Black Women, Cultural Images and Social Policy

Julia S. Jordan-Zachery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415884709
• eBook ISBN: 9781135842390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica sociale

Black Women, Cultural Images and Social Policy offers a critical analysis of the policy-making process. Jordan-Zachery demonstrates how social meanings surrounding the discourses on crime, welfare and family policies produce and reproduce discursive practices that maintain gender and racial hierarchies. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), she analyzes the values and ideologies ensconced in the various images of black womanhood and their impact on policy formation. This book provides exceptional insight into the racing-gendering process of policy making to show how relations of power and forms of inequality are discursively constructed and impact the lives of African American women.

1
Perceptions, Culture and Policy

A Racing–Gendering Perspective

The real question in understanding the power of political symbols is not so much where symbols come from or what they initially mean. Rather, it is how they become the focal points of diverse meanings and commonly salient objects condensing and indexing different experiences, fears, apprehensions, hopes and interests.

—Elder and Cobb (1983:35)

On August 22, 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) that ended more than 60 years of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The PRWORA was the first piece of radical social welfare legislation since the inception of the social welfare program. While the politicking of the process that ended welfare as we knew it intrigued me, I was more intrigued by the actual signing process that took place in the Rose Garden. What struck me was that two “Mammies”—(at least one of which was horizontally challenged (that is, plump), grinning black¹ women—flanked President Clinton. Additionally, these women were encircled by a group of (white) men. Why? Why was it necessary to use these stereotypical images of welfare recipients to justify PRWORA? What message was President Clinton sending to the American public? These were the types of questions that plagued my mind for days after Public Law 104–193 was signed into effect. President Clinton’s use of these women as signs of social welfare led me to question the use of cultural images and symbols in the policy-making process. My focus is not on the visual representation of black women. Instead, I concentrate on the textual representation of black women in the framing of social policy. My rationale for focusing on text is that language facilitates the expression of attitudes and values. This analysis looks at social relations that underpin the framing of social policy.

Grounding this research in Black feminist politics, I explore how social policy, via the use of cultural images and symbols, maintain the often inequitable position of black women. Black feminists and womanists recognize the intersection of race, gender and class. Connected to the concept of intersectionality is the question of power—how it is constructed and used. Black feminists seek to engage in a politics that challenges multiple intersecting forms of oppression, “that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression” (Combahee River Collective). The goal of Black feminist politics is to theorize about and strategize to address the various manifestations of intersecting oppressive structures and ideologies. Consequently, Black feminists have concentrated much of their efforts in exposing, challenging and dismantling dominant structures and ideologies that result in the marginalization of black women.

In what follows, I critically analyze the use of cultural images and symbols of black womanhood across three policy domains: crime, welfare and family policies. This work evaluates the racing and gendering of policy making in the United States. By means of critical discourse analysis (CDA), which centers language and its relation to power, I study how key decision makers use race and gender cultural images and symbols to frame policy. Further, I discuss how these frames and the resulting policies impact the lives of African American women and their quest for social justice. I specifically focus on the role of language, as expressed through symbols, in creating and maintaining social inequality. I argue that the Mammy image, a slave era caricature, the 1960s Matriarch and the 1990s Welfare Queen, among other images, continue to be employed in the policy-making process. In this way, I account for how cultural images and symbols inject dominant social biases into social welfare policy discourse. The analysis, as a result, highlights how social welfare policy discourse operates as a form of power serving to perpetuate inequalities in the broader society.

Central to my argument is the assumption that any policy justification depends, at least in part, upon imagery. While at some level this might seem intuitive, it is not a typical approach for the study of policy analysis (this is discussed later in the section Explaining Race, Gender and the Policy Making Process). It differs significantly from approaches that suggest that policy is the result of cost–benefit calculus (rational choice theory) or other approaches that focus on the logic of politic bargaining and interest group competition. These conventional approaches risk buttressing the status quo because they inadequately incorporate issues of how the power of discourse operates to frame political contestation to privilege certain understandings of issues over others (Schram 2006). The conventional approaches tend to ignore how policy decision making grows out of discourses that give rise to value-laden perspectives and preferences about desired sets of social arrangements. Given one of my goals of unmasking the often hidden power relations of the policy making process, these traditional approaches to the study of policy making were deemed inappropriate.

