Welfare: A Racial Justice Issue that Demands a Religious Response

Rev. Susan L. Starr is Senior Research Associate, Applied Research Center, an Oakland, CA nonprofit institute (www.arc.org; 510/653-3415) that focuses on issues of race, racial justice, and public policy.

During the Summer of 2000, each member of the staff of the Applied Research Center, including the receptionist and the director, participated in conducting more than 1500 surveys of welfare recipients in 13 localities across the country. The results are chronicled in the report, Cruel and Usual: How Welfare "Reform" Punishes Poor People, available from the Applied Research Center. This article presents a few representative stories uncovered during the research process.

Rules First, Common Sense Second

In 2000, Laura Jackson lost welfare benefits for herself and her three children. The Brooklyn, NY resident hadn’t reached her two-year benefit limits. She hadn’t refused a work assignment or missed an appointment. She had broken just one rule: she’d failed to report that she and her kids each had a savings account. The total amount in all four accounts? Seventy-three cents.

A delay or temporary loss of benefits can be a catastrophic event for a poor family. For example, when the Milwaukee, Wisconsin welfare system suddenly cut off all benefits for Alma Jenkins, she requested a fair hearing. The county lost its case at the hearing and was ordered to restore her benefits retroactively, but this was never done, so she could not pay her mortgage. When the bank then foreclosed on her home, she managed to find an apartment, apply for, and be granted emergency aid—but the funds were never disbursed, so she lost her home.

Forced to seek lodging in a shelter, she requested that her children be placed in foster care. The county placed them with her bedridden mother, in a setting where they had previously been abused. When Jenkins complained, the county instituted a no-contact policy. When she was interviewed in July 2000, she had not seen her children in seven months.

When is a crime not a crime? When you’re in Minnesota

Janet Murphy spent 30 days in the Santa Rita jail in Alameda County, California. What was her crime? She was caught doing exactly what welfare reform was designed to make her do: she started working at a minimum-wage job. Her job didn’t pay enough to support her and her kids, so she used her TANF check to supplement her earnings without reporting it, resulting in an overpayment of her welfare benefits. Her caseworker had told her that if she earned less than a certain dollar amount, she didn’t have to report it. Her caseworker was wrong. In Alameda County, California, what Murphy did is welfare fraud. The District Attorney prosecutes well over 1000 of these cases a year.

GROWL members carry their message to Tommy Thompson's doorstep at Dept. of Health and Human Services: Hear Our Voices. Photo courtesy Applied Research Center

It’s too bad Murphy doesn’t live in Minnesota. In May 2000, the news of that state’s innovative pilot project in welfare reform hit the national media. Under the Minnesota Family Investment Program, recipients remain eligible for welfare until their income reaches 140% of the poverty line. As a result, welfare participants are actually getting out of poverty, and households with two wage-earning adults are no longer forced to split up for economic reasons.

Lose your benefits, lose your children

In Utah, many women are losing their children within the first two months after they hit the state’s 36-month lifetime TANF limit. According to women interviewed in Salt Lake City, welfare caseworkers inform Family and Child Services (FCS) when a TANF family reaches its lifetime benefits limit. Within a month, FCS makes an unannounced visit to the family’s home to determine its fitness as a place for children. Anne Lawrence’s weeping son was removed from her home with no investigation whatsoever, because at the moment when the visitor from FCS arrived, she was tending his bloody nose. Lisa Abbott was told she didn’t have enough canned goods in her pantry, not too surprising a situation as her welfare benefits had been terminated. Her children were taken, too.

Jenny Logan lost her children on laundry day. She’d had her kids throw their dirty clothes down to the foot of the stairs so she could bag it up and take it to the laundromat. The FCS worker walked in, observed the pile of clothes, and promptly removed the children from this "unfit" home.

Alice Madigan managed to leave an abusive situation, only to lose her children because she had "allowed" them to see her being beaten up.

