A eleição de Bill Clinton em 1992 era para ser um ponto de virada na política americana. Os liberais deram um suspiro de alívio, acreditando que ele era uma pausa muito necessária da era Reagan-Bush de “governo pequeno” e cortes na previdência social.
Mas o otimismo em torno da eleição de Clinton - e as avaliações favoráveis de seu tempo no cargo desde então - ignoram a destruição que sua administração trouxe para os pobres e trabalhadores, especialmente os afro-americanos, e mascaram não apenas a continuação, mas a intensificação das políticas anti-pobres. Em vez de oferecer uma suspensão da austeridade punitiva, Clinton levou a agenda Reagan-Bush um passo adiante. Se sua administração foi um ponto de inflexão, nos levou na direção errada.
Em 1994, Clinton assinou a Lei de Controle de Crimes Violentos e Execução da Lei, o maior projeto de lei sobre crimes da história, que alocou US $ 10 bilhões para a construção de prisões, ampliou a pena de morte e eliminou o financiamento federal para a educação de presidiários. O ato intensificou a vigilância policial e o perfil racial, e prendeu milhões por crimes não violentos, como porte de drogas. Ajudou a inaugurar a era do encarceramento em massa que devastou comunidades de cor (pelas quais o próprio Clinton recentemente se desculpou).
A expansão simultânea de Clinton da aplicação da lei federal e encolhimento da força de trabalho federal ao seu nível mais baixo em trinta anos realocou os dólares dos contribuintes de empregar pessoas em empregos de serviço social para colocar mais policiais nas ruas.
O exemplo mais flagrante das muitas medidas racistas e anti-pobres dirigidas aos afro-americanos e aprovadas durante seu governo foi o projeto de lei de reforma da previdência de 1996, que transformou a previdência de um sistema de assistência em dinheiro exclusivo e desigual que estigmatizava seus destinatários em um que na verdade os criminalizava.
A Lei de Reconciliação de Responsabilidade Pessoal e Oportunidades de Trabalho acabou com o bem-estar tradicional transformando um direito federal, Ajuda a Famílias com Filhos Dependentes (AFDC), em subsídios em bloco, ou Assistência Temporária a Famílias Carentes (TANF). A TANF estabeleceu mandatos mais rígidos para mães solteiras pobres e deu aos estados mais flexibilidade na maneira como gastavam os dólares da previdência (abrindo a porta para uma maior discriminação contra as minorias).
It prohibits anyone from receiving assistance for more than two consecutive years or for more than five years over the course of their life. The act also requires aid recipients to be employed, in most cases, at least thirty hours a week to get their welfare checks, amounting to an hourly wage well below the legal minimum.
Once recipients reach their program time limit, TANF forces them even further into the labor market with little consideration of how they could ensure their children are properly cared for or whether paid employment will earn them an adequate wage. Many more are not even able to find work. A 2012 report by the Urban Institute concluded that for recipients with barriers to employment, TANF did little to help them find jobs.
Sweeping in scope, TANF contains clauses to bolster marriage, mandate job training, and offer parenting classes. The “flexibility” that was a hallmark of the welfare reform bill enabled states to shift welfare funds away from direct cash assistance toward child care programs or subsidies for companies hiring welfare recipients, meaning that a greater portion of public welfare dollars went to the private sector.
States were pressured to reduce welfare rolls — now the singular quantitative measure of success for the program — and used multiple strategies to deter the needy from applying for aid. They implemented complicated and demeaning application procedures and relied on fingerprinting and drug testing to weed out the “criminal element” — even though there was little evidence of widespread criminal activity among recipients.
The net result was that all recipients and applicants were assumed to be potential criminals. Surveillance of low-income women punished black women in disproportionate numbers, resulting in more black children in foster care and black women in prison. Today, welfare and law enforcement work together to closely monitor the parenting of poor mothers.
These punitive policies were not new, but rather an extension of a long, racialized attack on welfare. AFDC was not controversial when it was instituted in the 1930s. Many people subscribed to traditional ideas about gender roles, believing that poor single mothers without a male breadwinner should be supported by the state in order to enable them to stay home and care for their children.
The overwhelming majority of recipients at the time, however, were white women. Women of color were considered less deserving of assistance. State and local social administrators of AFDC, especially in the South, systematically excluded African Americans and Mexican Americans from welfare receipt through “suitable home clauses” and “employable mother laws,” which denied assistance to mothers who didn’t keep “proper” homes or who it was believed could get a job and become self-supporting.
As black migration to the North intensified, more women of color applied for assistance, resulting in opposition to the welfare program. Journalists wrote about welfare fraud and the “problem” of black migration, and there were growing calls to get people off the rolls. In 1967, the Johnson administration instituted a Work Incentive Program (WIN), the first-ever mandatory federal employment rule for AFDC, requiring states to direct a portion of their welfare population to employment programs.
