Constraint Of Race: Legacies Of White Skin Privilege In America [Paperback]

Linda Faye Williams (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0271025352 | ISBN-13: 978-0271025353 | Publication Date: August 30, 2004

A challenging new approach to understanding the evolution of American social policy and the racial politics shaping it. Rather than focusing on the disadvantages suffered by blacks in the American welfare state, Linda Faye Williams looks at the other side of the coin: the advantages enjoyed by whites.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This excellent, passionate, well-researched, and well-written book is a must read!" --S. D. Borchert, Choice

"In The Constraint of Race, a passionately argued book studded with trenchant insights, Linda Williams convincingly demonstrates that the U.S. welfare state was built on the basis of white advantage and black disadvantage. Williams puts race into the story of the American welfare state in a way that cannot be ignored. This is a splendid book by a consummate scholar." --Michael K. Brown, author of Race, Money, and the American Welfare State

"The Constraint of Race is a first-rate book by a thoughtful scholar-participant. Engaging an ongoing controversial debate, the author convincingly sustains her thesis that race continues to be a driving force in the formulation and implementation of social policy in the United States. Williams's analyses link the past to the present in an intelligent, comprehensive way that provides an understanding of the important word in her title, 'legacies.'" --Charles V. Hamilton, Columbia University"

From the Inside Flap

"There can be little genuine progress in solving the so-called race problem or in creating the kind of social citizenship all Americans deserve unless and until continuing white skin privilege is openly acknowledged and addressed. In effect, the problem of the twenty-first century is not the color line but finding a way to successfully challenge whiteness as ideology and reality."
—From The Constraint of Race

The Constraint of Race offers a challenging new approach to understanding the evolution of American social policy and the racial politics shaping it. Rather than focusing on the disadvantages suffered by blacks in the American welfare state, Linda Faye Williams looks at the other side of the coin: the advantages enjoyed by whites. Her hope is that rendering the benefits of "white skin privilege" more visible will help undermine their acceptance as "normal" and motivate renewed efforts toward achieving a more just and equitable society.

Williams begins her analysis by comparing two programs of federal provision in the mid-nineteenth century—the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil War Veterans’ Pension system. Already at this early stage of its development, she shows, the emerging welfare state effectively denied blacks the protections it provided white Americans and simultaneously stigmatized blacks as welfare "dependents." The linkages among race, moral worthiness, and social policy established then have persisted to the present.

Her reexamination of key episodes in the later evolution of the American welfare state from the New Deal through the Clinton administration reveals how developments in social policy have advanced the privileges attached to "whiteness" by a variety of mechanisms: the ongoing reinterpretation of the American tradition of liberal individualism in racialized ways; the slow accretion of policy legacies; the construction of "whiteness" itself as a political category; and the normal procedures of coalition building and electoral politics. Through these connected processes, whiteness and the protection of white privilege became fundamental to the operation of American democracy, and their centrality has been continually reinforced by social policy. The result has been a politics in which race is used as a weapon by political parties and candidates to constrain and turn back the American welfare state.

Looking to the future, Williams concludes by considering the socioeconomic conditions and political mechanisms that might help overcome the iron grip that white privilege holds on American social politics. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 429 pages
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State Univ Pr (Txt) (August 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0271025352
• ISBN-13: 978-0271025353
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #334,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Public policy virtually sanctions racial discrimination, May 8, 2005

By 

Robin Orlowski "political activist" (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America (Hardcover)

Using the later 20th/early 21st century as her canvas, Linda Faye Williams paints a disturbing and all too true portrait of American social policy's inherently racialized construct. Our formal declarations of `equal opportunity' are undercut by the cultural reality of racist social policy. Like Dorothy Roberts, she argues that gender and racial hierarchies intersect to specifically disadvantage black women.

Unlike Robert's earlier work, this book goes all the way back to the emancipation era and covers many more issue areas beyond reproduction. When the federal government has intervened for racial equality, it has only done so in periods which are relatively fleetingly in comparison to the magnitude of the problem.

Williams has her most provocative research in a chapter on the black community's consistent support for President Bill Clinton (1993-2001). Blacks had consistently supported the Clinton administration at levels which easily overshadowed the total support simultaneously received from white voters. Although she does not provide a detailed analysis of intra- African American socioeconomic issues, Williams does ask us to consider how goals and stereotypes subtly but pervasively co-exist in public policy programs.

Those ultimately racialized voter patterns were established and then further solidified even as Clinton signed `welfare reform' which specifically built off the specter of the `welfare queen'; a presumably African American woman who lived off of the government instead of having a `job' and then raising her kids `right'. Ironically, before the federal welfare program became racially integrated in the 1960's, the white welfare recipients were intentionally supposed to stay at home with their children and not work outside of the home specifically so that their children would grow up `right'.

Williams correctly recognizes that any `universal' public policy does fact take on racial connotations because of our society's fundamentally racialized nature. People who prefer the status quo (and the ensuing racial constructs) are not going to be happy with a program which then attempts to equalize the playing field for all Americans. Talking about democracy is one thing, but sharing it with somebody who looks different from the self still makes many Americans and our public officials uncomfortable in spite of their `tolerant' public demeanor.

This book is an essential read for people studying race/ethnicity, but I also think it needs to be at the top of public administration reading lists. Conceeding that public policy is not value neutral is the first step in making a society which truly is equal.

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Reference Book on Class, Race & Gender, October 23, 2008

By 

L. Fields (Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Constraint Of Race: Legacies Of White Skin Privilege In America (Paperback)

I would highly recommend this book as a great reference when studying race and gender. Dr. Williams' book is an outstanding publication that should be required reading for political science students.