Problems and Possibilities:

Welfare "reform" has made old problems worse and created new ones. There is strong evidence of discrimination in the operation of the system. Women of color routinely encounter insults and disrespect as they seek to navigate the various programs that make up the welfare system. They are frequently subject to sexual inquisitions in welfare offices, as well as sexual harassment at their assigned work activities. Those whose first language is not English encounter a serious language barrier when they have contact with the welfare system, in spite of Federal protections designed to lift that barrier. Eligible immigrants and refugees are often told to "go back where they came from" when they try to get help for themselves or their US citizen children.

Devolution, the new "states’ rights," has greatly exacerbated the arbitrariness of the welfare system. When Congress passed the 1996 PRWORA, the buzzword "devolution" reverberated through the halls of the Capitol and in state houses around the country. To the states, devolution promised a bonanza of unrestricted funding, in the form of block grants they could spend as they liked, restricted only by the very general guidelines of the Act. As long as states spent a specified minimum of state funds on undefined "programs for poor people"—which could include, for example, highway construction, because that could be construed as increasing the ability of poor people to reach job destinations, or improving parks, rationalized as a family support mechanism—they would be free to transfer the unspent portion of their block grants into their general funds.

Raise the Floor: Wages and Policy that Work for All of Us, by Holly Sklar, Laryssa Mykyta, and Susan Wefald; Ms. Foundation for Women, New York, 2001 From the introduction to Raise the Floor: "They work full time in the richest nation on earth, yet they can't make ends meet. They can't make ends meet because their wages are too low. "They are health care aides who can't afford health insurance. They work in the food industry, but depend on food banks to help feed their children. "They are child care teachers who don't make enough to save for their own children's education...They care for the elderly, but they have no pensions." The current minimum wage of $5.15 an hour doesn't bring a full-time worker with one child above the official poverty line. The authors make a case for raising the federal minimum wage to at least $8 an hour. For more information on the book and on the campaign to raise the minimum wage, contact the Ms. Foundation for Women, 120 Wall St., 33rd follr, New York, NY 10005; 212/742-2300; or visit www.raisethefloor.org

The 1996 "welfare reform" legislation was based upon mythologies about who was receiving welfare benefits and why. Perhaps the most infamous misrepresentation was Ronald Reagan’s "welfare queen," who got rich from welfare fraud, drove a cadillac, and was collecting benefits under dozens of names. She was a lie, but the lie worked. Although few, if any, of the conservatively-driven images of welfare recipients were statistically valid, those images came to dominate the public discourse. Worse, attacks from the right were reinforced by the liberal stance that welfare created generations of dependency, so everyone could agree that welfare policy was bad for rich and poor alike. The result was PRWORA, oriented toward coercion and punishment, with a disproportionate negative impact on families of color.

As we enter into the reauthorization debate, religious people are called to publicly challenge the widespread belief that welfare reform has been a "success" at anything other than punishing poor people, particularly women and children of color. We are called to make this challenge based on our real, ongoing, and committed relationships with the people who are the actual experts on welfare policy—the poor. Here are some examples of policies we can advocate that promote racial equity and respect the worth and dignity of all persons:

1. Addressing Racial Profiling
Because sanctions are often mistakenly and unfairly applied, there is a need for Federal protection standards and enforcement to ensure due process rights. Tracking, measuring, and remedying the racial profiling of public assistance recipients should be a priority.

2. Ending Social Engineering Policies Legislation that punishes single parents, provides special rewards for marriage, and/or controls the reproductive choices of poor women should be removed.

3. Increasing Access to Training and Higher Education
Provide equitable and ready access to tuition, transportation, childcare, and direct income supports so that secondary education is available to all. Remove work mandates that are barriers to achieving long-range adequate income.

4. Restoring Benefits to Immigrants
All residents, regardless of status or arrival date in the United States, should receive public assistance as needed to ensure survival and provide opportunities to develop economic stability.

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