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readily to interpretations that suggest that national welfare reform is a race-neutral public
policy that is being implemented by states in ways that indicate racial bias that leads to a
greater reluctance to help a nonwhite clientele compared to whites. Still other data
suggest that while national and state policies may be largely race-neutral in their intent
and language, welfare programs are being administered by agencies and their personnel
in ways that point to explicit race by bias that favors white recipients. Other data can be
interpreted as suggesting that even an ostensibly race-neutral policy such as welfare
reform is being applied to nonwhite recipients in ways that are insensitive to racial
inequities in the broader society and as result ends up reinforcing racial disadvantage for
nonwhites.
My analysis of the findings emphasizes how data never speak for themselves and
the disparate findings on racial disparities under welfare reform need to be narrated in a
way that places them into context and helps make sense of them. My review of the major
findings on racial disparities under welfare reform lead me to conclude while there are
elements of the way welfare reform is being implemented by states that suggest there is
explicit racial discrimination taking place, welfare reform, for the most part, as a post-
Civil Rights era policy, is not consciously intended to reinforce racial subordination. Nor
is it a policy that is implemented by states and administered by agencies in ways that are
as overtly discriminatory to anywhere the extent as welfare policy of the pre-Civil Rights
era from the 1930s to the 1960s. For that reason, while I find that state implementation
and agency administration still have racially discriminatory practices associated with
them, I am reluctant to label contemporary welfare reform a racist policy in the strict
sense of the “old” racism. I am also not entirely willing to suggest that welfare reform
Convention