This landmark legislation shifted the role of welfare away from support for single mothers toward one of requiring those mothers to take paid employment outside the home. Although symbolically important because it signaled a new direction in federal policy, WIN was never adequately funded nor effectively enforced. The welfare rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s opposed the mandatory work rules and fought for higher monthly benefits, tempering some of these regressive policies. But only temporarily.
The punitive approach to addressing poverty was a result of the way race and poverty had become intertwined in the national debate. In the 1960s, urban social disorder, black demands for economic equality, and federal anti-poverty initiatives drew the nation’s attention to the persistent problem of black poverty. But the dominant liberal approach explained poverty as a product of black culture, reinforcing the notion that certain poor people were responsible for their own poverty.
Most notoriously articulated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the culture of poverty argument suggested that a dysfunctional family structure — in particular single-parent families — was a primary reason for persistent African-American inequality.
The solution became one of attempting to instill proper values of work and marriage in black men and women. Poor black women were demonized as “welfare queens,” a trope popularized by Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s, which implied that black women chose welfare over work and milked the system for all it was worth. This rhetoric was used to justify sweeping cuts in welfare spending.
Likewise, Clinton’s welfare reform bill was rooted in a culture of poverty argument, evidenced by his racially coded language of dependency and people taking advantage of the system. Stereotypes about women were the foundation of the 1996 welfare reform debate.
Clinton alluded to the fear of black street crime, drug use, crack babies, the breakdown of the family, and the drain on public dollars. His primary goal in dismantling AFDC, as he put it, was to end the “cycle of dependence” and “achieve a national welfare reform bill that will make work and responsibility the law of the land.”
Clinton did not offer a departure from either earlier liberal policies that blamed the poor for their poverty or neoliberal economics. Instead, he turned what had been a few piecemeal reforms into a systematic overhaul of federal policy that led to the criminalization of the welfare poor. He redirected state resources away from financial support for the needy and toward surveillance and criminalization.
In an era of market worship, those who couldn’t demonstrate self-reliance or independence were identified not only as unworthy of assistance, but as a potential threat to the core institutions of American society.
Clinton’s dismantling of welfare, couched in a language of personal responsibility and public policy correction, was the culmination of a trend among both Democrats and Republicans to deter and discourage poor women of color from applying for assistance. In this regard, there was little new about the “New Democrat.”
Sobre o autor
Premilla Nadasen é historiadora e autora de Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement.
Mas o otimismo em torno da eleição de Clinton - e as avaliações favoráveis de seu tempo no cargo desde então - ignoram a destruição que sua administração trouxe para os pobres e trabalhadores, especialmente os afro-americanos, e mascaram não apenas a continuação, mas a intensificação das políticas anti-pobres. Em vez de oferecer uma suspensão da austeridade punitiva, Clinton levou a agenda Reagan-Bush um passo adiante. Se sua administração foi um ponto de inflexão, nos levou na direção errada.
Em 1994, Clinton assinou a Lei de Controle de Crimes Violentos e Execução da Lei, o maior projeto de lei sobre crimes da história, que alocou US $ 10 bilhões para a construção de prisões, ampliou a pena de morte e eliminou o financiamento federal para a educação de presidiários. O ato intensificou a vigilância policial e o perfil racial, e prendeu milhões por crimes não violentos, como porte de drogas. Ajudou a inaugurar a era do encarceramento em massa que devastou comunidades de cor (pelas quais o próprio Clinton recentemente se desculpou).
A expansão simultânea de Clinton da aplicação da lei federal e encolhimento da força de trabalho federal ao seu nível mais baixo em trinta anos realocou os dólares dos contribuintes de empregar pessoas em empregos de serviço social para colocar mais policiais nas ruas.
O exemplo mais flagrante das muitas medidas racistas e anti-pobres dirigidas aos afro-americanos e aprovadas durante seu governo foi o projeto de lei de reforma da previdência de 1996, que transformou a previdência de um sistema de assistência em dinheiro exclusivo e desigual que estigmatizava seus destinatários em um que na verdade os criminalizava.
A Lei de Reconciliação de Responsabilidade Pessoal e Oportunidades de Trabalho acabou com o bem-estar tradicional transformando um direito federal, Ajuda a Famílias com Filhos Dependentes (AFDC), em subsídios em bloco, ou Assistência Temporária a Famílias Carentes (TANF). A TANF estabeleceu mandatos mais rígidos para mães solteiras pobres e deu aos estados mais flexibilidade na maneira como gastavam os dólares da previdência (abrindo a porta para uma maior discriminação contra as minorias).
