Line, Robert Lieberman illustrates how racist attitudes towards African Americans translated into the structure and the institution of welfare policies. The ability to exclude blacks from benefits has been a central factor in the adoption of national policies such as Old-Age and Unemployment Insurance during the 1930s. Today, these programs include African Americans as honorable beneficiaries because they could garner widespread political support without being labeled as programs that give preferences to blacks at the expense of others. On the other hand, programs such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)  are loaded with racial perceptions. Initially, Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) was able to effectively restrict African American participation because of the program's parochial structure. The parochialism of ADC institutionalized multiple and decentralized structures of power, leaving welfare recipients at the political and economic mercy of local officials.  Even though ADC, later AFDC, and now TANF seem to approach poverty from a color-blind perspective, their implementation had and still have significant racial consequences. In this respect, it is important to realize that not only the content of policies but also their structure, institution and administration play a powerful role in the politics of race affecting the success, the popularity, and future course of the programs themselves as well as the racial perception of welfare recipients. The pejorative imagery of white Americans towards blacks has shaped the content and structure of the American welfare state from its beginnings. Racial prejudices actualize racial politics which institute race-conscious as well as race-blind programs which reconstruct racial identities and perceptions which reshape politics which in turn reconstruct race.

References

Cammisa, Anne Marie. _From Rhetoric to Reform? Welfare Policy in American Politics._ Boulder: Westview, 1998.
Hurwitz, Jon and Mark Peffley, ed. _Perception and Prejudice. Race and Politics in the United States._ New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1998.  Lieberman, Robert. _Shifting the Color Line. Race and the American Welfare State._ Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Noble, Charles. _Welfare As We Knew It._ New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Skocpol, Theda. _Social Policy in the United States._ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.