Black Citizenship And Welfare BAYAN ABUBAKR

11:12 PM September, 14 2017

Sudanese Online
bayan abubakr-USA
My Library
Short URL



Barack Obama has been accused of sympathizing with terrorists, forging a birth
certificate, being born in Kenya, being a Muslim, and being a citizen of Indonesia. There is an
entire Wikipedia page—currently at 11,421 words—dedicated to “Barack Obama citizenship
conspiracy theories.” Although Obama released his birth certificate in 2008, 23% of the United
States continued to believe that he was born in another country. Skepticism about his citizenship
existed beyond those who disliked him: nearly 29% of people who said Obama was not born in
the United States approved of the job he was doing as President, of whom 23% said they wanted
to see him reelected in 2012. 1 The question of Barack Obama’s citizenship wasn’t a matter of
politics, policy, or partisanship. It was a question of the legitimacy of a black man in the highest
office of the United States. Being American, for a black man, is conditional on behaving like a
“grateful guest.”2 You can stay here, sure, but in the guest room. You can stay here, sure, but you
can’t be President. You can’t be the American, at least not while being black.
Black Americans are treated as subjects rather than citizens. A subject “is under the
power of another; but a citizen is a unit of a mass of free people who collectively possess
sovereignty.”3 This has manifested itself through state and federal welfare systems: “citizens
receive welfare as an entitlement the government has an obligation [to fund] as compensation for
their social contribution or as a prerequisite to their participation in sociopolitical and economic
life.”4 Subjects, on the other hand, receive “inferior, inefficient, and stigmatizing assistance at
the government’s discretion,” and their benefits depend on their conformity to “behavioral rules
and submission to government scrutiny and assessment.”5 Ultimately, welfare for subjects allows
the government to rule them, as they are vulnerable to “official or quasi-official state sanctioned
inquiry and surveillance.”6 This is accompanied by the government’s authority to investigate and
control these persons’ behavior. For instance, some states have conditioned payments on
mothers’ compliance with varying standards of sexual morality and have tested her deviance
through means and morals testing. In the last thirty years, at least thirty states attempted to
modify their welfare programs to include some form of behavior modification.7 This system of
welfare derives from a racist, divisive, and tyrannical history.
Modern welfare systems deny black Americans their right to privacy. This is maintained
by the fact that they are not considered natural citizens of the United States. As an American,
1 “Section 6: Obama, 2012, and the Tea Party,” PEW Research Center (May 4, 2011)
2 Wesley Morris, “Colin Kaepernick and the Question of Who Gets to Be Called a ‘Patriot’” (September
12, 2016)
3 David Ramsay, “A Dissertation on the Manner of Acquiring the Character and Privileges of a Citizen of
the United States,” (1789).
4 Dorothy Roberts, “Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship,” (1996)
5 Ibid.
6 Joel Handler and Margaret Rosenheim, “Privacy in Welfare: Public Assistance and Juvenile Justice,”
(1966).
7 Dorothy Roberts, “The Welfare Debate: Who Pays for Procreation؟” in Killing the Black Body: Race,
Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, 226-230.
6
blackness is the ultimate marker of illegitimacy, and this has reinforced itself through various
state sanctioned welfare systems. The development of welfare systems as a means of controlling
poor individuals, families, and communities of color can be traced through four Supreme Court
cases: Dandridge v. Williams (1970), Wyman v. James (1971), Lyng v. Castillo (1986), and
Bowen v. Gilliard (1987).
To be black and a citizen of the United States is to live in a paradoxical world. Blackness
and citizenship, in the ways in which they were constructed, exist in constant tension with one
another. Citizenship was built off the backs of people of color by and for whiteness. Whiteness is
the defining marker of citizenship without which one cannot be considered a natural citizen of
the United States. Citizenship is itself an abstract term, but it signifies an emergence of liberties
specific to the United States and the modernity of the Western world. Citizenship was constituted
and reinforced by social relations established by colonial governance in the Americas, Asia, and
Africa. These differences made it possible for Western liberalism to theorize and practice the
universality of human freedom, “despite the fact that freedom for slaves, colonized, and
indigenous people were exempted by this ideology.”8 To individuals deemed worthy, citizenship
granted them civility, and a right to privacy and intimacy.
