Vanessa Daniel
Mary Anderson had
come all the way from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to a fancy hotel in Washington DC.
A single mother now working for less than minimum wage in exchange for welfare
benefits in Wisconsin’s notoriously harsh W-2 workfare program, neither
Anderson nor any other welfare recipient had been invited to participate in
the first major national gathering to address the state of welfare reform and
its upcoming reauthorization. Nevertheless, Anderson had found her way to the
conference and, standing up from the audience, she directed her remarks at the
absent Tommy Thompson, the former governor of Wisconsin and Bush’s newly
appointed U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
“Tommy
Thompson, shame on you for building a career on the backs of poor women. Shame
on you for a 37 percent increase in infant mortality in Milwaukee. Shame on
you that my neighbor has to stay with the man who broke her nose. Shame on you
for lying about poor mothers and women.” Were it not for the presence of
Anderson and about 100 other grassroots activists and welfare recipients, it
would have been easy to envision the national dialogue about welfare reform as
one of glowing agreement over the success of the 1996 measure that changed the
nature of welfare as we knew it. Protesters at the welfare conference in
Washington sought to inject a different dose of reality into what has
otherwise been a one-sided debate on welfare. Organized by GROWL, a national
coalition of 35 welfare rights organizations from 20 states, the activists
targeted the conference because it was a key forum for policymakers and
because it was emblematic of a tradition of exclusion that has long marred the
beltway welfare debate. After being pushed to the margins during the battle
over welfare reform in 1996, the people most affected by welfare policy are
determined not to be shut out of the discussions surrounding welfare
reauthorization in 2002.
The conference,
which was organized by the University of Michigan School of Public Policy and
billed as The New World of Welfare: an Agenda for Re-authorization and Beyond,
featured some of the most influential figures in the welfare debate, but
excluded many others. The list of invited speakers, which showcased such right
wing extremists as Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, failed
to include a single welfare recipient or grassroots advocate. Also largely
shut out were women and people of color. Of 65 presenters, only 21 were women
and only 9 were people of color. Missing as well were many of the more
progressive academics to produce scholarship on welfare. Tracking the planning
of the conference from a distance, GROWL realized early on that while
advertising an open and balanced forum, conference planners were in reality
gathering key policy makers together to listen to a narrow, conservative
agenda. Handsomely funded and partially organized by the Charles Stewart Mott
and Annie E. Casey foundations and held in the posh Marriott Hotel, the
conference was poised to quietly set the tone for the reauthorization debate
without causing much of a stir. The surprise arrival of 100 members of GROWL,
however, complicated things.
The opening
ceremony, which lauded the success of welfare reform and welcomed a
“diversity” of panelists, fell flat against the specter of GROWL welfare
mothers in the audience wearing gags to symbolize being silenced. As the
conference rolled on, the dry graphs, sterile language, and dispassionate
rhetoric used to describe poverty and those in it, rang increasingly hollow.
The presence of GROWL forced attendees (academics, policymakers, and welfare
administrators) to see the speakers in relationship to a left polarity that
conference planners had worked hard to exclude.
Where the
imbalance wasn’t glaring enough, GROWL made it obvious, until it became
impossible to continue to view the scheduled proceedings as fair and balanced.
GROWL protests against Murray, New York City HRA Commissioner Jason Turner,
and Tommy Thompson, encouraged the audience to think critically and see a
broader picture. Whether or not they agreed with the message, audience members
could not deny the protests had a powerful affect. Thompson, who was slated to
speak on the last day of the conference in what would be his first public
address on welfare since his appointment, heard news of the picketers and
canceled.
By the end of
day one, presenters appeared less like authorities and more like economically
comfortable academics talking about something they really knew very little
about. Despite the opening speaker’s insistence that they were “getting as
close to the ground as possible,” one conference attendee observed that
presenters, “relate only to numbers, not people,” and remarked, “it is clear
that many of their conclusions were reached by simply crunching data, without
ever actually speaking to anyone on welfare.”
By the second
panel, the GROWL presence had shifted the perspective of the conference, and
speakers began alluding to the imbalance. In the face of nearly 100 welfare
mothers, mostly women of color, the parade of white men became glaring enough
to inspire embarrassed remarks from several panelists. Hugh Heclo of George
Mason University, a white man, joked nervously to the audience that “there is
a certain irony about a panel of middle aged white guys getting up here to
talk to you about the world of welfare”—an added irony, of course, for those
women in the audience who had experienced the impact of welfare policy. Even
the self-proclaimed right winger Michael Laracy referred, though perhaps
unintentionally, to the narrow nature of the debate. Before launching into a
response to a “liberal” paper by scholar Rebecca Blank, he quipped, “Well,
they didn’t tell me before I got here that the format was going to be someone
on the left and then someone who is ‘right,’ but Becky has made my job more
difficult by failing to say anything objectionable.”
