How Did the U.S. End Up With Such a Weak Safety Net for Families?
For Centuries, Racism Has Stopped Progress in Its Tracks—We Won't Win Without Confronting It Directly
Last week, J.D. Vance hit the Sunday talk shows to accuse Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the Democrats of being anti-family and anti-child. To reinforce his own bona fides as a pro-family, normal guy, he said he wants the U.S. to have more children.
He was lighter on specifics about how to do that (probably because his radical anti-abortion politics are quite unpopular). He said he supports provisions to lower the cost of child birth, and that he supports an expanded Child Tax Credit (he had the chance to vote for an expansion in the Senate, but didn’t show up, earlier this month). Surprisingly, he said he supported a tax credit of $5,000. The bill Vance just skipped out on voting for and which his Republican colleagues defeated would only have raised that credit to $2,000 over the next few years.
As Bloomberg Tax reports, it’s quite hard to imagine Republicans actually supporting such a major expansion to the CTC, since they’ve already fought efforts to make the policy more generous to poor families and argued it disincentivizes work. (If you know a family with children who would quit their jobs in order to live on $5,000 a year, I’d like to talk to them.)
Then late last week the Harris campaign announced some of its policy agenda for easing costs for families, and wow! Harris’s proposal would raise the CTC to $3,000, plus add an additional $6,000 benefit for newborns. She also proposed a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers, bans on price gouging for food and groceries, and eliminating medical debt for millions of Americans. Those are a few ideas that would make THIS family quite happy, even if we’d only stand to benefit from a few of them.
The emerging populist policy arms race has echoes of 2020, when the Democratic primary candidates sought to out-shine each other and the first glimpses of what would be the Build Back Better legislation began to emerge. The increase in proposals for such progressive family policy, especially from the right, is an incredible sign of the success of the care movement over recent decades. But as usual in the U.S., the real question is how likely we are to get these proposals across the finish line and through Congress, even if there’s a willing president waiting to sign them.
Joe Biden’s Build Back Better came so close to bringing America’s family policy into the 21st century—paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and high-quality pre-K—but it didn’t get the votes it needed. It’s important to be sober about the political fight it will take to win these key pieces of infrastructure for over-stretched families.
After Build Back Better failed, I wrote a piece about the history of U.S. discourse around family policies and why, unlike the rest of the wealthy and even not-wealthy nations in the world, we haven’t supported universal income-enhancing policies for families. There are multiple answers, but a key one we cannot look past is the unique role of racism and racist fear mongering that opponents of these policies stoke, just as they did to end welfare in the U.S. in the 90s.
Donald Trump is no stranger to this kind of fear mongering, and with a Black woman leading the Democrats’ ticket, we can only guess we’ll be seeing the return of racist scapegoating to make Americans afraid of, rather than excited about these policies, as the race heats up. When that happens, it’s critical family-policy supporters go at that racism directly, identifying it both as a calculated tactic and a historic reality that has made the U.S. incredibly unequal across race and made U.S. family life precarious.
To that end, I’m cross-posting a few excerpts from an essay I wrote for Work Life Everything in early 2023, (an org I cofounded as a hub for mental load research and innovation), with a few light edits for readability. The post draws on work from the historian Premilla Nadasen who wrote an important book about the history of welfare and the welfare rights movement:
When it Comes to Work-Family Policy, U.S. Racism Stymies Common Sense Solutions
Advocates for family supportive policies in the U.S. have spent their entire careers fighting for reforms that most countries, especially wealthy peer nations, have had on the books for decades, some even a century or longer. Paid parental leave, publicly subsidized child care, extra cash incentives for families with dependent children, to name a few, all remain progressive dreams, while in other countries, politicians across the partisan spectrum would scarcely dare to threaten them. And the differences in outcomes, in relative happiness, between families in the U.S. and in countries with these policies in place are stark. International studies regularly show how much less stable and how much more stressed U.S. families are than their peers.
Researcher Jennifer Glass told Time Magazine that her research shows both parents and non-parents in countries with these policies are happier. Why? "My hunch is that countries that do a good job of supporting parents who are employed by providing high quality childcare at a reasonable price in that zero through five period end up with kids who are better socialized," said Glass. "They are better workers. They have fewer problems with delinquency and crime later on. They have a population with higher educational credentials. Those are externalities that affect everybody whether a parent or not."
So just what is it about the U.S. that has put families in such a uniquely hard position, despite the well documented benefits of better policies? While there are various theories—from American’s Protestant work ethic, to our rugged individualism, to our unique devotion to capitalism, contemporary data and historical evidence point to our country’s racism, particularly toward African Americans, as a key barrier to progress. Until the family policy movement considers racism as central to the problem and confronts these biases directly, workers and families will continue to be stuck in a system that works for no one.
No where was this clearer than in the late 90s attack on welfare
The move to “end welfare as we know it,” as President Bill Clinton termed it, was seen as a long-needed end to policy run amok, and a blow against the racist stereotype of the “welfare queen.”
Such political backlash against welfare might have seemed bizarre to the political leaders and activists who fought for and won what was originally called Aid to Dependent Children in 1935. Those activists' intentions were two-fold. First, that the policy should help single mothers, and second that it should help them specifically avoid working outside the home while caring for young children. This pro-motherhood argument brought the U.S.’s earliest welfare policies into existence. Aid to Dependent Children was originally championed to support widowed white mothers to maintain their traditional roles as homemakers.
