Julie Anne White

Voices of Welfare Reform: Bureaucratic Rationality Versus the Perceptions of Welfare Participants

This article compares the assumptions of welfare reform with the way the program is actually implemented to show the underlying contradictions in the way policy is politically justified and implemented. The results of focus group discussions with women on welfare in four rural Appalachian Ohio counties demonstrate the disparities between the top-down goals of welfare policy and the bottom-up perceptions of their outcomes.

The Hollow and the Ghetto: Space, Race, and the Politics of Poverty

The distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor has always been critical in the context of American poverty policy. Recent work by Martin Gilens (1999), Ange-Marie Hancock (2004), and Deborah Ward (2005) has demonstrated the ways in which this distinction has been racialized. Such work illustrates the promise of an intersectional approach for fields ranging from the study of public opinion to historical institutionalism and contemporary policy analysis. Indeed, at this point in our disciplinary history, it is difficult to imagine how research in any of these areas can be done in either an empirically satisfying or normatively responsible way without attention to intersectionality.

Ignorance, Innocence, and Democratic Responsibility: Seeing Race, Hearing Racism

In contemporary race politics, ignorance is often invoked by whites to refuse responsibility for offenses. This points to the tight configuration between knowledge and responsibility. Yet, in a sociopolitical context pervasively shaped by what Mills has identified as an “epistemology of ignorance,” this configuration fosters irresponsibility. Moreover, the technologies of the surveilling state perpetuate this, as they lead white citizens to “see” certain truths about race and protect certain blindnesses to white privilege. Drawing on work in feminist epistemology, we develop an alternative approach to responsibility, one more appropriate to democratic practices of accountability. This approach must be centered on the stories of racism as narrated by racial others rather than the visions generated by the gaze of the white state. We conclude by outlining a set of “traitorous” deliberative practices that foster democratic renegotiations of racial responsibility.