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Racial Disparities in Welfare Policy: A New Racism?
Data are never enough by themselves to answer the most pressing political
questions. At a minimum, they also need to be interpreted, often making the major
debates not so much about the facts but how to narrate them. And interpretations need to
be particularly sensitive to how they facilitate some responses more than others. For
instance, a growing body of research on welfare reform has highlighted a number of
racial disparities in client treatment and outcomes (Soss, Schram and Fording 2003).
These findings have inaugurated a debate as to how we should interpret racial disparities
under welfare reform and what should be done about them. Do the findings mean that
welfare reform reinforces racial inequality, involves racial discrimination, or merits being
labeled racist, either in intent or effect? Is welfare reform racist; and if it is, what is the
best way to respond (Piven 2003)?
The problem in using data to answer these questions is that a review of the data on
different racial disparities under welfare reform suggests that there are different types of
data indicating different possible interpretations and those interpretations suggest
different sorts of responses. Part of the problem lies with the data and part of the problem
lies with the interpretations. And both pose issues for articulating possible responses.
Concerning interpretations, we might say the devil is not so much in the details as
in the definitions (Stone 2000). For instance, the issue of whether race is natural or
socially constructed has relevance to debates about defining racism. Depending on how
one defines race affects the identification of instances of racism. For some analysts, race
remains a natural phenomenon grounded in biology; for a growing number of others it is
the result of social processes (see Loury 2002; and Winant 2001). The biological
Convention