As conceptualized by John Fiske, discourse, which can be viewed as either a language or “system of representation,” has developed socially in order to make and transmit a “coherent set of meanings.” These meanings then serve the interests of a particular group or section of society (1987:14). Thus, discourse becomes crucial in the process of explaining how the social subject is positioned relative to another. The framing of public policy issues is a critical dimension for the operation of discourse. One source for creating frames is tapped when they adequately utilize “cultural resources” (Best 1991), “relate to deep mythic themes” (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988:64) and have “cultural resonance” (Gamson and Modigliani 1989:56). Further, policy frames detailing what the policy elite should do and how the public should respond depend, to a certain extent, on society’s images of “types” of people—that is, our perception of their value to society (Schneider and Ingram 1993). This helps to explain why and how President Clinton used two black women to justify his signing of PRWORA. The use of two black women provided a valence to President Clinton’s behavior because they resonated with the public’s view of the physiognomy of welfare recipients. Consequently, their presence legitimized the policy.² Stories of these women, which are used in policy discourse, serve a similar function.

Several studies on the nexus of race and social policy focus primarily on the “white backlash” to race-conscious policies (Bobo 1983, 1988; Herring 1997; Peffley and Hurwitz 1998; Scott 1997; Steinberg 1995) or on the impact of said policies on the black male population (Tonry 1995) or on blacks in general (Walters 2003). Critical race theorists and feminist scholars challenge these approaches to policy analysis because they fail to adequately address multiple forms of oppression. Specifically, researchers such as Roberts (1997, 2002), Johnson (1995) and Thomas (1998) call attention to the processes of racing and gendering and their impact on political institutions, laws, public policies and institutional practices. Politics and the policy-making process produce and maintain race and gender categories and hierarchies in multiple ways. For one, the practices and processes of politics and policy making create and maintain race, gender and other divisions in society. This occurs at multiple levels but is particularly prevalent during what is referred to as the problem definition stage of policy making.

In framing social issues, policy makers often rely on existing gendered and raced symbols to suggest that their particular definition of an issue is accurate. Therein lies the relationship between language and power (see Fairclough 2000). Through language, which is used to frame a social issue, race and gender divisions are reinforced. Second, race and gender categories are produced and maintained by defining race and gender characteristics and then employing the characteristics to bestow differential rights (Yanow 2003). The policy-making process is both raced and gendered because (a) genders are raced, (b) institutional norms and practices are both raced and gendered, and (c) political institutions are a critical component in producing, maintaining and reproducing raced and gendered cultural images and symbols through their organizational practices and routines (Duerst-Lahti and Kelly 1995). Racing–gendering occurs through the actions of individuals, as well as through laws, policies and organizational norms and practices (Haney Lopez 1996). Gendered and raced cultural images and symbols are integral to this process. These types of symbols and images are used to convey social meanings of the policy issue, the policy targeted population and possible solutions. Some scholars have recognized the use of cultural symbols and icons in the policy-making process (Edelman 1977; Schneider and Ingram 1993; Stone 1989; among others). However, there has been minimal attention paid to how these images and symbols are employed by those engaged in the policy making process and the impact of the use of these images.

This brings me to my purpose for conducting this analysis. My purpose for engaging in this research is two pronged. For one, I strive to analyze how symbols and images of black womanhood play a significant role in the policy-making process. I take a critical look at the discursive construction of policy frames with the goal of showing how power relations are maintained and perpetuated. To do such, I use a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach. A central goal of CDA is to link the relationship between the text (micro level) with underlying societal power structures and hierarchies through discursive practices upon which the text was drawn (meso level; see Thompson 2002). In this analysis, I challenge the social construction of reality by bringing to the forefront the impact of racing–gendering on the policy-making process. This brings me to my second reason for engaging in this research project. In the spirit of Black feminism and womanism, I illustrate how it is possible and necessary to challenge and debunk the negative construction of black womanhood that is employed to justify her inequitable position in society as well as her punishment via public policies.