Citizenship grants Americans political emancipation, social equality, and the promise of
economic freedom. Political emancipation, in particular, is a critical part of citizenship. For
European and North American citizens in the 19th century, ideas of privacy were constituted
within an individual’s right to political protection. This understanding of citizenship can be
traced in the political philosophical traditions of Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. They
consider and analyze the modern individual, or the Western man, who possesses “interiority of
person” as well as the private household. 9 Hegel, for example, traced the development of
citizenship through various forms of privacy: property, family, and domestic life.10 This notion
of privacy became critical to defining the modern liberal individual and how citizenship itself
became a function of privacy.
During the Progressive era, white women advocated for the universality of welfare
systems, but made sure that black people were excluded from these systems. This was justified
through beliefs such as: “blacks needed less to live on than whites,” and that, as one Southern
public assistance field supervisor claimed, “the number of Negro cases is few due to the
unanimous feeling on the part of the staff and the board that there are more work opportunities
for Negro women.”11 The Civil Rights movement, however, began opening the welfare system to
black Americans. It forced states to relax welfare eligibility requirements, raise benefit levels,
and increase the availability of benefits to single-parent households. The federal government,
under the scrutiny of the international community and civil rights activists, proceeded to set up
several programs designed to integrate more black Americans into federal and state assistance
programs. But this victory came with consequences. Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC), a system of welfare administered by states with federal funding, became “increasingly
associated with black mothers already stereotyped as lazy, irresponsible, and overly fertile. It
became burdened with behavior modification rules, work requirements, and reduced effective
8 Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in The Intimacies of Four Continents, 16-20.
9 Ibid, 28.
10 Ibid, 27-29.
11 Dorothy Roberts, “The Welfare Debate: Who Pays for Procreation؟,” in Killing the Black Body: Race,
Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, 202-246.
7
benefit levels.”12 Furthermore, the inclusion of black Americans in welfare programs became
stigmatized as proof of black people’s lack of work ethic, perpetual depravity, and dependency.13
The black woman, as a result, became the state’s enemy. This black woman depleted the state’s
resources, was a site of poverty and destitution, and tarnished the purity of “Americanness.” In
response, welfare became a tool of social control and an entry point for the state into the lives of
poor, black families.
Under AFDC, the state of Maryland computed a “standard of need” for each family. In
Maryland, this standard increased with every additional member of the family, but at the same
time, it incrementally decreased. Rather than paying the full amount of determined need to each
family, the state, to conserve funds, established a “ceiling of about $250 per month, regardless of
the size of the family and its actual need.”14 This resulted in smaller families receiving “100
percent of their state-determined minimum subsistence while larger families were receiving a
lesser percentage, the exact percentage reduction depending upon the size of the family.”15
Larger families were discriminated against and were more likely to starve than smaller families.
This is invidious and explicitly prejudiced. Maryland could not direct its efforts to cap the state
budget at larger families, as there is no compelling reason for them to do so. Larger families are
no less justified to welfare benefits than smaller families. In its totality, this policy was designed
to make life “more difficult for low-income families, thrust them deeper into poverty, and
ultimately, discourage additional births.”16 This family cap, and others like it, was intended to
prevent mothers on welfare from having additional children, as this would ultimately ease public
burden. This sort of policy is based on the myth of the sexually irresponsible welfare queen: a
woman of color who has multiple children to cash in on her welfare benefits. This was built off
the premise that women should not have children if they cannot provide for them without
welfare; considering this, children by welfare mothers were another means by which the welfare
queen could rob the state. Family caps are an extension of a “misogynoir” stereotype.17 Capping
welfare curbs the incentive to produce more children, supposedly putting an end to the moral
decline and pathology in poor communities of color.
