An acquaintance of mine recently said to me that all black people get public assistance (as if there is some kind of ongoing slavery reparations allocation available to all black people in the US) and they get a larger amount than white people who apply and have similar needs. She indicated that the civil servants who administer the program at all levels structure it so that black people have an advantage and do not face the obstacles to receiving public assistance that white people do.
Now, I know that not all black people are on public assistance, that is easy enough to dismiss as racist nonsense. What I want to understand is how much discretion is there in regards to allocating benefits to individuals? I thought, perhaps naively thought that there were fairly pat guidelines that defined who qualified for benefits and what they would receive, and I do assume there is nothing written into those guidelines that would grant black people more benefits than white people receive.
Is there discretion in how the benefits are allocated that allows assistance to vary on a case by case basis though need would be similar, that is say, the same income, number of children, etc. that might allow the program to be administered the way my acquaintance thinks it is? How wide is the belief that public assistance is actually defined to give preference to black people over white people with similar need?
I’ve often encountered the belief black people have an advantage in seeking public aid.
This may be a cultural advantage, in that black people may be more likely than other groups to have friends and family with experience in dealing with the Public Aid bureaucracy that gives them advantage in moving through the system.
To the best of my knowledge, though, there is NO written policy or rule that would give black people any sort of advantage in obtaining benefits. In fact, last I heard, if you consider just raw numbers MOST people receiving welfare are white.
I have recently had experience in negotiating the Public Aid maze. Judging from the screaming and anger I have occasionally seen in the offices, not all black people get the aid they feel they deserve. Some do get turned down.
I also think people who have never sought Public Aid have a very distorted view of what the current system is, which has changed considerably from, say 20 years ago.
There is not, as far as I can see, much discretion in granting benefits. However, pissing off your case worker can make it exceedingly difficult to get through the system. I could envision situations where bias on the part of the caseworker towards a particular type of person might affect if that person gets aid but it would more likely work to deny aid than help the person get it.
Broomstick, thank you. I have not found a government site yet with a break down of public assistance recipients by race. I have found people reporting they have found that breakdown, and that it shows whites and blacks both comprising about 38% of recipients.
This acquaintance has sought public assistance recently. I can imagine she might have rubbed a caseworker the wrong way.
You should never just consider raw numbers for this sort of thing. You’re comparing two vastly different populations, so it should be obvious that a population of 230 million might have more people on welfare than a population of 38 million.
Broomstick, thank you. I have not found a government site yet with a break down of public assistance recipients by race. I have found people reporting they have found that breakdown, and that it shows whites and blacks both comprising about 38% of recipients.
This acquaintance has sought public assistance recently. I can imagine she might have rubbed a caseworker the wrong way, especially with that attitude and belief simmering.
Let’s not forget that the caseworkers on the ground are the ones who actually decide who gets what, and their own racial biases enter into the equation. I have little trouble believing that social workers are disproportionately left-wing. Not only are attracted by helping the poor through government transfers, they also depend for their employment on the expansion of the welfare state. Folks on the left have a greater belief of the deservingness of the black poor (on average, they assign a higher importance to discrimination and believe less in the ability of individuals to help themselves in bad situations). Therefore I can easily believe that racial bias may exist due to the biases of the people we happen to have on the ground.
I was NOT comparing the percentage of white people on public aid to the percentage of black people on public aid, I was refuting the widely held belief that the majority of people on public aid are black. They are not. For that, you do, in fact, look at raw numbers. You take all the people on public aid, count up the white ones, count up the black ones, and determine which number is higher.
Which is a polite way of saying white people are the victims of racial prejudice, isn’t it?
Fact is, no ONE person had the final say in my case - applications pass through more than one pair of hands, if you appeal a decision (which is very much your right) it will be heard by someone other than the original person, and anyone engaging in a pattern of bias of that nature really will get caught. Case workers are under scrutiny, too.
Let me elucidate further on the cultural aspect of applying for public aid. As an example, I was asked about 5 or 6 times to provide proof of marriage (as I had claimed I was married). I noticed that the black people asked the same question invariably had a marriage certificate/license in hand and produced it immediately without a peep of complaint The first time I didn’t have it with me, but after that, yep, I carried mine every time I went to public aid. I noted a number of white people who were just OUTRAGED that anyone would dare question that they were married, who often did not have that documentation at hand, who apparently had no clue how to get that documentation, and thus, in some cases, were denied benefits because they could not produce the required documentation. This rule was applied equally to all but it hit the white couples harder, especially those who were former middle class dropping into poverty during this economic mess, because being asked to prove you’re married is NOT something that the typical middle class white person encounters. This is a cultural barrier, NOT a bureaucratic or prejudicial barrier.
Lesson here is ask what papers you need to bring then bring in those papers.
So, while I do believe there are some social workers who don’t like white people, I don’t think they’re the majority. The one person of that sort I encountered when applying for aid pretty clearly preferred black people, but she was polite to me and I can’t think of any way in which she slighted me for the brief time I dealt with her. She may not have liked me, but I felt I got the same service as anyone else even if it wasn’t exactly with a smile. In other words, she was professional about her job and didn’t let her personal preferences get in the way of doing it properly.
