Dialogues

Sex Is the Answer

Dear Jonah and Ron,

We want to live in a country where full-time workers like Angie and Jewell live in dignity. I think it’s clear from American Dream that we are still a little short of that. The most depressing page of the book is Page 325, on which Lillie Harden—Bill Clinton’s favorite photo-op welfare-to-work mom, the one whose son could now famously answer, “What does your mama do for a living?”—asks DeParle to “ferry a message back to Clinton, asking if he could help get her on Medicaid. She had received it on welfare, but had been rejected now. … More sad than bitter, she said of her work: ‘It didn’t pay off in the end.’ ” Yikes.

Angie and Jewell do seem better off than when they were on welfare—even in strictly economic terms, DeParle admits, that’s “probably” true. It’s also pretty clear that Angie, at least, takes some pride in her nursing work, which she seems to be good at. The key incident comes when she tries to scrub a white patient who barks, “Get your hands off of me, you nigger.”

On the streets that would have sent Angie’s fists flying; on the ward, it made her laugh. … She smiled at the frightened old woman and, in the calmest voice she could muster, explained. “The nigger is cleaning your ass, ‘cause you can’t do it yourself—so you might as well let me.”

You’d think that over time, Angie would earn at least a bit more money for this hard work, if only because she finds out about better employers. At one point in the book, one of the newly working nurses’ aides is sent to a distant facility where, for the first time in her life, she is surrounded by white people. The incident suggests that even if DeParle’s subjects weren’t isolated from the world of work when they were on welfare, they were isolated in some profound social sense. It also suggests that by forcing them to get out into the larger society, welfare reform opened up new opportunities. You’re not going to maximize your earnings in the United States unless you work (and network) with people of all colors—including white people! Early on in American Dream, the protagonists take crummy maid jobs at the local Budgetel, an unpleasant low-rent trysting spot. But they don’t have to work at the Budgetel. The more they get out, the more they will find out about better employers.

What else might boost Angie’s income? We learned in Clinton’s second term that a full-employment economy will, in fact, lift wages at the bottom. Tighter immigration controls would help too. Whatever we think about immigration, unskilled workers will earn less money if they have to compete with unskilled (and hungrier, and cheaper) workers from abroad. Don’t we have an obligation to take care of existing Americans like Angie before we have an obligation to take care of El Salvadorans? Yet both parties are currently proceeding in the opposite direction—toward more liberal immigration policies—in pursuit of the pivotal Hispanic vote.

I’m not convinced by Ron that there isn’t an opportunity for more direct government aid. Why? Welfare reform itself, whicha) showed, as DeParle notes, that “antipoverty policy can enjoy a measure of success,” andb) changed the terms of the debate from, “How generous are we to people who may not be doing any work?” to “What do we do for people who get up and go to work every day?” When Bill Clinton tells DeParle that, because of welfare reform, George Bush “thought in order to win the White House he had to run as a compassionate conservative. He had to run bragging on the religious programs that help poor people and inner city kids,” it seems self-serving. But Clinton may be right. We’ve just been through the first presidential campaign in my memory in which race, and fear of inner-city crime and chaos, wasn’t even brought up as an issue.

Outside of providing universal health care—the biggest programmatic step the government could take—I don’t see why a large program of training vouchers shouldn’t be a central part of Bush’s “ownership society.” People would implicitly “own” the vouchers, just the way they’d “own” their private Social Security accounts. They’d be responsible for using them wisely—if they wasted their voucher on a fly-by-night beautician’s school, they’d bear the consequences. The main obstacle to this approach is probably the vast training “blob” of well-connected community colleges, which don’t want to have to compete.

Still, everybody seems to agree that the most important thing the Angies of the world could do is team up with another breadwinner. That’s not simply an economic point—double Angie’s income and the money problem is solved—but a psychological and social point. When DeParle asks her “what might have helped,” she interrupts him: “If my man woulda come home!” Married households are also plausibly seen as the antidote to the social disorganization so evident in Angie’s life. It’s not enough to “strengthen [the] ties” of fathers with their children. I’ve heard about the laudable efforts of people like Ron Mincy to reconnect fathers with children after the fathers have left the home. It’s incredibly complicated! The moms often don’t want them, there’s a new man, the welfare office wants to get reimbursed, etc. It’s no substitute for establishing a culture in which actual marriage is the norm, as opposed to the current ghetto culture in which, despite the favorable post-welfare trends, the majority of children are born outside of wedlock.

