A recent UNICEF report found that the US ranked 34th on the list of 35 developed countries surveyed on the well-being of children. According to the Pew Institute, children under the age of 18 are the most impoverished age population of Americans, and African-American children are almost four times as likely as white children to be in poverty.
These findings are alarming, not least because they come on the 20th anniversary of President Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it” with his signing into law, on Aug. 23, 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (P.L. 104-193).
It is true that the data show the number of families receiving cash assistance fell from 12.3 million in 1996 to current levels of 4.1 million as reported by The New York Times. But it is also true that child poverty rates for black children remain stubbornly high in the US.
My research indicates that this didn’t happen by chance. In a recent book, I examine social welfare policy developments in the US over a 50-year period from the New Deal to the 1996 reforms. Findings reveal that US welfare policies have, from their very inception, been discriminatory.
Blemished by a History of Discrimination
It was the 1935 Social Security Act, introduced by the Franklin Roosevelt administration, that first committed the US to the safety net philosophy.
From the beginning, the policy had two tiers that intended to protect families from loss of income.
On one level were the contributory social insurance programs that provided income support to the surviving dependents of workers in the event of their death or incapacitation and Social Security for retired older Americans.
The second tier was made up of means-tested public assistance programs that included what was originally called the “Aid to Dependent Children” program and was subsequently renamed the Aid to Families with Dependent Children in the 1962 Public Welfare Amendments to the SSA under the Kennedy administration.
The…