The Politics of Disgust

The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen

Ange-Marie Hancock

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780814773413
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentlichsarbeit & Verwaltung

Winner of the 2006 Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Organized Section Best First Book Award from the American Political Science Association

Winner of the 2006 W.E.B. DuBois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists

Ange-Marie Hancock argues that longstanding beliefs about poor African American mothers were the foundation for the contentious 1996 welfare reform debate that effectively "ended welfare as we know it." By examining the public identity of the so-called welfare queen and its role in hindering democratic deliberation, The Politics of Disgust shows how stereotypes and politically motivated misperceptions about race, class and gender were effectively used to instigate a politics of disgust.

The ongoing role of the politics of disgust in welfare policy is revealed here by using content analyses of the news media, the 1996 congressional floor debates, historical evidence and interviews with welfare recipients themselves. Hancock's incisive analysis is both compelling and disturbing, suggesting the great limits of today's democracy in guaranteeing not just fair and equitable policy outcomes, but even a fair chance for marginalized citizens to participate in the process.

1
Introduction
The Face of Welfare Reform

Imagine the following scenario. While watching C-SPAN in July of 1996, you observe a member of the House of Representatives reading the following statement:

Bertha Bridges is still waiting for the end of welfare as she knows it. She and her three children have been on and off welfare since the early 1980s, and she has been unable to hold a job in recent years because school administrators often call several times a week to ask her to pick up her disruptive, severely depressed 13 year-old son for fighting and disobeying teachers. (Appendix B, Document 75A)

If you close your eyes and picture Bertha Bridges, you envision a person “with issues.” Despite no overt reference to her economic class or race, “coded” categories abound, including welfare, a disruptive male child, unemployment, and nearly fifteen years of sporadic welfare dependency. We may blame the member of Congress for creating such an image, but the next statement reveals a more complex picture:

Seventeen months after U.S. News first interviewed her for a cover story on welfare reform, matters have only worsened for the Detroit resident. Several weeks ago her son let three strangers into her house, and they promptly stole Bridges’ money, jewelry, clothing, dishes and videocassette recorder. Her son is now back in a psychiatric hospital, his younger sister is starting to imitate him by refusing to complete school assignments and Bridges doesn’t know where to turn for help. “I’m living a nightmare,” she says. (Ibid.)

Here Bridges herself contributes to your mental picture. Her life, most charitably, could be characterized as spinning out of control. A harsher view would see her as an incompetent mother nurturing the next generation of pathology. Importantly, the role of the media in the process of public debate is also made clear: a magazine is given as a source of information reliable enough to be included in the public record. This is the face of welfare included in the Congressional Record for the floor debate regarding HR 3734, now the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act (PRWA) of 1996.

When citizens like Bertha Bridges are thrust into the public sphere for political purposes, the potential for “reasonable” democratic consideration of policy options is bleak. Reading the first excerpt from the Congressional Record triggers a comparison of Bridges to stereotypes about welfare recipients. This act of cognition occurs so quickly that before we read her own words (as quoted by a journalist), we have given her an identity that acts from that point forward as an interpretive filter. Whether her words reinforce or contest the identity assigned by the reader, any political claim she may make later in the article is still considered in the context of that identity. After those two paragraphs and the rest of the article, the debate of HR 3734 continues, with the identity lingering in our minds. What are the political implications of this image for our democracy? This book explores one compelling answer to this question.

Bertha Bridges’s story triggers a specific identity in many American minds. The identity, although shaped by political elites, academicians, and the media, draws on citizens’ preexisting beliefs about women who exist at the intersection of marginalized race, class, and gender identities. The harsh light under which Bridges found herself in July of 1996 is emblematic of the political context in which HR 3734 was developed and ultimately signed into law.

Political context,¹ a key product of political culture, is commonly thought of as a primary influence on policy decisions. In this vein, historical and contextual changes in political culture and public discourse receive a share of the responsibility for the preservation of democracy (Almond and Verba 1963, 5; Merelman 1984; Barber 1998; M. Williams 1998), not the destruction of it. However, political culture encompasses more than the shared beliefs, values, and norms that coalesce to form a political context at a particular political moment. It also includes identities learned by means of experiences and relationships in institutions like families, schools, the media, and voluntary associations (Conover et al. 2002, 5).