Historian Premilla Nadasen details the shift of pro-motherhood policies emphasizing time at home with children from being popular and moral to being seen as excessive and abused.
From inception ADC (later called AFDC) systematically discriminated against households of color, deeming them immoral and undeserving. The benefits were administered locally, and included subjective rules — like that the recipients be in a “suitable home”— that directly targeted families of color for exclusion. Local enforcers could make unannounced visits to homes and make biased judgments about whether the home was “suitable.” A comprehensive report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities cites a field supervisor justifying the exclusions, stating that “Black families ‘have always gotten along’ and if made eligible for assistance, ‘all they’ll do is have more children.’”
Once increasing numbers of African American women began to qualify for aid when it was federalized after World War II, the policy fell under intense public scrutiny. At that point, Nadasen notes, “politicians and the press hammered away at the apparent overrepresentation of black women on the welfare rolls. However, taking into account poverty and out-of-wedlock birth rates, black women were actually underrepresented on ADC. Increasingly, the politics of welfare converged on the stereotypical image of a black unmarried, unworthy welfare mother.” The public panic over Black women’s reproductive decisions also stoked eugenics campaigns geared at restricting their child bearing. Mississippi State Representative David H. Glass called for forced sterilizations of Black women, arguing, “The Negro woman, because of child welfare, [is] making it a business in some cases of giving birth to illegitimate children.” The social tide shifted against this policy, even as it still largely supported white mothers.
Just as the Black-women led welfare rights movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the fight against segregation and other Jim Crow policies gave Black women greater access to existing welfare provisions, a public backlash prompted the retrenchment of these policies. This primed the public to understand social support policies through a deeply racialized lens. As Nadasen writes in her book Welfare Warriors, “There was now a racially defined gender script that said good white mothers should stay at home, and good black mothers must go to work.” Thus, despite Black women’s demonstrated higher engagement in paid work, the myth of the Black mother with too many children, no intention of honest work, and a stockpile of luxury items paid for by honest taxpayers espoused during Ronald Reagan’s campaign for president in the 1970s had a significant impact on the electorate. Specifically, it cautioned the white voter against programs to help all families in need, due to the risk that it could be abused by the wrong ones.
In 2020, nearly thirty years after the welfare reforms of the 90s, the U.S. was closer to passing these long-needed policies than ever before. In the midst of the instability and unprecedented worry of many families driven by the pandemic, the Biden administration and its allies proposed a host of reforms as part of its Build Back Better budget reconciliation package, including investment in home and family care, child care and early education, and a permanent paid family and medical leave program that would allow workers paid time off to care for themselves or loved ones. Ultimately, the entire Republican establishment and a few key Democrats rejected the reforms and the legislation moved forward with the family supports removed, in favor of a climate, health, and tax centered bill.
How is it possible that in the nearly hundred years since the AFDC was created, Americans and political leaders remain reluctant to support policies with long-established track records boosting family well-being and national economic performance?
From explicit racism to “implicit bias”
Criminology professor Kevin Drakulich theorized that implicit bias is driving some of the resistance to these policies.
In a study designed to understand the shift away from social assistance, Drakulich found powerful evidence that racism still impacts our social policy: “Among non-Hispanic whites, implicit racial bias is significantly associated with opposition to policies designed to ameliorate these inequalities as well as support for punitive crime policies.” In other words, the same attitudes that promote “law and order” policies, like policing with a demonstrated record of violence against Black people, also suppress public support for social supports that help ameliorate long-standing racial inequalities and intensify hardships for black and brown families.
Similarly, a 2018 study by researchers at Stanford found that since 2008 and the election of Barack Obama, white Americans have declined in their support for welfare programs due to what they term “racial resentment,” a feeling that the status of white Americans is in decline while that of African Americans and other people of color is rising. In fact, research shows that the majority of those who benefit from welfare programs are white, and that significant wealth disparities remain between white families and families of color. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reports that “White Americans hold 84 percent of total U.S. wealth but make up only 60 percent of the population—while Black Americans hold 4 percent of the wealth and make up 13 percent of the population.”
For too long racist biases have stopped progress in its tracks, leaving Americans lagging far behind their international peers and too susceptible to crises like recessions and pandemics and inflation. This means advocates and activists in the movement for work-family justice and family-supportive policies must join the anti-racism effort whenever and however possible, and publicly proclaim that the fight against racism is critical to our movement and ultimately the security and happiness of families across the country. Women of color leaders in the movement have been making this case for decades, and the brave leaders of the welfare rights movement from the Civil Rights movement through the 90s gave us the templates for making anti-racism an explicit part of the movement for family reforms.
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Yet, we continue to shy away from clear evidence that family policy is critical to racial justice, often because polling shows this may be off-putting to some voters—in truth, those voters’ fears have held us back for decades. Instead, we should take the biases that lie behind those fears head on, to show them to be false, to call them out for the prejudices they are, and to emphasize the real and ongoing damage they’re causing families of color. That the lack of effective family policy is also detrimental to white Americans is undeniable. But, until we confront the racist fears and resentments, history shows us, self-interest alone is not enough to overcome racist bias.
A family policy movement without anti-racism is a movement destined to fail. And many families can no longer afford failure.
Great post!