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| From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918
ISBN: 9780814708866
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / NYU Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Public welfare -- New York (State) -- New York -- History; African Americans -- New York (State) -- New York -- History;
The racially charged stereotype of "welfare queen"--an allegedly promiscuous waster who uses her children as meal tickets funded by tax-payers--is a familiar icon in modern America, but as Gunja SenGupta reveals in From Slavery to Poverty , her historical roots run deep. For, SenGupta argues, the language and institutions of poor relief and reform have historically served as forums for inventing and negotiating identity.
Mining a broad array of sources on nineteenth-century New York City's interlocking network of private benevolence and municipal relief, SenGupta shows that these institutions promoted a racialized definition of poverty and citizenship. But they also offered a framework within which working poor New Yorkers--recently freed slaves and disfranchised free blacks, Afro-Caribbean sojourners and Irish immigrants, sex workers and unemployed laborers, and mothers and children--could challenge stereotypes and offer alternative visions of community. Thus, SenGupta argues, long before the advent of the twentieth-century welfare state, the discourse of welfare in its nineteenth-century incarnation created a space to talk about community, race, and nation; about what it meant to be "American," who belonged, and who did not. Her work provides historical context for understanding why today the notion of "welfare"--with all its derogatory "un-American" connotations--is associated not with middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, but rather with programs targeted at the poor, which are wrongly assumed to benefit primarily urban African Americans.
SenGupta Gunja :
Gunja SenGupta is professor of history at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas . |
