The Welfare State

• Pages: 487-517
• Author: Khiara M. Bridges

487

Chapter 20

THE WELFARE STATE

I. Introduction

In this chapter, we explore the U.S.’s welfare state—the

constellation of government programs and services that aim to

protect and foster the health and wellbeing of the nation’s citizens

and residents. This chapter pays particular attention to the programs

that provide cash assistance to indigent families with children—

namely the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program

(TANF), which replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children

program (AFDC) in 1996.

Some may be a bit perplexed by the inclusion of a chapter on the

welfare state in a primer that is about race. These folks may feel that

the U.S.’s safety net is not a racial issue in the same way that the

criminal legal system or education, for example, are racial issues.

However, progressive scholarship seeks to challenge this belief. The

work of critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw—specifically, her

theory of intersectionality, explored in Chapter 13—is instructive

here. Crenshaw’s work counsels that the intuition that the welfare

state is not a racial issue, and that it fails to implicate questions of

racial justice, is likely a product of the belief that the black man is

the true racial subject.

1

Pursuant to this view, the issues that we

understand as affecting black men, like mass incarceration, are

easily understood as racial issues. Meanwhile, matters that

disproportionately impact black women—like the approach that the

government has taken to supporting poor, female-headed

households—are not thought to be racial issues. Guided by the

lessons that intersectionality has taught, the inclusion of this chapter

in this primer represents critical thinkers’ commitment to bringing

women, as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy,

squarely within our racial lenses. As such, it offers an invitation to

readers to think of the welfare state and the public benefits that it

offers (or refuses to offer) poor women and other pregnancy-capable

people, who are disproportionately people of color, as a matter of

racial justice.

1

As noted in Chapter 13, Crenshaw argued that while the generic “black

person” is male, the generic “woman” is white. Thus, antiracis t efforts have centered

the experiences of black men, and feminism has centered the experiences of white

women. The result has been that black women and their experiences have been

obscured in both of these social justice movements. Crenshaw offered the theory of

intersectionality with the intention of making black women visible.

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THE WELFARE STATE

Ch. 20

Additionally, many scholars have observed that the

government’s policies around public benefits mirror its policies

towards crime and punishment. They say that both sets of policies

are born of the same impulses and concern the same population.

Their argument, essentially, is that if we understand the criminal

legal system, policing, and mass incarceration as implicating racial

justice, then we ought to understand the welfare state in similar ways.

Sociologist Loïc Wacquant has offered a comprehensive

articulation of this position.

2

He begins by observing that

transformations in the economy have reduced the number of middle-

skill, middle-wage jobs that used to support the middle class. Many

people who could once rely on these jobs have been pushed into the

market for low-skill, low-wage labor and, consequently, into jobs that

cannot support a family. They are forced into poverty as a result.

Wacquant proposes that the contemporary welfare state and the

criminal legal system are society’s way of managing the population

living in this precarious economic condition. Instead of protecting

indigent people from the insecurity and deprivation that the market

for low-skill, low-wage labor guarantees, the welfare state pushes

them into this market by making work a condition of assistance—or

by denying assistance altogether. Meanwhile, the criminal legal

system incarcerates those who turn to criminalized means of earning

an income. Wacquant calls these dual systems a “carceral-

assistantial net.”

3

Wacquant contends that both the modern welfare state and the

criminal legal system are motivated by the same philosophy of the

individual: Both systems insist that the individual is wholly

responsible for their social situation. If the individual is female and

poor, this philosophy proposes that her poverty is due to her lacking

the commitment to work that will allow her to achieve financial

success within the market for wage labor; if the individual is male

and has committed a crime, the philosophy proposes that his criminal

activity is a result of the fact that he is criminally inclined and

ethically challenged. Wacquant claims that both the welfare state

and the penal state accept the view that moral deficiencies explain

why people are poor or why they break the law. While the welfare

state attempts to “fix” the moral deficiencies of the individuals under

its jurisdiction, the penal state simply aims to keep the morally

deficient away from the general population. Importantly, says

Wacquant, both systems reject the possibility that the

transformations in the economy mentioned above—that is, structural

2

See generally LOÏC WACQUANT, PUNISHING THE POOR: THE NEOLIBERAL

GOVERNMENT OF SOCIAL INSECURITY (2009).

3

Id. at 12.