It prohibits anyone from receiving assistance for more than two consecutive years or for more than five years over the course of their life. The act also requires aid recipients to be employed, in most cases, at least thirty hours a week to get their welfare checks, amounting to an hourly wage well below the legal minimum.
Once recipients reach their program time limit, TANF forces them even further into the labor market with little consideration of how they could ensure their children are properly cared for or whether paid employment will earn them an adequate wage. Many more are not even able to find work. A 2012 report by the Urban Institute concluded that for recipients with barriers to employment, TANF did little to help them find jobs.
Sweeping in scope, TANF contains clauses to bolster marriage, mandate job training, and offer parenting classes. The “flexibility” that was a hallmark of the welfare reform bill enabled states to shift welfare funds away from direct cash assistance toward child care programs or subsidies for companies hiring welfare recipients, meaning that a greater portion of public welfare dollars went to the private sector.
States were pressured to reduce welfare rolls — now the singular quantitative measure of success for the program — and used multiple strategies to deter the needy from applying for aid. They implemented complicated and demeaning application procedures and relied on fingerprinting and drug testing to weed out the “criminal element” — even though there was little evidence of widespread criminal activity among recipients.
The net result was that all recipients and applicants were assumed to be potential criminals. Surveillance of low-income women punished black women in disproportionate numbers, resulting in more black children in foster care and black women in prison. Today, welfare and law enforcement work together to closely monitor the parenting of poor mothers.
These punitive policies were not new, but rather an extension of a long, racialized attack on welfare. AFDC was not controversial when it was instituted in the 1930s. Many people subscribed to traditional ideas about gender roles, believing that poor single mothers without a male breadwinner should be supported by the state in order to enable them to stay home and care for their children.
The overwhelming majority of recipients at the time, however, were white women. Women of color were considered less deserving of assistance. State and local social administrators of AFDC, especially in the South, systematically excluded African Americans and Mexican Americans from welfare receipt through “suitable home clauses” and “employable mother laws,” which denied assistance to mothers who didn’t keep “proper” homes or who it was believed could get a job and become self-supporting.
As black migration to the North intensified, more women of color applied for assistance, resulting in opposition to the welfare program. Journalists wrote about welfare fraud and the “problem” of black migration, and there were growing calls to get people off the rolls. In 1967, the Johnson administration instituted a Work Incentive Program (WIN), the first-ever mandatory federal employment rule for AFDC, requiring states to direct a portion of their welfare population to employment programs.
This landmark legislation shifted the role of welfare away from support for single mothers toward one of requiring those mothers to take paid employment outside the home. Although symbolically important because it signaled a new direction in federal policy, WIN was never adequately funded nor effectively enforced. The welfare rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s opposed the mandatory work rules and fought for higher monthly benefits, tempering some of these regressive policies. But only temporarily.
The punitive approach to addressing poverty was a result of the way race and poverty had become intertwined in the national debate. In the 1960s, urban social disorder, black demands for economic equality, and federal anti-poverty initiatives drew the nation’s attention to the persistent problem of black poverty. But the dominant liberal approach explained poverty as a product of black culture, reinforcing the notion that certain poor people were responsible for their own poverty.
Most notoriously articulated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the culture of poverty argument suggested that a dysfunctional family structure — in particular single-parent families — was a primary reason for persistent African-American inequality.
The solution became one of attempting to instill proper values of work and marriage in black men and women. Poor black women were demonized as “welfare queens,” a trope popularized by Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s, which implied that black women chose welfare over work and milked the system for all it was worth. This rhetoric was used to justify sweeping cuts in welfare spending.
Likewise, Clinton’s welfare reform bill was rooted in a culture of poverty argument, evidenced by his racially coded language of dependency and people taking advantage of the system. Stereotypes about women were the foundation of the 1996 welfare reform debate.
Clinton alluded to the fear of black street crime, drug use, crack babies, the breakdown of the family, and the drain on public dollars. His primary goal in dismantling AFDC, as he put it, was to end the “cycle of dependence” and “achieve a national welfare reform bill that will make work and responsibility the law of the land.”
Clinton did not offer a departure from either earlier liberal policies that blamed the poor for their poverty or neoliberal economics. Instead, he turned what had been a few piecemeal reforms into a systematic overhaul of federal policy that led to the criminalization of the welfare poor. He redirected state resources away from financial support for the needy and toward surveillance and criminalization.
In an era of market worship, those who couldn’t demonstrate self-reliance or independence were identified not only as unworthy of assistance, but as a potential threat to the core institutions of American society.
Clinton’s dismantling of welfare, couched in a language of personal responsibility and public policy correction, was the culmination of a trend among both Democrats and Republicans to deter and discourage poor women of color from applying for assistance. In this regard, there was little new about the “New Democrat.”
Sobre o autor
Premilla Nadasen é historiadora e autora de Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement.
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