Joe Soss

Richard C. Fording

Sanford F. Schram

Sanford Schram

Disciplining the Poor explains the transformation of poverty governance over the past forty years—why it happened, how it works today, and how it affects people. In the process, it clarifies the central role of race in this transformation and develops a more precise account of how race shapes poverty governance in the post–civil rights era. Connecting welfare reform to other policy developments, the authors analyze diverse forms of data to explicate the racialized origins, operations, and consequences of a new mode of poverty governance that is simultaneously neoliberal—grounded in market principles—and paternalist—focused on telling the poor what is best for them. The study traces the process of rolling out the new regime from the federal level, to the state and county level, down to the differences in ways frontline case workers take disciplinary actions in individual cases. The result is a compelling account of how a neoliberal paternalist regime of poverty governance is disciplining the poor today.

Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race

Disciplining the Poor

"This book analyzes data from a variety of sources to understand the mainstreaming of racism today. The book puts this research in a historical context. Today with issues of globalization, immigration and demographic diversification achieving greater public salience, racism is more likely to manifest itself more in the form of a generalized ethnocentrism that expresses "outgroup hostility" toward a diverse set of groups, including Latinos and Muslims as well as African Americans. Both changes in structure and agency have facilitated the mainstreaming of racism today. Changes in the "political opportunity structure," as witnessed by the rise of the Tea Party Movement, facilitated the mainstreaming of white extremists into the Republican Party and lay the basis for an electoral politics focused on giving voice to white people more generally acting on their outgroup hostility. Changes in the political structure were matched by the appearance of a charismatic leader in the person of Donald Trump who made great use of a transformed media landscape to stoke white people's outgroup hostility. Trump won the presidency most strategically deploying his demagoguery to mobilize white non-voters in swing states, with the end result greatly accelerating the mainstreaming racism and placing it at the center of policymaking in the White House. With the extensive empirical evidence provided, this book documents how the mainstreaming of racism today began before Trump started to run for the presidency but then increased under his leadership and it likely to be a troubling presence in U.S. politics for some time to come. The findings provided create the basis for suggestions on how to push racism back to the margins of American politics"--

Richard C. Fording

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