Dandridge v. Williams (1970) punished unconventional families through the state of
Maryland’s “standard of need.” The plaintiffs were Linda Williams, a single mother, and Junius
and Jeanette Gary, a married couple. They were parents of eight children each. They filed a case
against Edmund P. Dandridge, chairman of the Maryland State Board of Public Welfare, because
Maryland’s method of calculating a “standard of need” discriminated against larger families and
was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiffs also
claimed that the “standard of need” calculation conflicted with the stated purpose of AFDC, as
per the Social Security Act of 1935 (“[aid] shall be furnished with reasonable promptness to all
eligible individuals”). The District Court found that the regulation was unconventional and in
violation of the Social Security Act. The Supreme Court, in a 5-3 decision, found that the
Maryland provision was not unconstitutional and was not in violation of stated AFDC policies.
The Court looked to a precedent set by King v. Smith (1968), which described AFDC as “a
12 Ibid, 240-246.
13 Ibid.
14 Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U.S. 471 (1970).
15 Mevlyn Durchslag, “Welfare Litigation, the Eleventh Amendment and State Sovereignty: Some
Reflections on Dandridge v. Williams,” (1975).
16 Jamelle Bouie, “The Most Discriminatory Law in the Land,” (June 17, 2014).
17 Eliza Anyangwe, “Misogynoir: where racism and sexism meet,” (October 5, 2015).
8
scheme of cooperative federalism,” and granted the states “considerable latitude in allocating
their AFDC resources, since each state is free to set its own standard of need and to determine
the level of benefits by the number of funds it devotes to the program.”18 The Court also
reasoned that the state, by capping welfare benefits, could encourage employment in the
marketplace. In his dissent, Justice William Douglas warned of “the danger that the state could
use welfare programs to ‘wield its economic whip’ over disfranchised groups, forcing them to
dance in response to the dominant groups’ fantasies and phobias about its own Soul.”19
Welfare caps policed welfare recipients. These caps weren't the only barriers to welfare,
however. Caseworkers prove to be yet another means of restricting access to welfare, and they
negatively affect the experiences of welfare recipients of color.
Caseworker visits are an essential part of the welfare system’s oppressive and invasive
methods. They are a form of checks and balances that ensure that the state’s money is being used
as directed. These visits come with intrusive questions with prodding, and suspicious undertones.
They are also laced with a systemic racial bias; “white welfare recipients benefit considerably
from the discretionary actions of their caseworkers…black and white welfare clients may be
incorrectly attributed to differences in work ethic, personal motivation, or attitude.”20
Caseworkers are the intermediaries between welfare systems, relevant government agencies, and
welfare recipients. They can help define and set the parameters of a recipient’s under welfare,
and they have free reign in doing so. Unequal treatment at the hands of caseworkers is unfair,
discriminatory, and reinforces the stereotype of the malicious black welfare recipient. The same
stereotypes that drove welfare agencies to enforce means and morals testing to validate eligibility
for welfare created the need and desire to use caseworkers as the designated gatekeepers of
welfare. Caseworkers are another agent of surveillance that can ensure where, why, and most
importantly, to whom welfare is being distributed. Caseworkers are a point of entry into the lives
of poor families. When these poor families are also families of color, caseworkers become a
point of entry, monitoring, and behavior modification. The biases that muddle a caseworker’s
judgment can play into the benefits a recipient is eligible for. It is for this reason that welfare
should not have to depend on caseworker visits to “verify” the legitimacy of a recipient’s claims.
Wyman v. James (1971) was a direct and insidious violation of Barbara James’ right to
privacy. James was a welfare recipient and single mother. After having a son, James applied for
assistance under New York’s AFDC program. She was deemed eligible and began receiving her
benefits after a caseworker visited her apartment. Two years later, James was scheduled to be
visited again by another caseworker—this was required under New York state law and could
affect James’ benefits under AFDC. James refused the caseworker’s visit because “questions
concerning personal relationships, beliefs, and behavior are raised and pressed, which is
unnecessary for a determination of continuing eligibility.”21 James continued to refuse the visit,
and AFDC assistance was terminated, even though James “expressed willingness to cooperate
and to permit the visit elsewhere.”22 James filed a claim under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights
Act of 1971 in the District Court for the Southern State of New York. She claimed “that the
18 King v. Smith, 392 U.S. 309 (1968).
19 Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U.S. 471 (1970).
