The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen

By Ange-Marie Hancock

Winner of the 2006 Race, Ethnicity, and Politics geared up part top First ebook Award from the yankee Political technology Association

Winner of the 2006 W.E.B. DuBois publication Award from the nationwide convention of Black Political Scientists

Ange-Marie Hancock argues that longstanding ideals approximately terrible African American moms have been the basis for the contentious 1996 welfare reform debate that successfully "ended welfare as we all know it." by means of interpreting the general public id of the so-called welfare queen and its function in hindering democratic deliberation, The Politics of Disgust exhibits how stereotypes and politically stimulated misperceptions approximately race, classification and gender have been successfully used to instigate a politics of disgust.

The ongoing position of the politics of disgust in welfare coverage is published the following through the use of content material analyses of the inside track media, the 1996 congressional ground debates, historic facts and interviews with welfare recipients themselves. Hancock's incisive research is either compelling and nerve-racking, suggesting the good limits of state-of-the-art democracy in ensuring not only reasonable and equitable coverage results, yet even a good likelihood for marginalized voters to take part within the process.

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First, it acknowledges the significance of sophistication as an more and more huge cleavage in the African American neighborhood, a situation that refutes the revisionist argument of Black nationalists, who suppose that sooner or later in background a necessary, uniform racial event existed. bankruptcy 2 indicates the significance of sophistication from the sunrise of welfare politics. but the patience and development of the cleavage, even if disheartening, can't shock us after we use a framework responsive to race, type, and gender. moment, the argument for intersectional ways encourages us to move deeper in the facts, past superficial interracial or cross-gender analyses. at the face of it, the votes of so much Congressional Black Caucus contributors opposed to HR 3734 point out a few quantity of political aid for unmarried, terrible African American moms. notwithstanding, research of the Congressional checklist unearths chinks of their cohesion: proof of the politics of disgust already displayed by means of legislators of one other social gathering, race, and gender (or from time to time, all the above). in addition, the content material research exhibits their complicity in perpetuating, even though accidentally, the The twin risk | 141 public identification of the “welfare queen. ” All 3 are symptoms that superficial interracial or intraracial comparisons are inadequate. Intersectional techniques give you the such a lot complete approach to interpreting the knowledge for extra nuanced questions of democratic illustration and deliberation. Acknowledgment and pursuit of intersectionality as greater than an annex to the research of African American or gender politics assaults the various unstated energy that unquestioned norms equivalent to public id achieve in public discourse. Intersectionality additionally emphasizes the significance of context in addition to voice. during this feel, it's a software if you happen to undergo inequality in line with the bias of fellow team participants as well as out-group contributors. it's a approach, actually, of remedying secondary marginalization. The extra we concentration the highlight on such phenomena, the better the chance for contestation. Participatory Democracy and the method of Public Judgment Researchers have lengthy argued that the democratic values and practices we proportion as americans are key individuals to the maintenance of our democracy (Almond and Verba 1963; McCloskey and Zaller 1984). but the shortcomings of liberal democracy in supplying “liberty and justice for all” is easily documented within the theoretical works of Benjamin Barber (1984, 1998), Michael Sandel (1992), and Rogers Smith (1993), in addition to extra social medical ways like that of Lani Guinier (1994), Michael Dawson (1994), and Katherine Tate (1994). Formal participation, reminiscent of the criminal correct to vote, has now been bound to so much segments of the inhabitants formerly excluded from the general public sphere. nonetheless, students notice that theoretical questions of voice and speech—of participation within the public discourse—are much less concerning the truth of participatory possibilities than the standard of actual participation.

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