Certain identities, such as race and gender, are salient in American political culture due to long-standing beliefs of politically important differences between people of different races and different genders. Often at the insistence of members of marginalized races and genders, such differences have historically received attention in the public sphere to promote shared values such as equality and freedom (M. Williams 1998). We might call this demand for attention a demand for democratic attention.

Many theorists agree that in democratic politics a specific form of attention is required, one that requires thinking collectively with others while “judging for one’s self” (Bickford 1996, 139). Democratic attention is a necessary component of democratic deliberation because we deliberate about uncertain things that are within our collective power to do (27). In other words, as we collectively figure out what to do, the democratic process requires us to consider the multifarious opinions of other citizens in rendering our personal judgment.

The use of democratic attention in the political sphere is intended by democratic theorists to “create a sense of genuine public interest” in solving particular social problems (Barber 1984, 13). In the area of welfare politics, however, Congressman Scott McInnis (R-CO) perverts democratic attention into an ideological justification for a specific policy that restricts the rights of welfare recipients. The critical feature of this attention, its intent to separate welfare recipients from worthy American citizens, has serious implications for the potential of participatory forms of democracy in the United States. Such perversions of democratic attention are part of what I define as a “politics of disgust.”

A developed democracy usually turns its attention to issues about which there is a genuine debate, but the underlying assumptions—the unquestioned consensus about certain topics—influence democratic deliberation before, during, and after a specific policy or issue debate. By defining deliberation as an activity conducted in common by citizens (Barber 1998, 25), the democratic process retains republican aspirations of citizen development and enhancement of individuals’ capacities (see Young 1990; Barber 1984). For the process to function, however, some preexisting consensus must exist: “Still, not everything can be up for deliberation at the same time. Aristotle [in Nicomachean Ethics] notes that there must be some agreed-upon or assumed factual background for deliberating” (Bickford 1996, 28). Yet as many political theorists now agree, political facts are largely shaped by norms conditioned by history and experience. The question remains: Whose history and which experiences shape this assumed factual background?

Public identities of marginal citizens represent one critical part of this assumed background. In developing public identity as a specific construct suitable for political psychology, I do not intend to discredit other more theoretical connotations of the term. My project, in fact, is to link political theory with empirical political science to develop a bridge term that explains the representations that stories like Bertha Bridges’s create in the audience’s mind.

Previously, theorists such as John Rawls and Susan Bickford have characterized public identity as a public presentation of the self, based upon what we as citizens are able to agree upon (Rawls 1985 quoted in Bickford 1996, 5). To further her point, Bickford argues, “We may bolster our courage by reminding ourselves that criticisms are not of our most intimate selves, but of how we have performed, how we are acting in public” (150). I argue that the public presentation of the self is not the sole component of public identities in contexts of inequality. Taking issue with theorists who overstate the role of agency in the political sphere, I demonstrate that public identities endure over generations and impoverish the potential for empowered participation by citizens saddled with such identities in processes of democratic deliberation. The ability to adopt an identity at will has been proven time and again to remain a pipe dream for citizens consigned to the margins of the public sphere. As Bickford herself acknowledges, the actor, in the language of Hannah Arendt, cannot also assume the role of interpreter for the spectator (162; see also Arendt 1958, 1982).

My logic here does not intend to argue that agency is impossible. What I want to argue is that one’s public identity is conditioned not simply by one’s own speech and action but also by others’ perception, interpretation, and manipulation—particularly for those citizens who lack political equality. In this sense, I extend Arendt and Bickford’s work into a realm of emotionally charged political context—the politics of disgust. A politics of disgust is first marked by traditional signposts of inequality; for example, members of marginal groups, even when granted the power of speech, find their voices devalued or disrespected, increasing their isolation and alienation from the public sphere (Young 1997, 64; Taylor 1994, 70). Democratic deliberation then devolves into conversations “routinely marked by vast differences in status, power and privilege” (Kinder and Sanders 1996, 285). The persistent influence of public identities contributes to the breakdown of deliberation, largely because of the more unique characteristics of the politics of disgust I discuss in the next section.