One could argue that prior research, such as that conducted by AngeMarie Hancock (2004), Gwendolyn Mink (1995, 1998), Dorothy Roberts (1997, 2002) and Rickie Solinger (2000) already analyze how the codification and promulgation of African American women as the “other” create a fertile breeding ground for a seemingly “logical” and “rational” policies. Furthermore, Neubeck and Cazenave (2001) and Hancock (2004) review the functioning of images of black women in the policy making process. Both Neubeck and Cazenave, via their use of welfare racism, and Hancock’s employment of the concept of the public identity of the welfare queen and the politics of disgust, conclude that the degenerate construction of black women have resulted in her negative treatment, vis-à-vis public policy. These researchers show how the negation of black womanhood is expressed through a logic of imagery, metaphor and complex symbolism. So, why do we need additional research in this area? Because despite the importance of this body of work, the concept of using negative construction of black womanhood in policy making, especially in discourse, has been loosely specified and undertheorized and has not been the subject of systematic research. For example, Gwendolyn Mink (1995) in The Wages of Motherhood says that traditional feminists have analyzed welfare policy through a gender analysis; her work extends this by adding a cultural and racial dynamic to the analysis (viii). However, Mink does not explicitly address or analyze how the cultural symbolic and social constructions of black womanhood influence the policy-making process. For example, one does not see a reference to the image of Mammy or other stereotypical images of black women. There is a reference, in an abstract manner, to how race influences policy but this is not explicitly addressed. I strive to start a dialogue on this issue by addressing the racing–gendering process of policy making. As such, I concentrate on enhancing this prior theorizing by offering a systematic analysis of the use of symbols and myths on the policy-making process. Additionally, I contribute to this existing body of literature by performing a systematic analysis on a number of different policy domains: crime, welfare and family policies. What I hope readers will gather from this research, among other pockets of knowledge, is that although the three policy domains are treated as separate entities, they are intertwined and thus form an interwoven policy blanket that tends to subjugate black women.

In this chapter, my focus is on the theorizing element of Black feminism and womanism. I provide a theoretical understanding and justification for why traditional methods of policy analysis are insufficient for an analysis of how race, gender and class influence policy. Chapter 6 satisfies the second tenet of Black feminism and womanism in that it considers strategizing elements that might prove useful in challenging and debunking the racing– gendering process of policy making. The theoretical foundation of Black feminism and womanism allows me to evaluate how the interaction of gender, race and class is experienced in social and political spaces. It is within this context that I must point out that the primary focus of the analysis is race and gender. Accordingly, the systems of race and gender are explicitly addressed while the system of class is treated in a more implicit manner. This is not to suggest that class is not an important variable in the framing of policy discourse. However, for this analysis, class is recognized within the context that many of the women targeted by policy issues are often considered economically disadvantaged.

Black feminist and womanist theories “treats racial inequality as a vital shaper of women’s and men’s lives and advances a coherent and powerful premise—that racial ancestry, ethnic heritage, and economic status are as important as gender for analyzing the social construction of women and men” (Zinn and Dill 1994:11). The intersection of gender and race has led to some interesting experiences. For example, black women and other women of color tend to occupy political and economic spaces that are characterized by low wages, menial dead-end jobs and high unemployment. Additionally, they often reside in social spaces where there are both higher rates of poverty and solo-mothering in comparison to their white counterparts. In contrast to a more traditional feminist approach, which tends to use a hegemonic model of womanhood, a Black feminist and womanist approach allows me to situate black women in the multiple systems of domination that place them in a subordinate social and/or political space. As an analytical tool, Black feminism and womanism allow me to answer the questions that plagued me after President Clinton signed the PRWORA.

By centering the intersection of race, class and gender, I am able to explore how social understanding and representation of groups, specifically black women, are employed in the policy making process. Black feminism and womanism provide (a) the general categories of black womanhood and the images employed in this study; (b) the methodological and method approach for this study, CDA; and (c) guidelines and suggestions for debunking, and therefore, limiting the impact of the use of what are often negative images of black womanhood. Black feminist and womanist scholars such as Collins (1991), Jewell (1993), King (1973), Millet (1970), Mullings (1992) and Palmer (1983) have and continue to explore the social construction, that is, the social meaning attached to these real life women, of black women and the various images and symbols used to transmit a white supremacist ideology of black womanhood. Out of these multiple works, analyses and theories a number of images of black women have been offered. These images carry stories that are grounded in history and hierarchal relations of power. Using these existing theoretical understandings, I developed a typology of black womanhood as a means of linking the text of policy frames with particular understandings and representations of black womanhood—the images of black womanhood (these images are explored in more depth in Chapter 2). This typology captures the characteristics of five dominant images, which include: Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Welfare Queen and Urban Teen Mother.³ While these images were developed to be distinct—for example, Mammy is constructed as asexual and Jezebel is constructed as being ruled by her libido—they are bound by two common characteristics, black female sexuality and morality. This typology of black womanhood is valuable to this study as it allows me to analyze the discourse of the policy elite in relation to the wider system of race, class and gender ideologies. It is these ideologies that inform text and its production process. By production process, I am referring to not only the framing of ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in North American Politics
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Perceptions, Culture and Policy
• 2 Mythical Illusions
• 3 Mammy Is a Maniac
• 4 You Better Work
• 5 The Government’s “Make a Man Kit”
• 6 For Us By Us
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index