Relational Poverty Politics

Forms, Struggles, and Possibilities

Mathew Coleman, Sapana Doshi, Victoria Lawson, Sarah Elwood

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780820353142, 9780820353135
• eBook ISBN: 9780820353128
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection examines the power and transformative potential of movements that fight against poverty and inequality. Broadly, poverty politics are struggles to define who is poor, what it means to be poor, what actions might be taken, and who should act. These movements shape the sociocultural and political economic structures that constitute poverty and privilege as material and social relations. Editors Victoria Lawson and Sarah Elwood focus on the politics of insurgent movements against poverty and inequality in seven countries (Argentina, India, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States).

The contributors explore theory and practice in alliance politics, resistance movements, the militarized repression of justice movements, global counterpublics, and political theater. These movements reflect the diversity of poverty politics and the relations between bureaucracies and antipoverty movements. They discuss work done by mass and other types of mobilizations across multiple scales; forms of creative and political alliance across axes of difference; expressions and exercises of agency by people named as poor; and the kinds of rights and other claims that are made in different spaces and places.

Relational Poverty Politics advocates for poverty knowledge grounded in relational perspectives that highlight the adversarial relationship of poverty to privilege, as well as the possibility for alliances across different groups. It incorporates current research in the field and demonstrates how relational poverty knowledge is best seen as a model for understanding how theory is derivative of action as much as the other way around. The book lays a foundation for realistic change that can directly attack poverty at its roots.

Contributors: Antonádia Borges, Dia Da Costa, Sarah Elwood, David Boarder Giles, Jim Glassman, Victoria Lawson, Felipe Magalhães, Jeff Maskovsky, Richa Nagar, Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales, LaShawnDa Pittman, Frances Fox Piven, Preeti Sampat, Thomas Swerts, and Junjia Ye.

CHAPTER 1

Safety Net Politics

Economic Survival among Impoverished Grandmother Caregivers

LASHAWNDA PITTMAN

How do grandparents faced with the unexpected and sudden assumption of primary caregiving responsibility for their grandchildren cope with this situation? How do they make room for their grandchildren, as renters, subsidized housing recipients, or home owners anxious to relocate to publicly subsidized senior housing? What factors contribute to their underutilization of public assistance despite high levels of poverty? Finally, and most important, how do low-income African American custodial grandmothers overcome barriers to public support, and what are the economic implications of their caregiving?

Scholars and policy makers are increasingly considering these questions as the number of grandparent-headed households (GPHHs) in the United States continues to reach historic highs. Previous research has shown that, despite the fragile economic status of grandparents, current child welfare and kinship care policies and practices make them the primary safety net for children in need of out-of-home care. This trend, combined with insufficient government supports, has profound implications for the economic welfare of GPHHs (Baker, Silverstein, and Putney 2008; Copen 2006; Pittman 2015). I suggest that, as grandparent caregivers in skipped-generation households (SGHs, defined as GPHHs with no parents present) navigate the safety net, they are challenged by family dynamics, social welfare policy eligibility criteria, and street-level implementation.

My study of the survival strategies of low-income African American custodial grandmothers providing care in informal kinship arrangements (children not involved with the public child welfare system) reveals the structural vulnerability of families that experience multiple and intersecting disadvantages compounded by non-heteronormative family forms, lacking legal protections and publicly recognized authority as parents. Relational poverty (relpov) and intersectional frameworks help make sense of who provides care, what resources they have available to do so, and how accessible they are.

A relpov analysis calls attention to the ways in which poverty and privilege are mutually constituted, the structures that produce poverty (e.g., global political economy, diminished welfare state, etc.), and the unequal power “wielded through the political, institutional and cultural relations between subjects, social groups and governments” that impoverishment entails (Elwood, Lawson, and Sheppard 2016). Furthermore, from a relpov perspective, race and gender are constitutive of poverty alongside the political economy, not secondary to it. African American grandmothers’ caregiving history shows the ways in which impoverishment is produced through intersecting power relations, as well as the forms of agency used by the poor. The coercion of free labor under slavery, exploitation of labor in the postslavery debt peonage system, exclusion of blacks from most of the formal sector prior to the civil rights era, and their disproportionality in the expanded informal, contingent, and low-wage service economies of the postindustrial era have necessitated black grandmothers’ greater involvement in the parenting of their grandchildren and have contributed to their poverty rates.

