Political-Economic Roots of Coercion

Gwendoline M. Alphonso

doi:10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8742

Abstract

The Article argues that at the core of the American neoliberal policy regime, of which child welfare is a critical part, lies an enduring raced family policy logic of two racially stratified standards: a punitive Black economic utility family standard and a supportive white domestic affection family standard, whose policy roots and practices trace back to slavery in the antebellum South. Historically and contemporaneously, state regulation of poor Black families has been shaped by, and in turn perpetuates, the Black economic utility standard that normalizes and places political value above all else on the promotion of labor by Black mothers outside of their homes in service of a racially-discriminatory market order. By doing so, the state devalues the affective, nurturing labor that Black mothers perform within their households and towards their children. Long followed in Southern local policy practices and led by the efforts of congressmen from the South, the Black economic utility standard is shown to have been formalized nationally within the neoliberal policy regime through a repurposing of overtly racial ideas into behavioral values of work and self-sufficiency that are enshrined in social and child welfare reforms. The Article suggests that the deployment of the Black economic utility standard by the neoliberal policy regime pathologizes poor Black women’s childbearing and motherhood as economically irresponsible, obscures centuries-long structural inequalities and racial family coercion, and serves to perpetuate and justify Black family disruptions in colorblind ways.

Highlights

Empirical research has amply documented the institutionalization of racial disproportionality and disparity in the child welfare system, as well as the disproportionate harm experienced by Black[1] children, families, and communities as a consequence of the system’s practices.[2]
The modern child welfare system’s disruption, over-surveillance, and criminalization of the Black family has been embraced by the United States since the 1980s and is linked to the rise of neoliberalism—the political ideology that elevates free markets as critical to human wellbeing, characterized by private property rights, entrepreneurism, and free trade
3 As a policy regime, 4 the neoliberal American state has been critiqued for the many unique ways in which it overly penalizes and coerces Black and Brown populations, produces racial marginality, and exercises a “racial authoritarianism” that has starkly limited the civic belonging of African Americans, in particular, after a period of democratic inclusion in the 1960s

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Empirical research has amply documented the institutionalization of racial disproportionality and disparity in the child welfare system, as well as the disproportionate harm experienced by Black[1] children, families, and communities as a consequence of the system’s practices.[2]. 3 As a policy regime, 4 the neoliberal American state has been critiqued for the many unique ways in which it overly penalizes and coerces Black and Brown populations, produces racial marginality, and exercises a “racial authoritarianism” that has starkly limited the civic belonging of African Americans, in particular, after a period of democratic inclusion in the 1960s.5 This Article furthers Roberts’s critical political framework and offers a new conceptual framework focused on family-centered policy logics that I use to explain why and how the American state came to choose its current, punitive, child welfare approach that normalizes the widespread removal of Black children from their homes despite claims of colorblindness. It is to this theoretical end that I direct this Article

Legal and Ideological Foundations of Black Family Utility

BLACK FAMILY ECONOMIC UTILITY IN NEOLIBERAL WORKFARE AND CHILD WELFARE POLICY

Findings

CONCLUSION