The Price of Progressive Politics

The Welfare Rights Movement in an Era of Colorblind Racism

Rose Ernst

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814722572
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Through the voices of women activists in the welfare rightsmovement across the United States, The Price of ProgressivePolitics exposes the contemporary reality of welfare rightspolitics, revealing how the language of colorblind racism underminesthis multiracial movement. Through in-depth interviewswith activists in eight organizations across the UnitedStates, Rose Ernst presents an intersectional analysis of howthese activists understand the complexities of race, classand gender and how such understandings have affectedtheir approach to their grassroots work. Engaging and accessible, The Price of Progressive Politics offers a refreshingexamination of how those working for change grapple withshifting racial dynamics in the United States, arguing thatorganizations that fail to develop a consciousness that reflectsthe reality of multiple marginalized identities ultimatelyreproduce the societal dynamics they seek to change.

1
Introduction

I see this pattern and it took me years to connect the pieces. Working jobs and dealing with child care issues, paying 50% of my check for child care and then havin’ to be asked to leave my place because I chose between child care and payin’ my full rent. Or feedin’ my kids or gettin’ diapers and then forced into situations because I chose not to be a punching bag. And so these are systematic choices that have been mapped out and we need to understand that.

—Grace, California

Well, the strengths of the group, is, first of all—it’s a bunch of people that are poor people. And some of the people can get strength from other people. And it goes on like that. We’re something like a big family and we, and when one go through something, we all have a little input and try to go through it with them—we don’t let ’em go through it alone.… Togetherness. Yes.

—Shauna, Texas

On a cold November morning, women huddled around a podium came together to speak. Two months after the levees broke and Congress was considering drastic cuts to the already shredded safety net, it was the time to be heard. The purpose of their gathering on the Capitol steps was to call media attention to the deteriorating state of the already tattered safety net. Yet their message alternated between the searing anger, betrayal, and despair of New Orleans and the stilted jargon of budget cuts. The Katrina speeches were not part of the planned script, yet they were the most urgent and meaningful. Those speeches had to be made. Why did some of the women not understand this need? Why did they not understand the connection between Katrina and further welfare cuts? This book is the story of these women and their struggles with one another to make change. It is the story of welfare parent activists—women of color and White¹ women—confronting their common yet divergent experiences in their multiplicity of identities. It is the story of how some of these women understandably wish away the racist specter of the “welfare queen”² through the language of colorblindness, and how others learn or are forced to confront this queen head-on. It is, in short, the narrative of a movement grappling with the contradictions and complications of organizing for social change along the multiple axes of race, class, and gender marginalization.

This book examines the dynamics of movements situated at the crossroads of marginalized axes of race, gender, and class. By definition, these movements are confronted with cross-cutting issues and images that “disproportionately and directly affect only certain segments of a marginal group.”³ Welfare rights is an exemplar of a movement that must grapple with such issues, embodied in the convergence of marginalized identities in the infamous trope of the welfare queen. Welfare rights activists face an increasingly difficult task: How do they fight public policies based on damaging images of race, class, and gender identities in an era of “color-blind” racism? How do they navigate these intersectional politics in their own movements for change? While it is clear that the welfare rights movement has been unsuccessful in reframing the image of its members, we know little about why and how these strategic decisions were made at the ground level. As welfare continues to be the central public image of poverty programs, and, perhaps the most despised social policy in the United States, exploring the antecedents and current realities of shifting discourses along the lines of race, gender, and class provides insight into how other movements come to terms with frames that target the most vulnerable among them. In essence, this movement is analogous to Guinier and Torres’s allegory of the racially marginalized as the “canary in the coal mine”: “Their distress is the first sign of a danger that threatens us all.… Others ignore problems that converge around racial minorities at their own peril, for these problems are symptoms warning us that we are all at risk.”⁴ If any social movement is predisposed to attend to the importance of intersecting marginalized identities, it is the welfare rights movement. As it represents both the real and symbolic consequences of at least three intersecting marginalized identities, with race at its core, the inability or unwillingness to engage with these intersectional dynamics has serious implications for more mainstream social movements.