20 Susan Gooden, “All Things Not Being Equal: Differences in Caseworker Support Toward Black and
White Welfare Clients,” (1997).
21 Wyman v. James, 400 U.S. 309 (1971).
22 Ibid.
9
caseworker visit was a search,”23 and as such, would violate her Fourth and Fourteenth
Amendment rights. The District Court ruled in her favor, the state of New York appealed, and
the case was sent to the Supreme Court. In a 6-3 opinion, the Court found that the caseworker
visit was not an “unreasonable search or seizure,” and therefore, was not in violation of James’
Fourth Amendment rights. Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the majority of the Court,
reasoned that the visit was not forced or compelled, meaning that “there is no entry of the home
and there is no search.”24 Furthermore, Blackmun argued the visit would allow the state to ensure
that its welfare funds were being spent appropriately. In his dissent, Justice William Douglas
argued that welfare was a form of surveillance:
In this manner, welfare acted as an agent of violence; Welfare has long
been considered the equivalent of charity and its recipients have been subjected to
all kinds of dehumanizing experiences in the government’s efforts to police its
welfare payments. In fact, over half a billion dollars are expended annually for
administration and policing in connection with the Aid to Families with
Dependent Children program. Why such large sums are necessary for
administration and policing has never been adequately explained. No such sums
are spent policing the government subsidies granted to farmers, airlines,
steamship companies, and junk mail dealers… The bureaucracy of modern
government is not only slow, lumbering, and oppressive; it is omnipresent. It pries
more and more into private affairs…25
Wyman v. James legitimized yet another tool of government and state-sanctioned
surveillance. It legalized an odious and discriminatory invasion of privacy that sustained the
notion that black Americans should be treated as subjects, always to be surveilled, rather than as
citizens of the United States.
In 1982, the Food Stamp Program was amended and eligibility and benefit levels in the
program began to be determined on a “household” basis. This definition of “household” did not
include more distant relatives or groups of unrelated persons living together. Rather, a
“household” consisted of two parents, their children, and the parents’ siblings. Before this
revision, the federal food stamp program evaluated eligibility on an individual basis. A group of
individuals would be eligible for more food stamps if they consisted of several households,
rather than just one. These amendments target a particular kind of welfare recipient, the recipient
that does not fit into the traditional, normalized definition of a “household”: “in Lyng v. Castillo
several families lost all or part of their food stamp benefits when adult children or siblings were
forced to reside together…[T]he Food Stamp Program penalizes families that turn to their
relatives for shelter.”26 Children whose income is available to a household applying for
assistance were forced to consider moving out of their homes, refusing to help support their
family, or surrendering their income to support their household’s chance at receiving adequate
benefits. These amendments fall in line with other revisions to welfare programs during the late
1980’s and early 1990’s that represented an ideological shift in response to the War on Poverty.
This shift called for federal deregulation, criticized the welfare state, and aimed to reduce federal
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Lyng v. Castillo, 477 U.S. 635 (1986).
10
aid to impoverished communities. Communities and individuals of color were scapegoated, as
they were, by mainstream definition, the quintessence of the welfare state and how damning it
was to American society. This is the sort of ideology that created the foundation for the statutory
revision in question. It redefined what a “household” could legally look like for families in need
of welfare. Through its intrusive approach to regulating funds, it treated welfare recipients like
subjects, rather than citizens.
Lyng v. Castillo (1986) restructured and redefined the statutory definition of a household.