The politics of disgust occurs despite the relatively “open and permeable body of people in active roles that influence public opinion and shape public affairs” (McCloskey and Zaller 1984, 3), or the opportunity to cause a little “gender trouble” in micropublics, as Judith Butler (1990) and Nancy Fraser (1992) might have us do. Because political culture under conditions of consensus tends to be successfully transmitted by elites to the general public (McCloskey and Zaller 1984, 234; Zaller 1991, 1216; Zaller 1992, 1996), the unacknowledged consensual absence or misrepresentation of a marginalized group can predictably stunt the dissemination of accurate information and thus the development of accurate attitudes about them (Taylor 1994, 25).

Moreover, such social constructions of groups are continually reinforced by existing government policy (Schneider and Ingram 1995, 443). Socially constructed target populations are “the cultural characterizations or popular images of the persons or groups whose behavior and well-being are affected by public policy” (Schneider and Ingram 1993). Such social constructions, Schneider and Ingram argue, are based upon stereotypes about particular groups of people from politics, culture, the media, and history, among other influences. Yet both theoretical and empirical critiques of their theory center upon the lack of conceptual clarity of key constructs such as “social construction of target populations” (Lieberman 1995; Schroedel and Jordan 1998). In this book I offer a concept that builds upon their notion of social construction while incorporating several innovations that improve empirical utility, using the insights of political psychologists studying social identity. Several recent scholars have emphasized the social construction power of extant public policy (Schram 1995; Campbell 2000); I want to focus upon other equally important contributors to what I define as the public identity of a target population. I argue that elite manipulations and cues of public identities provide a feedback arrow to the start of the policy-making process, shaping government policy by means of public identity’s role in democratic deliberation.

The Politics of Disgust

It seems that more than ever the compulsion today is to identify, to reduce someone to what is on the label. To identify is to control, to limit. (Madeleine L’Engle 1995)

Identities and emotions are two aspects of our common humanity. Each of us has one or more identities that we accept; we each have one or more identities ascribed to us by others regardless of whether we accept them. Much attention has been given to the possibility of overlaps and disconnects between these identities of differing origins in both political theory and political psychology. Similarly, emotions in politics have long been an issue of discussion among political theorists; feminist theorists have made the strongest case for the appropriateness of emotions in politics (see, e.g., Collins 2000; Bickford 1996; Young 1990). I am extremely sympathetic to this ontological position, yet the susceptibility of citizens to an emotionally charged political context can pose serious problems for democracy.

I argue that the public identity of welfare recipients—created from the misperception that they are all or mostly single mothers who are poor and African American²—interacts with a context I term the politics of disgust to produce legislative outcomes that are undemocratic both procedurally and substantively. The remainder of the book analyzes the national welfare reform discourse in 1996 from historical, empirical, and theoretical angles to make this case.

But first it is essential to define what is unique about a politics of disgust, as distinct from other more popular terms like contempt or demonization. The politics of disgust is characterized by four features in our representative democracy. As I alluded to above, the politics of disgust involves a perversion of democratic attention. In this political context the process of deliberation lacks the type of attention (to all citizens’ claims) that democratic theorists deem necessary for a democracy. I initially document the perversion of democratic attention from a historical perspective in chapter 2 when I discuss the roots of the public identity of the “welfare queen,” which is grounded in two discursive themes about Black women traceable to slavery: their laziness and their fecundity. I return to it throughout the case study.

Second, the political context within which so-called democratic deliberation occurs is conditioned by monologic, rather than intersubjective, communications among citizens. As the character Sheldon Runyon (played by Gary Oldman) in The Contender so aptly puts it: “People will believe me because I’ll have a very large microphone in front of me.” It is this particular aspect of the politics of disgust that renders public identities like that of the “welfare queen” so resistant to change following contestation. Chapter 3 discusses the results of a study³ of national print media coverage of welfare reform in the months leading up to the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Act in 1996.