Blank, a
professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, who was also the
primary organizer of the conference, said very little about the protests. When
a reporter questioned her about the racial balance of the event, Blank was
nonplussed, insisting she was happy with the “diversity of perspectives,” and
added, “I would love to see far more people of color engaged in researching
welfare but unfortunately, in the public policy arena, as in many academic
disciplines, we struggle with the shortage of people of color producing
research and writing.” Meanwhile, some of the most respected researchers of
color working on welfare, including Susan Gooden of VA Tech, were at the
conference but spent it listening from the audience. When asked in the
question/answer period about the disparity of data on race in her own study,
Blank admitted “our data on race is slim” but evidently felt qualified enough
to state, “There is not a big difference between the black and white women who
are on or are leaving welfare,” a statement that contradicts the few complete
studies that do take race into consideration.
The protests
drew an angry response from others. When recipients from New York confronted
Jason Turner with, among other offenses, not providing translation services to
non-English speakers (16 months after the federal government deemed New York
City in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act) moderator Michael
Laracy told them to “sit down and be quiet and you might learn something.”
After the panel, which was comprised entirely of white men, Laracy approached
demonstrators elsewhere in the hotel accusing them of “silencing us,” with
their interruptions, before he became rattled and shouted at one woman, “I
don’t have to listen to you because you’re dumb.”
The action
against Murray drew a warmer response. Signs printed with some of Murray’s
most famous opinions, such as “black people are less intelligent than whites,”
and “poor women shouldn’t have babies,” drew sporadic applause from the
audience. Murray made GROWL’s job easier by doing most of the convincing
himself, telling an alarmed audience that the children of single parents
“rarely grow up able to function in a complex modern society,” that
“illegitimacy is what generates all of society’s problems and almost any risk
taken in effort to remedy the problem is worth it,” and openly quoting from
the notoriously racist 1965 Moynihan Report on “The State of the Black
Family.” He recommended forcing traditional marriage through denying welfare
benefits to single mothers and when pressed by the audience about the impacts
such a policy would have on victims of domestic violence, he replied, “I think
the way men behave depends entirely on the demands that women make of them.
Women need to learn to ask more of men and we are saying to young women, if
you’re going to have a baby without a man, life is going to be real tough.”
Fred Grandy,
House Republican and former president of Goodwill quoted Phil Graham, telling
the audience, “It’s time for people who have been given a free ride to get out
and push,” and remarked, “Wisconsin is to welfare what Florence was to the
Renaissance and Tommy Thompson is the latter day Lorenzo Benedetti.” But at
the close of the conference, three GROWL mothers had the last word as
conference coordinators, who had denied their request two weeks prior, finally
agreed to let them speak on the closing panel. For the first time in two days,
the din of economic jargon was interrupted and the audience listened to the
human impact of all the numbers. Nora Calderón from POWER in San Francisco
explained in Spanish while another organizer translated for the audience,
“They sent me all the applications in English, then my children and I spent 30
days in a shelter before I received any benefits. This is happening to many
families with children. Immigrants and families with kids should be treated
with dignity and respect by the department of social services.” Helen Nichols
of GRO in Mexico, Missouri, said simply, “They force us to work for below
minimum wage and give us 60 months, in 60 months we could all have a degree
that would give us a livable wage.” Iñez Zayaz of Community Voices Heard in
New York City, told the audience, “I work 45 hours a week yet still don’t have
enough to feed my family. I refuse to work for less than minimum wage or end
up with a job with no future for me or my children.”
While many
conference speakers agreed on the same troubling goals and disagreed only on
how best to achieve them, GROWL brought the underlying objectives into
question. For example, Charles Murray insisted poor women should not have
children, hailed the decline in low-income black women’s birth rates as
“authentically good news” and advocated cutting off all benefits to single
mothers. Rebecca Maynard of Mathematica Policy Research accepted the goal of
more marriage and less children for poor women as a useful and acceptable one.
She supported using welfare as a social engineering device to control poor
women’s sexual and reproductive behavior, only suggesting “a softer approach”
than Murray proposed. GROWL rejected the premise that welfare should be a tool
for social engineering, asserted poor women’s right to sexual and reproductive
freedom, and pointed out that programs that privilege married women and
penalize single motherhood force victims of domestic violence and their
children to stay in abusive circumstances.
Among other
policy recommendations, GROWL suggested: (1) measuring the success of reform
by the decrease in poverty rather than the decline in rolls, (2) ensuring that
education counts towards fulfillment of the work requirement and that it is
accessible to all, (3) counting care giving and parenting as a work activity,
providing ample job supports such as childcare and transportation, (4)
simplifying the application process, (5) ending workfare, and (6) basing
eligibility on economic need without regard to gender, race, family size,
immigrant or marital status, sexual orientation, and physical and/or mental
abilities.
In 1996, after
signing welfare reform into law, Clinton delivered his now famous line, “We
have ended welfare as we know it.” At the New World of Welfare conference,
House Republican Fred Grandy played off of Clinton’s words to sum up the
question plaguing decision makers facing reauthorization, “If we have
succeeded in ending welfare as we know it, what do we know now?” “Not much,”
according to welfare mother and GROWL member Nora Caledron, who says, “unless
that ‘we’ begins to include welfare recipients, policy makers will continue to
shoot in the dark. The noise GROWL made today is only the beginning.”
Z
Vanessa
Daniel is a freelance writer who has previously written for
ColorLines magazine and Sojourner, the Women’s Forum.