Welfare Reform, Globalization, and the Racialization of Entitlement

Abstract

In August of 1996, the United States Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRA, Public Law 104-193).1 Dismantling the 60-year-old federal cash assistance program, Aid to Families With Dependent Children ( AFDC), this legislation replaced AFDC with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) block grants to states governed under a new set of time-limits and restrictions. Although popularly known as reform, the PRA instead radically transformed the character of public assistance. Welfare was no longer a social safety net but a temporary program designed to encourage marriage and other family values among the nation's poor and to move welfare recipients as quickly as possible into the workforce. Along with a five-year lifetime limit on cash benefits and new work requirements, the PRA implemented strict restrictions on welfare eligibility, banning large sectors of the American public (including teenage mothers, newborn babies, convicted felons, and legal immigrants) from receiving public assistance. The political discourse that fueled welfare reform reveals much about how a neoliberal vision of the global economy shaped the connection between changing ideas about what kinds of people are deserving of state protection and American entitlements and the broader context of the triumph of the neoliberal vision of the global economy based on the ascendancy of free markets and the diminution of state social responsibility. As in the past, the contemporary welfare debate pitted the interests of a white citizenry against the de-legitimized claims of an undeserving and alien underclass. Welfare reform hinged on the belief that welfare and the culture it bred not poverty most harmed the poor. While