The Castillo family—the plaintiffs—consisted of a mother, a father, and their children who lived
with the mother’s adult daughter. Although they were separate living units, the Castillos were
denied eligibility as a separate household because they lived with an adult who already received
food stamps. The Castillos claimed that “the statutory distinction between parents and children,
and all other groups of individuals violates the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.”27
The District Court of the Southern District of Texas invalidated this distinction because it
“directly and substantially” interfered with family living arrangements. The decision was sent to
the Supreme Court, where the lower court’s decision was reversed; a state’s ability to define a
“household” was found constitutional. The Court found that “Congress could reasonably
determine that close relatives sharing a home—almost by definition—tend to purchase and
prepare meals together while distant relatives and unrelated individuals might not be so
inclined.” The Court also reasoned that Congress had an “undeniably legitimate desire to prevent
fraud and waste in the food stamp program.” Justice Thurgood Marshall, in his dissent, argued
that “the government has chosen to intrude into the family dining room…[and] what possible
interest can the government have in preventing members of a family from dining as they
choose؟” He claimed that there were no grounds for Congress’s assumption that related persons
living together were a significant source of fraud. Rather, Marshall claimed that Congress
determined that the government could save money by “tightening the definition of an eligible
food stamp household” and scapegoating larger, more unconventional families.28 Lyng is
discriminatory in that it doesn’t provide reasonable rationale for it targeting blended or unusual
“households,” and in doing so, appears to directly attack the poor, “unconventional” welfare
recipient.
The Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 (DERFA) was an attempt by the AFDC, backed by
Congress, to use family size as a marker for eligibility. Before 1984, families with dependent
children applying for AFDC could exclude children with outside financial support from their
filing. This changed with the passage of DERFA. DERFA amended the AFDC program to
require families to include all children living in the same house in the filing, even if they had
outside support. This meant that the total sum of AFDC benefits could be reduced by an amount
corresponding to the sum of any child support received. DERFA served as an intrusion into
private households and family networks. It punished families that did not operate as typical twoparent
households: families that are blended, families with multiple parents, and families that
don’t fit the “two-point-five-kids” mold. In America, these are families with grandmothers
raising their grandchildren, with aunts raising their nieces and nephews, and families where
kinship exists beyond bloodlines and biological parenthood. Although “kinship care” is common
among all races, cultures, and ethnicities, black children are “more likely than other racial or
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
11
ethnic groups to live in a household without either parent and not be raised by kin.”29 DERFA
was in reckless disregard for the privacy to which these households are entitled.
This, however, fails to have any substantive meaning because poor people of color are
considered subjects, rather than citizens of the state. Their homes warrant surveillance and
intrusion because their homes are where poor people of color breed their illegitimate and toxic
cultures, the very cultures that push them in the direction of welfare. These are families that are
considered illegitimate because fathers don’t live with their children, and the mothers in these
households are not always the mothers of said children. These families are looked upon
negatively because they use the state’s money to fund their “unorthodox” lifestyles, and this is
unacceptable. Therefore, welfare recipients––especially recipients of color who lead
“unconventional” lifestyles––need to be monitored by the state.
In Bowen v. Gilliard (1987), the Supreme Court found that the state may force families to
“shrink rearrange, or break up to qualify for benefits” through DERFA.30 In 1970, Betty Mae
Gilliard, a welfare recipient, gave birth to her second child. Since she was receiving child support
from the child’s father, the state deducted the child support from the benefits she was eligible for
as the parent of an eight-person household. Gilliard sued and the District Court ruled in her
favor. The court claimed that she could exclude the child receiving child support from her filing
unit because the seven-person family benefits were greater than what she would receive from the
eight-person family benefits minus the child support. When North Carolina adopted the DERFA,
Gilliard and other members of the class action filed a motion to reopen the case. They argued
that the DERFA was a violation of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the
takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. The District Court ruled in Gilliard’s favor, North
Carolina appealed the decision, and the case was sent to the Supreme Court. The Court found
that the DERFA amendment did not violate the due process clause and its equal protection
component because it “does not interfere with a family’s fundamental right to live in the type of
family unit it chooses.” 31 Furthermore, the Court found that Congress’s rationale for passing
DERFA––reducing the national deficit and distributing aid to needy families in the fairest way
possible––was constitutional. The majority decision failed to consider how DERFA would affect
family structures and networks once it was put into place. These ramifications were explored in
Justice William Brennan’s dissent, where he argued that DERFA was an intrusion that was
unprecedented, intolerable, and muddled the line between “public citizen and private person.” In
this case, the federal government “directly and substantially interfered with family living
arrangements.”32
The Supreme Court played a substantial role in legitimizing stereotypes and commonly
held beliefs of welfare recipients. These beliefs, given welfare’s racialized history, were
projected onto the lives of people of color, and these projections fed into policy and rhetoric.
