States With Large Black Populations Are Stingier With Government Benefits

[Nevilledog]

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Torraine Walker
@TorraineWalker
Here's a story about the psychopathic anti-Blackness of America: A study found that state governments with majority Black populations would rather let the ENTIRE population suffer rather than pass laws that Black citizens could potentially benefit from.

States With Large Black Populations Are Stingier With Government Benefits
Research suggests that states with homogenous populations are more willing to spend on the safety net than those with higher shares of minorities.
theatlantic.com
7:30 AM · Aug 29, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/race-safety-net-welfare/529203/

When he launched his War on Poverty in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson visited Tom Fletcher, an unemployed white Appalachian coal miner who lived in Kentucky. The White House had chosen Fletcher, who had eight children, to become the face of American poverty, and an iconic Time magazine photo captured the president squatting next to Fletcher and three of his boys on the porch.

Poverty, in the 1960s, did not just affect white Appalachians like Fletcher. As Johnson himself wrote in his memoirs, the poor “were black and they were white, of every religion and background and national origin. And they were 35 million strong.” But Johnson chose a white family to represent poverty to the American public. His legislative agenda would be contentious, and he needed as much support from Republicans and Democrats as he could get. It seems he made a calculation: Convincing elected officials, the majority of whom were white, to help poor people would be a lot easier if they thought of the poor as white people like them.

The example highlights a fact of life about welfare in America: People are more likely to support anti-poverty programs if they conceive of the poor as “like them,” especially when it comes to race. On a state-by-state basis, places with the most homogeneous populations tend to be the most generous. Oregon, for example, one of the whitest states in the union, has an extensive safety net, as I’ve written about before. Today, Oregon, where 84 percent of the population is white and 1.8 percent of the population is black, gives a single-parent family of three $506 a month through Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the modern-day welfare program. Mississippi, which is 60 percent white and 38 percent black, gives a single-parent family of three just $170 a month. Oregon also helps people get off welfare by linking them to employment and pays their wages for up to six months. Mississippi has a work requirement for people receiving welfare, but does little to help them get a job. “I think what you see in other states is you see this kind of partisan, ‘we are going to take it out on poor people,’ philosophy. You just haven't seen that here,” Tina Kotek, a Democratic legislator in Oregon, told me last year.

That states have so much leeway in how they administer benefits is one of the legacies of a massive overhaul of welfare programs in 1996. In those reforms, spearheaded by then-president Bill Clinton, the government changed cash assistance to a program called TANF, which was administered through what are known as “block grants” to states. States could decide what they did with TANF funds, and could set their own limits for how much cash families could receive and who could receive it. A new Urban Institute analysis finds that allowing states to decide how to spend TANF dollars has led to even more racial discrepancies in who receives benefits. The Urban Institute analyzed a federal database that tracks state policy decisions about TANF and found that the states whose populations are more heavily African American are now less generous, more restrictive, and provide TANF for a shorter period of time than whiter states.

*snip*

[Elessar Zappa]

1. This doesn't surprise me one bit.

Racism in America is institutional regardless of what the Republicans say.

[2naSalit]

7. Not even a teeny tiny bit.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[MichMan]

3. What states have majority Black populations ?

I dont understand the tweet

The state referenced was Mississippi which was said to be 60% white and 38% black.

[stillcool]

4. yeah...it says state governments

but that isn't right either. I think the person misspoke, and turned largest black populations into majority populations.

[marybourg]

5. I think that's always been pretty noticeable.

AZ exhibits the same behavior in relation to its Hispanic population, especially as regards its K-8 education spending.

[cinematicdiversions]

6. We kind of do that here as well.

When people talk about cutting off the old Confederacy or cutting benefits to states that are takers rather than givers they are talking about the same states.

I doubt when people in anger or jest talk about letting the red states go, they really think of the fact that would make the new United States a richer and whiter county. But that is what the result of thier actions would be.