What mechanisms shape the decisions of such social movement organizations (SMOs)⁵ to respond to these cross-cutting issue frames that target the most marginalized among them? Inquiry into the political ramifications of how race, gender, and class interact as “intersectional” identities has only recently emerged as a research area in political science.⁶ These analyses, along with their critical race feminist legal scholarship precursors,⁷ are crucial in laying the groundwork for understanding the practical realities of social movements. But scholars have left empirical questions about how activists struggle with stereotyped portrayals of their movements and movement members largely unexplored. “Intersectionality” describes oppression as more than simply the compound effects of racism and sexism; instead, it locates this oppression as a unique convergence of differing facets of identity along the axes of race, gender, and class. This book examines these empirical questions through the historical and contemporary lens of a movement that represents this convergence. I examine how the overarching politics of colorblind racism, along with race, gender, and class intersectionality—operational between and within social movements—affect the ability of social movements to address critical issues of welfare politics.

I first examine whether the historical development of discourse by the women’s movement about women and work, in terms of race, gender, and class intersectionality, shaped the way contemporary welfare rights activists respond to the cross-cutting issues embodied in welfare politics. Through an explication of the weak alliance of two major social movement organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, I posit that the response of welfare rights groups to the stereotyping of welfare parents stems from the historical realities of race, gender, and class intersections of framing “work,” responsibility, and independence of women.

Second, I explore how contemporary realities of colorblind racism and intersectionality influence activists’ willingness to engage with issues of race and class embedded at the core of welfare politics. I investigate these dynamics through an analysis of forty-nine in-depth interviews (conducted between 2003 and 2006) with welfare rights activists in eight organizations across the United States. I argue that women-of-color activists, particularly in organizations in which women of color are in positions of power, confront the intersectional implications of the welfare queen and, by extension, the racial ideology of colorblind racism,⁸ while White women activists tend to avoid direct discussions of these issues. Instead, these activists deploy colorblindness frames as a way to avoid confronting the realities of racism. When ignored, race, class, and gender intersectionality limits the ability of social movements to address these cross-cutting issues. Given the fundamental insight of critical race theory that racism, sexism, and classism are interlocking systems of oppression, I argue that any movement that seeks to only address one of these forms of marginalization not only risks fracturing the movement, but also undercuts the central goals of the movement itself.

Racial Representations

Over the past fifteen years, the welfare debate and the subsequent elimination of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) as a federal entitlement have been thoroughly dissected from the perspective of historical institutional development, race and gender politics, as well as state development and global changes in capitalism.⁹ I investigate the particular significance of the welfare queen trope in U.S. politics as a useful shared point of departure for much of this scholarship. While she is not the focus of this book, this characterization does embody the intersectional dilemmas confronted by all movements for social change based on multiple marginalized identities.

Media, Public Opinion, and Race

This book builds on an extensive body of scholarship dedicated to explicating both the existence of the racialized frame of welfare in terms of news media coverage as well as its effect on public opinion. A number of studies in political science have established that media portrayals of poverty, and more specifically welfare, are racialized. In his analysis of news media stories about poverty over a forty-year period, political scientist Martin Gilens finds that coverage became decidedly racialized as African American in the mid-1960s.¹⁰ Despite changes over time, he finds that as “the differences across different subgroups of the poor both attest, it is the ‘undeserving poor’ who have become most black.”¹¹ Similarly, Clawson and Trice’s analysis of newsmagazine photos reveals that “Blacks were especially overrepresented in negative stories on poverty and in those instances when the poor were presented with stereotypical traits.”¹² Employing a race and gender intersectional analysis of the welfare reform debates of the mid-1990s, political scientist Ange-Marie Hancock finds that these images were not only racialized, but also gendered in their convergence around the trope of the welfare queen.¹³

The proliferation of these images has had consequences not only for the terms of policy debates over welfare, but also public opinion and racial attitudes in general. Experimental studies, such as political scientists James M. Avery and Mark Peffley’s regarding images of welfare parents, found that opinions of this group became more negative among White respondents when presented with photographs of African American parents.¹⁴ Survey analyses suggest that Americans believe most welfare parents are Black.¹⁵ Political scientist Franklin D. Gilliam found in his experimental study of perceptions of the welfare queen that this raced and gendered image had indeed reached the “status of common knowledge” among participants.¹⁶ Not only did the White and Black welfare queen news stories increase anti-Black prejudice among participants, but they also “encourage[d] viewers to perceive welfare as being caused by individual shortcoming, to oppose federal spending on welfare programs, and to prefer that women play traditional gender roles.”¹⁷ Gilliam’s results are significant not only with regard to the increasing of anti-Black prejudice, but also for the links between this trope and broader perceptions of poverty and gender roles. This web of race, class, and gender perceptions and politics is the central puzzle of this book.