An intersectional perspective establishes that structures of inequality are mutually constituted with respect to not only poverty but also race, gender, and age. From this standpoint, these systems of oppression are conceptualized as an interlocking matrix of power relations. Not only are naturalized assumptions about “race” and sex part of the processes of capitalism, colonialism, and structuring of the welfare state, but so too are notions of what constitutes a family (Gilbert 1997). As a result, African Americans and non-heteronormative families have been differentially incorporated into American society. Differential incorporation refers to the “unequal treatment and differential access of ethnic and racial minorities to the economic, social, political and cultural rewards in a plural society” (Henry 1994, 16–17).

The grandmothers I study experience differential incorporation owing to their race, gender, age, and family forms. I argue that as they creatively remake family, grandmothers subvert normative assumptions of family, resist the devaluation of their caring labor, and devise strategies to allow for the fluidity and complexity of GPHHs. In remaking family they prioritize caregiving and negotiate risks in pursuit of resources. I consider these forms of poverty politics in three policy settings critical to GPHHs and low-income households broadly: subsidized housing, subsidized childcare, and cash assistance. Broadly, poverty politics are “struggles around who is poor, what it means to be poor, what should be done (or not) and who should do it” (Elwood, Lawson, and Sheppard 2016).

Impoverishment of Grandparent-Headed Households

Grandparents are primarily responsible for over 2.9 million children in the United States today. Roughly two-thirds of these grandparents are custodial grandmothers. One-third (32 percent) of SGHs live below the federal poverty level (FPL), which is nearly double the rates among parent–child families. SGHs headed by custodial grandmothers fare the worst, with two-thirds living at or below the FPL (U.S. Census Bureau 2010).

African Americans make up a disproportionate share of GPHHs, accounting for 24 percent of these households even though they are only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Moreover, African Americans are nearly twice as likely to live in SGHs as their white counterparts (13 versus 7 percent) (Livingston and Parker 2010). While the number of these households has risen among all racial-ethnic groups, the overrepresentation of African Americans in the child welfare and criminal justice systems, coupled with changing welfare policies, has dramatically altered black parents’ ability to care for their children, the demands placed on caregivers, and the availability of needed resources. In contrast to dominant arguments that individual failings and poor choices are the cause of African Americans’ high poverty rates, the highly racialized, gendered, and tightly interwoven nature of these structural causes of poverty have been well documented (Alexander 2010; Gustafson 2009; Roberts 2003).

Previous research has found that increased female incarceration, reduced cash welfare benefits, and other state-specific characteristics and policies drove the growth in foster care caseloads from 1985 to 2000. As the number of incarcerated mothers more than tripled (Swann and Sylvester 2006, 311), caseloads more than doubled, compelling grandparents to care for as many as two-thirds of their children (Johnson and Waldfogel 2002). As black children went from being excluded to disproportionately included in the child welfare system, a growing number of African American grandparents provided care in order to keep them from “going into the system” and under the auspices of the child welfare system (Murphy, Hunter, and Johnson 2008).

Even as punitive law enforcement policies increased African American incarcerations and lengths of stay, child welfare policy reduced the time children spend in foster care. The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 and the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act were passed to reduce foster care drift and to make placement with relatives a viable option for out-of-home care (Murphy, Hunter, and Johnson 2008). As a result, the number of children being raised by a grandparent more than doubled from 3 percent in 1970 to 7 percent in 2010. The most significant increase occurred among SGHs, rising more than 50 percent between 1990 and 2005 (Scommegna 2012).

The interrelationship between the cash welfare and foster care systems also contributes to the rise in GPHHs. Children who receive or have received public assistance are overrepresented in state custody. In fact, the falling values of welfare benefits were the second largest contributor to the growth in foster care caseloads (15 percent) (Swann and Sylvester 2006). Without the resources they need to provide for their families, low-income African American parents have relied on their children’s grandparents to absorb caregiving responsibilities.

As certain public policies have led to higher rates of GPHHs, others affected supports available to GPHHs. Most legislation in the last twenty years has focused on GPHHs within the child welfare system (Beltran 2014a). While federal and state legislation on behalf of relatives providing care outside of the child welfare system has consisted largely of budget-neutral policies, like educational and healthcare consent laws that enable caregivers in seventeen and twenty-five states to access education and healthcare for children in their care without the need for legal custody or guardianship, respectively (Beltran 2014a).

