{"id":7695,"date":"2012-08-19T20:23:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T20:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=7695"},"modified":"2012-08-19T23:27:52","modified_gmt":"2012-08-19T23:27:52","slug":"milbank-welfare-and-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/milbank-welfare-and-racism\/","title":{"rendered":"Romney, welfare, and race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Washington Post<\/a> columnist Dana Milbank thinks that criticizing rollbacks in welfare reform shows a suspicious preoccupation with race\u2014to put the most generous interpretation on his words–or, more bluntly, makes one a racist<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Events of the past few days make that happy chatter four years ago about a \u201cpost-racial\u201d America seem especially naive. . . . On Tuesday, Mitt Romney began to attack President Obama as soft on welfare, an issue charged with race. On Wednesday, the Romney campaign hosted a conference call in which Newt Gingrich, who once leveled the racially loaded accusation that Obama was the \u201cfood-stamp president,\u201d perpetuated the welfare accusations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let\u2019s tease out the reasoning here. Romney\u2019s criticism of the Obama Administration\u2019s proposal regarding welfare work requirements was utterly race-neutral. And of course, more whites than blacks are on welfare. But because blacks have a higher welfare and food stamp usage rate than whites, one can\u2019t talk about welfare policy\u2014at least if one is calling for maintaining anything other than wide-open standards of eligibilty. To do so would stir up America\u2019s always simmering racism and reveal one\u2019s own hidden racial biases. Milbank would presumably also accuse Bill Clinton of racial demagoguery for his support of welfare reform. There are numerous other social problems where blacks are disproportionately represented\u2014truancy, dropping out of school, out of wedlock childbearing, and crime, to name just a few. Are those also off the table as legitimate topics of policy debate?<\/p>\n

I happen to think that the benefits of welfare reform, while real and impressive, have been overstated\u2014it failed to stem the rise in illegitimacy, as hoped, nor have the racial achievement and socialization gaps been reduced. Nevertheless, welfare reform was undertaken in the sincere belief that prodding welfare mothers to take a job would be in their best interests\u2014it would integrate them into the fundamental human experience of work, daily routine, and self-discipline, and in so doing also make them more positive role models for their children. And that belief, which applied equally to white and black recipients, was a justified one. The fact that so many welfare mothers did enter the workforce thanks to welfare reform is an unqualified good. Arguably, therefore, it is people who want to hold the line on welfare work requirements who truly care about the dependent poor, or, in Milbank\u2019s worldview, who care about blacks.<\/p>\n

(Of course, it\u2019s not racially charged, in Milbank\u2019s world-view, to advocate for easing welfare work requirements or making food stamps even more promiscuously available than they already are.)<\/p>\n

Milbank\u2019s knee jerk reaction to any conservative criticism of welfare policy is of course absolutely standard in the mainstream media<\/a>. The reaction reveals the utter terror that liberals feel about black social breakdown. Apparently viewing such breakdown as intractable, their only solution is to draw a massive cordon sanitaire of taboo around it, demonizing any speech that can be remotely seen as bearing on black social problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank thinks that criticizing rollbacks in welfare reform shows a suspicious preoccupation with race\u2014to put the most generous interpretation on his words–or, more bluntly, makes one a racist: Events of the past few days make that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7695"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7695"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7699,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7695\/revisions\/7699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}