This convergence of stereotypes in the image of the welfare queen is a constitutive part of broader structures of racism and sexism.¹⁸ Hancock connects individual stereotypes, theoretical analyses of the political function of such an image, and broader trends in public policy. She suggests that a more accurate description of the welfare queen image is that of a “public identity”; that is, one that contains both stereotypes and moral judgments. This public identity functions on both a macro- and micro-level in political discourse, which makes attempts at challenging it a daunting task. She explains that the two driving themes of this identity are economic individualism (beliefs about laziness) and fertility (beliefs about hyperfertility) that reside at the intersection of race, class, and gender.¹⁹ This concept of public identity is particularly useful given that it explains the power of such a trope beyond a single stereotype, to the institutional and individual levels of discourse about individualism, work ethic, responsibility, and fertility.

Intersecting Social Movements

The study of intersectionality in terms of race, gender, and class in the welfare rights movement has largely been focused on either the history of the movement,²⁰ or more general analyses of the current era of welfare politics.²¹ Political scientist Sanford F. Schram’s work on the dilemma faced by the welfare rights movement, in terms of framing race in their campaigns, reveals the perils of ignoring the racial dimensions of welfare discourse, although he does not explore the connection between this and the actual practices or strategies of the movement.²² This book focuses on capturing how the realities of intersectionality affect this movement in a contemporary micro-level setting, while also considering how broader discursive trends may have shaped movement responses to the complicated race, gender, and class politics of welfare.

From a social movement perspective, this book re-centers “power” as a central problem of any movement. Scholars have paid increasing attention to the key role of identity in movements,²³ identity construction and framing,²⁴ as well as intra-movement disputes,²⁵ but the linkage between identities as markers of privilege and power within movements appears largely absent from this area of research. Kevin M. Carragee and Wim Roefs assert that social movement and communication scholars who study framing have omitted serious considerations of power imbalances between media and social movements, as well as intra-movement constructions of collective action frames.²⁶ Carragee and Roefs’s claim is particularly relevant in the area of identity and framing. Framing theory portrays identity categories as essentially empty vessels; identities are viewed as relatively interchangeable variables. While a level of generalization across identity categories is certainly fruitful in understanding movement dynamics, this generalization risks glossing over real power imbalances within movements that are a result of specific identities imbued with privilege and power.²⁷ I argue that race, gender, and class are identities that demand a historically contingent and multilevel analysis of power. One of the best ways to explore this complicated politics of welfare, with race at its core, is through the voices of activists themselves.

Framing Colorblindness

Disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences often impinge on coherent definitions of the concepts of “frame” and “framing,”²⁸ especially between the media and social movement scholarship discussed in the preceding sections. While I delineate the specific parameters of a frame later in this chapter, I rely here on the definition provided by a sociologist of race politics, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: “[Frames] are rooted in the group-based conditions and experiences of the races and are, at the symbolic level, the representations developed by these groups to explain how the world is or ought to be.”²⁹ Frames are the building blocks of racial ideologies, of which colorblindness is currently dominant in the United States. Colorblindness, as a racial ideology, circumscribes all political discourse about race in the United States, regardless of whether this discourse supports or seeks to challenge the racial status quo. Colorblindness differs from its predecessor, Jim Crow racism, in that it “explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics.”³⁰ Colorblindness provides the ideological backdrop for this book, as it both reflects and recreates racial hierarchies in the United States, even among those who work for social change.

Activists resort to multiple frames in describing their own and their organization’s views of welfare rights organizing. Frequently, these frames feature elements...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 To Each Her Own: Race and Class in Gendered Coalitions
• 3 Closing Rank: Power and Colorblindness
• 4 Pulling Rank: Gender and Class Colorblindness
• 5 Breaking Rank: Race and Class Consciousness
• 6 Crossing Over: Rethinking Movement Organization
• 7 Critical Alliances: Intersecting National Coalitions
• Appendix A: Interview Protocol
• Appendix B: Characteristics of Activists
• Appendix C: Organizations
• Appendix D: NOW Newsletters
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author