These interrelated factors both increase the number of GPHHs among African Americans and exacerbate their impoverishment. By almost every available measure, the level of need experienced by GPHHs is not reflected in their overall benefit receipt patterns (Baker, Silverstein, and Putney 2008; Copen 2006). Grandmothers participating in this study identify stigmatization, family dynamics, punitive social welfare policies, and a structural lag between antipoverty programs and GPHHs as chief deterrents to accessing formal resources. Given these intersecting factors, it isn’t surprising that fewer than 12 percent of kinship families receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) assistance, and only 6 percent of children living with relatives receive TANF child-only payments, even though nearly all are eligible (Beltran 2014b). Moreover, because most kinship caregivers fail to receive TANF, they miss opportunities to connect to other critical safety net programs. TANF can be an important gateway program for low-income households because it often entails categorical eligibility for other programs. For example, only 17 percent of low-income working kinship caregivers receive childcare assistance and only 15 percent receive housing assistance. Fewer than half (42 percent) receive assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, although most report food insecurity (Annie E. Casey Foundation 2012).

State-to-state discretion in designing welfare programs shapes caregivers’ public assistance experiences.¹ Grandparent caregivers applying for TANF family grants must participate in work activities no later than twenty-four months after receiving assistance (Smith and Beltran 2003). Under Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), older grandparents benefited from federally mandated age exemptions, but with TANF, states now have discretion regarding these exemptions. Most GPHHs are eligible to receive the TANF child-only grant. Adult income and assets are excluded from TANF child-only grants, and most states impose no work, income, or benefit time limits. Child-only cases have increased dramatically since the passage of welfare reform, rising from only 10 percent of the overall caseload in 1988 to 41 percent in 2009 (Falk 2014). On top of formal policy restrictions, studies identify four main reasons for the lack of program participation among GPHHs: (1) a structural gap between non-heteronormative family forms and social welfare policies (Baker, Silverstein, and Putney 2008), (2) lack of awareness of available rights and resources (Fuller-Thomson and Minkler 2003), (3) misinformation about eligibility criteria, and (4) fear of drawing attention to their caregiving circumstances, including the severity of their poverty and material hardship, poor health, and family instability (Cox 2003; Pittman 2014, 2015).

African American grandparents who are most economically disadvantaged and have the fewest resources to draw upon are most likely to assume the primary caregiving role. Not surprisingly, the highest poverty rates among GPHHs occur among African American grandparents (Minkler and Fuller-Thomson 2005). These grandparents are also more likely than grandparents from other racial-ethnic groups to be caring for more grandchildren, for longer periods of time and to be managing additional caregiving responsibilities. Low-income black grandmothers contend not only with the economic burdens of primary caregiving but also with integrating the sudden and unexpected onset of caregiving responsibilities into an array of competing demands, without adequate resources. They also do so in the context of a punitive and minimal safety net that devalues care work and that is designed to reinscribe nuclear family forms.

This being the case for so many GPHHs, we should conceptualize their safety net experiences more broadly—beyond grandmothers’ caregiving for their grandchildren—to add greater complexity to our understanding of their economic survival strategies and outcomes, and to how we think about agency and politics devised to respond to punitive and excluding systems. While African Americans have gone from being excluded for much of the history of the welfare state to welfare dependency being viewed by the American public as a black cultural trait, it has not been without resistance on their part (Roberts 1996). Ranging from collective mobilization to individual forms of resistance, African Americans have challenged the stratification of the welfare state and differential treatment of its recipients based on discourses about earned entitlements and undeserved handouts.

Early on, black reformers pushed to expand welfare’s cultural meaning beyond its definition as a public handout to the poor. Where white reformers focused on moral motherhood (which excluded black women and non-heteronormative families), black women’s organizations stressed the value of women’s work in the home. They also linked welfare to citizenship. “For these advocates, race issues were poverty issues, and women’s issues were race issues. Race uplift work was usually welfare work by definition, conceived as a path to racial equality. And black poverty could not be ameliorated without challenges to white domination” (Roberts 1996, 1585). Black organizing prior to welfare reform combined civil rights and welfare activism that encompassed a wide range of programs, including fair housing policy, political empowerment, and affirmative action in Social Security and AFDC. The fight for African Americans’ equal incorporation was about interrelated systems. Black people’s organizing during the postwelfare-reform era has focused on increasing jobs and living wages, access to universal, quality childcare, government support for care work, family-friendly employment policies, and affordable housing and healthcare, as well as opposing marriage promotion (Hays 2004). Individual resistance includes supplementing welfare benefits with monetary support from intimate partners and informal and off-the-books work, developing a range of responses to dominant constructions of the welfare mother (e.g., distancing, rejecting, accommodating), practicing everyday forms of resistance, and engaging in discursive and instrumental tactics, to name a few (McCormack 2004).

