Bad Faith: Race, Religion and the Reformation of Welfare Law (original) (raw)

2006, Cardozo Pub. L. Pol'y & Ethics J.

This article focuses, in three sections, on the policy considerations, cultural constructions, and legal representations of welfare and welfare reform during several representative eras of racial politics in the United States. Section I of the article addresses how attitudes about welfare and race coincide with postmodern theories of the gift and the indeterminacy of need in the 1980s, and how political debate gives way to a surprising consensus on the meaning of welfare in that period. Under this consensus, government was no longer to use welfare to alleviate poverty or redress social inequity, but to stigmatize or punish the dependent, and ultimately to eliminate the eligibility of its recipients. As Lucy Williams succinctly argues, Most recent state initiatives are designed not to solve the multiple problems faced by poor women and children or to improve the economic conditions for such families, but rather to penalize them for their actions and to reduce welfare rolls... . These concepts, always an undercurrent in American history, surfaced with new vigor in the work of conservative scholars in the early 1980s. Williams specifically identifies George Gilder as an apotheosis of such conservative initiatives, and, as I address in the first section of this article, Gilder and the sociologist Robert Bellah typify the stifling consensus between conservatives and liberals regarding welfare rights that has dominated legislatures and the media since the 1980s. Subsequently, in Section II, I trace some of the assumptions behind contemporary welfare symbolism to the American Renaissance: this period is crucial for understanding contemporary welfare politics because attitudes about race were partly codified during this period in reification of and reaction to the social and political legacy of slavery. Many of the images of black reproduction developed in the 1840s-50s continue "unconsciously" and rhetorically to shape political debates about individual identity, independence and dependence, gender, and reproduction. The ideas I address concerning white male independence from a planned and racialized federal government - represented in welfare as a demand side economy - but dependence on god and divine chance - which represent supply side economics - are central to understanding consensus attitudes about welfare. Both racialized and feminized, welfare functions as a declaration of dependence in a society still dominated by values developed to maintain the status quo of putatively independent, self-reliant and self-created white men. In Sections II and III, I attempt to apply this cultural logic of white male independence/black female dependence to cases and welfare legislation of the past two decades, especially holdings and regulations that invoke images of black motherhood. I read some of these authors, with particular focus on Bellah and Gilder, as much for their subtext as their overt claims. I do not discount what these writers claim they are saying, but do not take their texts at face value, and instead read them through a larger context that accounts for the "surplus" of their texts, the meanings and implications they cannot control. I hope to use this somewhat unfamiliar approach to show the many ways that supply creates its own demand in postmodernism, and effect its own cause; what we might call the "market supply," the "legal supply," and (for our purposes) the "unconscious supply," all create the subject rather than the reverse. The transcendental and postmodern "I" are both the effects of discourses - in other words of supply - rather than the subjects or causes of those discourses (or demands). The self does not pre-exist and then create, for example, the market, the law, or the unconscious. Nor does the self discover his need and then demand it be supplied. Instead, the law, market, and unconscious create him and mutable supply determines what he will want. Transcendentalism and postmodernism are both based in faith in an unseen, impersonal divine hand, producing similar inversions in beliefs about individual and social agency; both rely on a civic individualism that opposes the federal government, state planning, and limitations on human nature and agency, and relies on unpredictable chance. Postmodern economics takes over where transcendentalism left off and provides many of the same cultural functions; instead of divine nature, we have the divine invisible hand of the market. Regulation is not only ineffective; it interferes with the theology of capitalism. Finally, transcendentalism and postmodernism in America are predicated on specific forms of projection about race and gender.