Which brings us to the men. DeParle is cold-eyed and unsparing in describing the role of men in his story:

But women leaving welfare are constantly undermined by the men in their lives, either deliberately, because the men resent their success, or simply because the lives of poor men are so infectiously troubled themselves. …It may be an exaggeration to say that behind every successful worker like Angie lurked a jealous, potentially disruptive man. But it’s not a huge exaggeration.

As I noted earlier, the hope of many welfare reformers—my hope, anyway—was that once welfare mothers started to work and didn’t lose their checks if they married, they would begin to demand more of the men in their lives. Ron can place his faith in some yet-to-be-designed government program of “counseling, job training, relationship education,” etc. I’ll put my faith in sex. Or, rather, the traditional power of women to get men to behave by implicitly withholding sex. Don’t laugh. There’s some evidence that the desired dynamic has started, if you look outside DeParle’s book. In 2001, Katherine Boo wrote about welfare-to-work mom in a Washington, D.C., ghetto area known as “the Shrimp Boat”:

The idea of marriage is relatively new in the Shrimp Boat, where for decades even love was something a woman lied about to caseworkers and talkative children. The old welfare system targeted assistance to single parents, so a woman who married, or even cohabited, usually lost her benefits. The 1996 reform law aimed to encourage two-parent families by removing such economic disincentives, but there is little evidence thus far that it has had an effect, which does not surprise in the Shrimp Boat. Lately, the playlist at WKYS, “the people’s station,” is thick with odes to the newly self-sufficient woman. “All the honeys making moneys, / Throw your hands up at me,” goes a Destiny’s Child song that Elizabeth [Boo’s subject] favors. To which the Cash Money Millionaires offer an emphatic male counterpose: “Give me a project chick./ Give me a hoodrat bitch,/ One that don’t give a fuck.”

But another huge hit of that post-welfare era, Boo might have noted, was “No Scrubs,”  in which the group TLC delivered what might have been the rebuttal of the “honeys making moneys”:

A scrub is a guy that thinks he’s fly and is
also known as a buster
always talkin’ about what he wants
and just sits on his broke ass
so (no)
I don’t want your number
no I don’t wanna give you mine
and no I don’t wanna meet you nowhere
no I don’t want none of your time no

Who wins out in this throwdown? Do men who want women to want their number learn to stop being “scrubs”? I don’t know—but I was hoping DeParle’s book would advance the narrative beyond what I learned from Boo. It doesn’t. This gets at the major limitation of American Dream. It vividly examines what happens to three women that welfare reform pushed into the world of work. It doesn’t examine the changes in the wider culture—including the millions of young women who now never go on welfare at all because they conclude (as many people do in DeParle’s book) that if they are going to have to get a job they’ll just go get the job themselves. Do they stay in school longer, knowing that they’re going to have to work and will need the skills? Do they delay having children? Do they have different expectations of men, knowing that welfare won’t be there to support them? Have the men started to clean up their act? You wouldn’t expect any changes to show up in Angie’s generation—the “leavers,” in welfare wonk terminology, the generation that grew up in the culture conditioned by welfare. You might find it in the next generation.

It wouldn’t have been easy for DeParle to locate the people who would have gone on welfare if the system hadn’t been reformed. Unlike welfare recipients, we don’t know exactly who they are. But it wouldn’t have been impossible to generally survey their communities—talk to ministers, policemen, bus drivers, etc., and ask them if they’d seen any changes. DeParle doesn’t do this. By narrowing his focus he produces a powerful drama, but may miss the larger narrative.

There are hints, though. On Page 305, Jewell concludes, “Us women that just got off W-2 can’t make it out here by ourselves.” Is this the beginning of the story, rather than the end? A few pages later, Angie’s daughter Kesha seemingly confirms the worst fears of the pessimists by having a child in the ninth grade and dropping out of school. “But unlike Angie, she didn’t go on welfare,” DeParle reports. ” ‘That’s for people who really need it,’ she said. ‘I like to earn my own money.’ ”

Finally, I agree with Jonah that the book’s chapters on the private caseworking company, Maximus, are devastating. But I don’t quite understand why he is so gleeful about “the awful record of casework in American Dream.” Does he want recipients to just sit on the rolls? If not, then he wants some casework—though one virtue of the strict work requirements Edelman opposes is that, as DeParle shows, they prod people to go out into the labor market on their own, eliminating the need for casework.

It’s not at all clear that government casework is much better than Maximus’. And Maximus can be fired!

The absence of good casework should depress Edelman. He and I are the pro-government people in this debate. If large state-funded organizations can’t get their acts together, where does that leave us? One lesson you could draw from American Dream is this: When it comes to protecting themselves and their families, Angie and Jewell are rocks of strength and competence compared with the state and its bureaucrats.

Mickey