While previous research has examined how the gendered nature of state policies affects women’s mobility differentially across the life course (Gilbert 1997), the assumption is that women will be accessing distinct systems—Social Security or TANF, not both—based on age. Less is known about the ways in which African American grandmothers parenting their grandchildren obtain or maintain access to safety net programs designed for nuclear and single-parent-headed families or the elderly—not intergenerational families of varying ages.

I examine the coping strategies of low-income African American grandmothers raising grandchildren in Chicago in a qualitative study that I conducted from 2007 to 2011. Data were collected through in-depth, semistructured interviews and participant observation sessions with seventy-seven custodial grandmothers between the ages of thirty-eight and eighty-three living in the greater Chicago metropolitan area. All seventy-seven participants self-identified as U.S.-born black women with an average age of fifty-four years. All study participants were primary caregivers to at least one grandchild or great-grandchild under the age of eighteen with no parents living in the home. Study participants had 3.2 children on average. Seventeen were married, twelve were divorced, three were engaged, and eight were widows. (The rest were single.) All but twenty reported yearly household incomes of less than fifteen thousand dollars.² Of the twenty women who reported household incomes greater than fifteen thousand, seventeen had incomes approximately 1.5 times the FPL and three had income twice the FPL. Twenty-eight of the women were working at the time of recruitment, twelve were retired, and thirty-seven were unemployed.

Study participants were raising an average of 2.37 grandchildren for an average of 5.25 years. Twenty-five grandmothers provided care informally, thirty-three were legal guardians, twelve were kinship foster care providers, three were subsidized guardians, and four had adopted their grandchildren. This chapter focuses on fifty-eight of the seventy-seven caregivers who were not providing care under the auspices of the child welfare system (which provides higher levels of assistance).

Remaking Families and the Safety Net

At the outset of the assumption of primary caregiving responsibilities, grandparents must remake family, meaning they must establish continuity and stability for their grandchildren, integrate SGHs into their lives, and devise strategies to deal with their family’s differential incorporation into antipoverty programs designed to support families (Pittman 2014, 2015). When remaking family intersects with their pursuit of resources, grandparent caregivers must negotiate both real and perceived risks. These caregivers must try to maintain their own public assistance even as their grandparent caregiving roles undermine their efforts and eligibility. They must gauge whether they can obtain public support for grandchildren in their care without losing custody or jeopardizing their own fragile financial status owing to their impoverishment, poor health, and/or family instability. GPHHs develop several risk negotiation strategies to compensate for their lack of legal protections and limited parental authority within their non-heteronormative family form. At the heart of resistance strategies enacted in the face of impoverishment was grandmothers’ prioritization of their caregiving. As such, they allowed parents to maintain control ov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction (Un)Thinkable Poverty Politics
• Chapter 1 Safety Net Politics: Economic Survival among Impoverished Grandmother Caregivers
• Chapter 2 Differential Inclusion through Social Assistance: Migration, Precarity, and Diversity in Singapore
• Chapter 3 Illegality, Poverty, and Higher Education: A Relational Perspective on Undocumented Students and Educational Access
• Chapter 4 Staying Alive: AIDS Activism as U.S. Relational Poverty Politics
• Chapter 5 India’s Land Impasse: Infrastructure, Rent, and Resistance
• Chapter 6 Abject Economies, Illiberal Embodiment, and the Politics of Waste
• Chapter 7 Crushing Red Shirts and Restoring Amart Privilege: Relations between Violence, Inequality, and Poverty in Thailand
• Chapter 8 Thinking from June 2013 in the Brazilian Metropolis: New Urban Political Assemblages, Old State-Society Relations
• Chapter 9 “Check Your Privilege”: The Micropolitics of Cross-Status Alliances in the DREAM Movement
• Chapter 10 Ethnographic Alliance: Hope and Knowledge Building through a South African Story
• Chapter 11 Theater, Hunger, Politics: Beginning a Conversation
• Conclusion Politicizing Poverty
• Contributors
• Index