By Robert C. Lieberman
Regardless of the monstrous monetary and political strides that African-Americans have made during this century, welfare continues to be a topic that sharply divides american citizens via race. moving the colour Line explores the old and political roots of tolerating racial clash in American welfare coverage, starting with the recent Deal. via Social safety and different social coverage courses, white employees have been effectively built-in right into a robust nationwide welfare kingdom. whilst, African-Americans--then as now disproportionately poor--were relegated to the margins of the welfare nation, via decentralized, frequently racist, public tips courses. Over the subsequent new release, those institutional adjustments had fateful effects for African-Americans and their integration into American politics. due to its robust nationwide constitution, Social safety quick grew to become the nearest factor we need to a common, color-blind social application. nevertheless, public assistance--especially reduction to households with established young children (AFDC)--continued to regard African-Americans badly, whereas closing politically susceptible and institutionally decentralized. Racial differences have been therefore equipped into the very constitution of the yank welfare kingdom. through protecting terrible blacks at arm's size whereas embracing white staff, nationwide welfare coverage helped to build the modern political divisions--middle-class as opposed to terrible, suburb as opposed to urban, and white as opposed to black--that outline the city underclass.
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Additional resources for Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State
Sample text
The Roosevelt administration’s social security plan, developed by the cabinet-level Committee on Economic Security (CES), proposed a dramatic expansion of the federal government’s welfare responsibilities in order to extend the social rights of American citizenship. 11 At the same time, Roosevelt did not call for an entirely national welfare system. In a special message to Congress in June 1934, he sketched the rough outlines of federal-state relations in an economic security policy:12 “I believe there should be a maximum of cooperation between States and the Federal Government .
1 But the racial structure of American politics and society compromised Roosevelt’s vision of an administrative state for economic security. The Social Security Act of 1935 produced a collection of social policies that was institutionally fragmented along lines constructed by class, race, and region. All of the policies contained in the Social Security Act carried race-laden exclusions, features that inherently, whether by accident or design, excluded African-Americans from full participation in their benefits.
On the inclusion dimension, the central issue was the status of agricultural and domestic workers, categories that included an enormous share of the African-Americans in the labor force. But providing social insurance coverage for these workers also challenged local traditions of racial segregation and dependence in the political economy. Along both dimensions, policies were designed to undermine the New Deal’s more comprehensive aims in a racially biased way. In order to pass national old-age and unemployment insurance plans, the Roosevelt administration had to compromise inclusiveness and accept the exclusion of agricultural and domestic employees from the program, with notably imbalanced racial consequences.