Hana Brown

Race, Legality, and the Social Policy Consequences of Anti-Immigration Mobilization

With the dramatic rise in the U.S. Hispanic population, scholars have struggled to explain how race affects welfare state development beyond the Black-White divide. This article uses a comparative analysis of welfare reforms in California and Arizona to examine how anti-Hispanic stereotypes affect social policy formation. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and newspaper content analysis, I find that animus toward Hispanics is mobilized through two collective action frames: a legality frame and a racial frame. The legality frame lauds the contributions of documented noncitizens while demonizing illegal immigrants. The racial frame celebrates the moral worth of White citizens and uses explicit racial language to deride Hispanics as undeserving. These subtle differences in racialization and worth attribution create divergent political opportunities for welfare policy. When advocates employ the legality frame, they create openings for rights claims by documented noncitizens. Use of the racial frame, however, dampens cross-racial mobilization and effective claims-making for expansive welfare policies. These findings help to explain why the relationship between race and welfare policy is less predictable for Hispanics than for Blacks. They also reveal surprising ways in which race and immigration affect contemporary politics and political mobilization.

Rethinking Panethnicity and the Race-immigration Divide An Ethnoracialization Model of Group Formation

Although demographic shifts continue to spark interest in the racially transformative effects of immigration, researchers routinely lament the lack of dialogue between race and immigration scholarship. We use recent research on panethnicity to illustrate the conceptual divides that exist between the two subfields. Panethnicity research has shed new light on the formation of group identities and political mobilization, but we contend that it is problematically divorced from research on racialization. Panethnicity scholars largely view racialization and panethnic group formation as separate processes, with the latter sequentially following the former. In this article, we argue that this analytical distinction both reflects and reifies the divide between race and immigration research and yields an incomplete understanding of the group formation process. We propose an ethnoracialization model to show how the concept of panethnicity can be reconfigured to develop a robust account of group formation and to bridge the much-lamented divide between race and immigration research.

‘They must be discontented’: racial threat, black mobilization and the passage of school closing policies

Abstract Existing research demonstrates that black population size in a given area correlates with the passage of racially restrictive policies in that area. This paper examines the mechanisms through which minority population size translates into exclusionary policies. It does so by examining a little-known but critical aspect of US civil rights history: the development of policies which allowed white communities to close their public schools entirely rather than desegregate. Using comparative-historical methods to build on existing quantitative studies, this analysis demonstrates that, while black population size does correlate with the passage of restrictive policies, the adoption of school closing policies was primarily a political strategy used to counter rising black political mobilization. That is, whites were not responding to a demographic threat per se or to increasing contact with blacks, as extant work might suggest. Rather, restrictive policies were a response to increasing political activity and mobilization within black communities.

TANF child-only cases in California: Barriers to self-sufficiency and well-being

Since the United States implemented Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), or ‘welfare reform,’ the number of assistance cases without an adult receiving aid has risen dramatically. In states like California, these child-only cases now constitute the majority of all TANF cases. Despite this increase, existing research sheds little light on the composition of child-only caseloads and the status of the adults and children in such cases. Drawing on county administrative data and interviews with 143 parents associated with child-only cases in five California counties, this paper identifies both the demographics of the child-only caseload in these sites and the major barriers to employment that parents in sanctioned and timed-out child-only cases face. These include human capital, health, and family issues, in addition to other obstacles. The data suggest that, despite functioning as one administrative entity, CalWORKs, Californias TANF program, has transformed into two separate programs: a welfare-to-work program and a subsistence-level cash assistance program for some members of child-only families. Given this transformation, the paper closes by suggesting a research agenda for future child-only scholarship and argues for policy innovations to meet the needs of the expanding child-only caseload.

Immigrant Rights are Civil Rights

Black-brown coalition activism is changing hearts, minds, and legislation in Mississippi and across the American South.

Logics of Redistribution: Determinants of Generosity in Three U.S. Social Welfare Programs

Social policy scholars disagree about which factors best predict U.S. welfare state generosity. We argue that this disagreement is an artifact of study designs. Researchers usually study either the totality of a state’s social expenditures or one specific program. These approaches overlook the fact that individual social programs were born of different circumstances and serve different constituencies. Comparing state-level policies for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), our findings suggest that these programs are governed by distinct logics of redistribution. Racial characteristics drive TANF generosity. Economic forces best predict CHIP generosity. SNAP generosity is a function of political factors. Qualitative data from Congressional hearings confirm these findings. These results adjudicate between conflicting accounts of the contemporary welfare state and also highlight which aspects of a program’s design make it most susceptible to the effects of racial bias and to partisan politics.

Why Clinton Lost

Hana Brown interviews Melissa Harris-Perry about the 2016 election.

American federalism and racial formation in contemporary immigration policy: a processual analysis of Alabama’s HB56

ABSTRACT Racialization scholarship identifies the state as a primary site of racial formation. Most of this research envisions the state as a uniform entity, with race-making occurring at a single level of political action. Analysing Latino racialization in immigration debates in Alabama, we argue that state-driven racialization occurs at multiple levels of governance. Although Alabama’s 2011 HB56 is widely recognized as state-enforced Latino racialization, we find that the bill resulted from mutually reinforcing racialization practices and policies that played out at multiple levels of immigration governance. These findings not only present a revisionist history of HB56, they suggest that any account of states and racialization requires a nuanced and complex understanding of the state, its institutional structure, and its operations. Individual state institutions may do different work as race makers, but race-making efforts by federal, state, and local actors interact to produce both racialized subjects and racial hierarchies.

Punishment and Inequality in America - by Bruce Western

dropout, are convicted of a crime, and spend a few months in jail, you will have a high probability of remaining unemployed, untrained, and under educated and of returning to jail more than once over your lifetime. As a result of various puni tive laws enacted over the past two generations, declining support for rehabilitation efforts, and the advent of technologies making it easier to track individuals, prison has become a way of life for many in the United States. It is too often a revolving door of crime, prison, release, lack of employment, crime, and return to prison. But (a) does incarceration cause unemployment, or