Third, the politics of disgust can exist beneath the radar screens of many citizens because even “well-intentioned” citizens in the public sphere succumb to a pitfall of what Hannah Arendt calls “representative thinking.” This pitfall, when studied by political psychologists, is usually called correspondence bias. In addition to these mistakes in political thinking, the politics of disgust is marked by a fourth and final feature: a distinct lack of political solidarity between citizens who are and citizens who are not part of the target population of the legislation at issue. Chapter 4 demonstrates the failures of representative thinking and mistaken solidarity among African American and female members of Congress evident in the 1996 Congressional Record. I turn first to the common cultural context of emotions like disgust.

Emotion scholars in psychology have determined that humans are programmed (that is, hardwired) for at least six core affects: anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise (White 1994, 222). Although emotions are “prototypically social and moral” (221) and carry moral weight, emotional responses to stimuli are couched within cultural frames, or interpretive grids of tacit social understandings, social representations, and practices that reflect amd enact these understandings in daily life (Kitayama and Markus 1994, 95; see also Keltner and Haidt 1999). Thus emotions, while seeming to be “gut” reactions over which we have no control, are in reality learned within what Charles Taylor calls “a common space” in which my and others’ experiences are shared and interpreted (1994, 35).

Politically speaking, emotions serve to regulate power relationships (Frijda and Mesquita 1994, 77) and instigate politically relevant behaviors such as sharing, bonding, and correction. Associations with emotional components, moreover, are learned faster and rendered salient to an individual when expressed by another individual. This finding has distinct ramifications for the durability of public identities such as that of the “welfare queen” and, more generally, for the difficulty even well-intentioned, politically “progressive” citizens have unlearning racism or sexism.

Culturally focal events, those that are important subjects of daily discourse, have clear norms that dictate how to interpret such topics and how to respond to them (Frijda and Mesquita 1994, 68). Thus the universe of possible welfare reform policy options is circumscribed by norms regarding how we interpret the process of welfare reform and those assumed to benefit from it. Not only do the norms themselves exist but cultures possess explicit verbal categories to identify events with particular associated meanings and affective evaluations. In chapters 3 and 4, I find buzz terms like “culture of poverty” and “welfare as a way of life” to be part of a semantic network surrounding welfare reform in 1996. The semantic network permeating the discourse regarding a certain topic contains the coding to be used by individuals regarding a particular event. In one sense, this is good news because it supports the assertion that emotions, although hardwired into all of us, are expressed and learned in culturally specific ways, implying that they can be unlearned.

Yet while social constructions may in fact change over time (Schneider and Ingram 1993; Lieberman 1995), one building block of social constructions, stereotypes, often does not change. Racial stereotypes in particular tend to be closely held and immune to contradictory information (Link and Oldendick 1996). The resilience such lessons demonstrate in the face of change, even among those of us who recognize the peril at the bottom of such a slippery slope, leads us only to guarded optimism about the potential for agency among marginalized citizens in democratic contexts with significant socioeconomic stratification.

In fact, one of the above functions served by emotions, that of bonding, may in its political form strengthen the role of core cultural frames in perpetuating the emotional responses we have to racialized stimuli. As Kitayama and Markus note, “societal integration may well require that the foundations of cultural models or schemas be largely taken for granted, and that their propositions be transparent or ‘go without saying’” (1994, 344). This idea of preexisting, uncontested consensus that precedes democratic deliberation again points out how the cultural frames through which we learn our quasi-instinctive emotional reactions are protected from being successfully challenged by the actual political purpose they serve.

Further, democratic theory notes that each instance of democratic deliberation must necessarily proceed from some shared background of information. Although the background information itself can be debated, it occurs under a process separate from the question “What is to be done next?” This separate process of debating the background information in welfare policy has been consistently thwarted by the politics of disgust. I point...