Yes, every caseworker and public aid employee I dealt with was black except for one. Nonetheless, I don’t feel I was mistreated, or treated differently. Of course, your mileage may vary and anecdote is not data. It may be that after living in Detroit and Gary, both cities that are majority black, I have enough grasp of the nuances of black vs. white culture (and there are some differences) that I don’t encounter as much friction in majority black situations.
If someone does need to apply for public aid they need to be polite, they need to be very patient, they need to keep calm even when frustrated or upset, and they need to learn that they can’t protest requests for information. If you are asked to produce something you MUST do so, and some of these requests may feel quite intrusive or even humiliating to the average middle class white person. You know, I don’t like it either, but I don’t have much sympathy because it’s largely the middle class white people who voted for the very rules they are now screaming so loudly about.
The caseworkers don’t decide anything. The data you supply on your application is feed into a computer and whatever program criteria has been decided on determines whether and how much assistance you get. There may be individual workers who speed up or slow down the process by hyper-scrutinizing supporting documentation but you are always able to ask for a supervisor (or to escalate it, what is called a Fair Hearing elsewhere) if you don’t think individual requests or decisions are fair. And, like Broomstick said, even the are case workers are scrutinizedl; too many complaints either way (fast or slow processing) will be noticed.
I call absolute bullshit on your assertion that public assistance workers - left- or right-wing - have "a greater belief of the deservingness of the black poor, " and the rest of that claptrap you just typed. From my recent experience, even the most professional of the people I dealt exuded a sense of shame at the even the numbers of blacks they saw coming through the door but were resigned to do their job no matter who was in front of them and handle their caseloads as best they could.
Sure thing:
Dr John McWhorter is a black political commentator with a degree in American Studies from New York University who’s taught at Cornell and Berkley.
In this interview he had with NPR in 2006, he discusses welfare in the United States and its (what he believes to be negative) affect on blacks.
That says it was CHANGED in the 1960’s with poor black women in mind - not that it was CREATED with black people in mind, or for black people. Welfare started during the Great Depression, not the 1960’s.
Most people with mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities are “able-bodied”, too. Acquired brain injury is not uncommon, either. Plenty of illnesses and disabilities affect people in ways that are invisible to casual observers. Can you pick the person with MS from a crowd of average people by sight? If the MS hasn’t progressed so far that they need help walking yet, they look exactly like able-bodied people.
The phrase “able-bodied” is extremely misleading. The ability to walk unassisted is not the deciding factor in whether someone has a disability or not. So don’t go assuming that people without obvious disabilities are perfectly capable of working and are simply being lazy welfare queens.
As to why a non-disabled adult would need a caseworker, the caseworkers aren’t so much needed by the clients as by the bureaucracy. Simply saying “no” to everyone who applies regardless of the validity of their claims would be hard to justify, and anyone who has actually been forced to claim assistance will tell you that despite the entrenched belief in some members of society that it’s easy to get public assistance, it ain’t. They make it as pointlessly complicated, difficult, and humiliating as possible, to try to placate outraged taxpayers who are convinced that lazy people are living it up on welfare.
Okay look don’t send me to the PIT but when you cite one of the nine black conservatives who gets media time i have to laugh. Since when does a linguistics professor from Berkely qualify as a expert on public policy? Hmmm if I stated that water was not wet perhaps I could receive the same attention eh?
Actually benefits began around the time of the great depression. It was originally called the “widows and orphans” fund for women who’s husbands had died. In actuality blacks were kept out of the benefits in the beginning… and then later were subjected to strict measures such as home visits and the prohibition from having items such as televisions and telephones.
After a on-duty injury I worked as a social worker for the great state or Missouri and i can report that it simply came down to having whatever documents you needed and the numbers. I didn’t process black people faster and my one on one interviews didn’t matter in who received what. I did note that all of my foreign clients (around 50-60) were remarkably all born on January 1 (imagine the coincidence LOL) and even as they could barely speak english they needed no instructions on what they were asking for.
Also what I will forever find ironic is the large number of middle-class to Upper-middle class white families that came into the office. The usually man would state that his retired father or mother were disabled and would inquire about what the state could do. Invariably the client would show me a income statement showing me that his/her parent had 80,000$ or more of either savings/investments/property. When i explained that their parent was not eligible I got indignation… MY FATHER fought in (insert war here) and has paid his taxes… the govt should provide for his nursing home or in-home care! Usually it was so that they could get his/her inheritance without having to spend it on the elderly parent’s care. I could only tell them that their parent had too much income to qualify. Then the same people would come back and their parent had given them their entire nest egg and was now indigent. Then… the parent was eligible for the the feds/state to pay for their nursing home…
Beware the stones one throws visavis benefits…
I guess you could say he’s not an expert. Just more of an expert than you. Or me.
tl;dr
I wasn’t making a political statement. Just reminding the people in the thread that the welfare system we have today was created with blacks in mind. Yes, yes, the original welfare system was created long before the '60s. But it’s long since become something new.