Social insecurity: a history of African Americans and the Welfare State.

• Author: Winbush, Raymond A.
• Position: Book review

The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State Mary Poole (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 272 pages.

If you think reading a book on the history of Social Security may not be the best way to spend a weekend, throw away such notions. Mary Poole's Segregated Origins of Social Security once again demonstrates how racism is intricately woven into the fabric of the United States. While it is increasingly popular for writers and pundits to tout the "oneness of humanity" and the "declining significance of race," Poole's book reveals the little known origins of the welfare state during the New Deal era and its continuing repercussions on African Americans, women and poor people. (1) Like a legislative stone thrown into the middle of the social-fabric pond, the ripple effects of the Social Security Act signed into law in 1935 are still being felt in every aspect of race relations in the United States.

Poole's book is a page-turner as she exposes the nature of the rise of social security legislation during the Great Depression. She provides in great detail the "race rules" that governed every aspect of life in the United States. For example:

In the 1930s "white" was used universally to describe the majority of U.S. citizens. "White" was not strictly a racial category like "Anglo-Saxon" or "Caucasian"; it specifically identified Americans of European descent who claimed to have no African heritage. The one-drop rule did not apply to other races. A white person could have a Cherokee or Mexican great-grandmother without losing whiteness, but even the most remote ancestral ties to the African continent would disqualify an individual from being classified as "white." (2) Pooles inclusion of such information appropriately magnifies the often missed micro-fibers of racism sewn into the social fabric of America that influence every aspect of public policy from heath care to education. Equally disturbing is how the Social Security Act was deliberately written to exclude African American workers. The law excluded agricultural and domestic workers; this comprised a significant portion of the black workforce not only in the South but in the North as well. Of the two groups, domestic workers were practically voiceless, as 90 percent of them were women and 45 percent were African American. This exclusion was viewed as an attempt to appease the region known as the "Solid South."

Poole provides...