They further reinforced the idea that welfare recipients of color were subjects of the state that
needed to be policed, rather than citizens. These Supreme Court rulings are important because
they shed light onto the perception of welfare during what some might argue to be its demise.
The fall of welfare was marked by the rise of the War on Drugs and the heightened
29 Tyreasa Washington, James P. Gleeson, and Kelly L. Rulison “Competence and African-American
Children in Informal Kinship Care: The Role of Family,” (2013).
30 Bowen v. Gilliard, 483 U.S. 587 (1987).
31 A.W. Phinney III, “Feminism, Epistemology, and the Rhetoric of Law: Reading Bowen v. Gilliard,”
(1989).
32 Bowen v. Gilliard, 483 U.S. 587 (1987).
12
criminalization of the black body, the black family, and black communities. It is unsurprising, to
say the least, that welfare became another means by which the government could target people of
color.
People of color have and will continue to be subjected to the tyranny of the United States.
They are not natural citizens of the United States. They created citizenship, but citizenship was
not created for them. Welfare is based on this notion, and it has, and will continue to, operate on
the body of the black subject.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anyangwe, Eliza. “Misogynoir: where racism and sexism meet.” The Guardian, October 5,
2015. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/05/what-is-misogynoir
Bouie, Jamelle. “The Most Discriminatory Law in the Land.” Slate, June 17, 2014.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...ximum_family_grant_a
nd_family_caps_a_racist_law_that_punishes_the.html
Durchslag, Melvyn R. “Welfare Litigation, the Eleventh Amendment and State Sovereignty:
Some Reflections on Dandridge v. Williams.” Case Western Reserve Law Review 26, no. 1
(1975): 60-100.
Gleeson, James P., Kelly L. Rulison, and Tyreasa Washington. “Competence and AfricanAmerican
Children in Informal Kinship Care: The Role of Family.” Children and Youth Services
Review 35, no. 9 (2013): 1305-12.
Gooden, Susan. “All Things Not Being Equal: Differences in Caseworker Support Toward Black
and White Welfare Clients.” Harvard Journal of African-American Public Policy 4 (1997): 23-
33.
Handler, Joel, and Margaret Rosenheim. “Privacy in Welfare: Public Assistance and Juvenile
Justice.” Law and Contemporary Problem 31 (1966): 377-412.
Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Morris, Wesley. “Colin Kaepernick and the Question of Who Gets to Be Called a ‘Patriot’” The
New York Times Magazine, September 12, 2016.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/magazine/who-gets-to-be-called-a-patriot.html
Phinney III, A.W. “Feminism, Epistemology, and the Rhetoric of Law: Reading Bowen v.
Gilliard.” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 12 (1989): 151-80.
Ramsay, David. “A Dissertation on the Manner of Acquiring the Character and Privileges of a
Citizen of the United States.” Evans Early American Imprint Collection, 1789.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx؟c=evans;idno=N17114.0001.001http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx؟c=evans;idno=N17114.0001.001
Roberts, Dorothy E. “Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship” (1996). Faculty
13
Scholarship. Paper 1283. http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1283/http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1283/
—. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York:
Penguin Random House, 1998.
“Section 6: Obama, 2012, and the Tea Party,” Pew Research Center, May 4, 2011.
http://www.people-press.org/2011/05/04/section-6-obama-2012-and-the-tea-party/
Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U.S. 471 (1970).
Bowen v. Gilliard, 483 U.S. 587 (1987).
Lyng v. Castillo, 477 U.S. 635 (1986).
Wyman v. James, 400 U.S. 309 (1971).
King v. Smith, 392 U.S. 309 (1968).

Arabic Forum