Black Women, Black Love by Dianne M Stewart

Author:Dianne M Stewart [Stewart, Dianne M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

WELFARE’S PATRIARCHAL LOGIC IN THE AGE OF MASS INCARCERATION: STILL A BARRIER TO BLACK MARRIAGE

Examples of how state-enforced patriarchy absolves the state of culpability for systemic poverty and other social constraints oppressing Black people today can be found in the management of welfare programs across the nation. The welfare state tracks and holds poor Black men accountable for the subsistence doled out to their wives or ex-wives and children even decades after issuing final payments. I personally know a Black man in New York in his sixties whose Social Security check continues to be garnished to repay the government for the decade of subsidies his ex-wife and children received between the 1980s and the 1990s. Although he began receiving his Social Security benefits only a few years ago, the state has a long memory. Until his debt is paid in full, he will collect reduced monetary payments. It doesn’t matter that this particular Black man was not able to find steady employment while his children were growing up. It doesn’t matter that when he tried to relocate to another state for greater opportunities, he was denied motor vehicle privileges, which quickly dashed his hopes of independence and gainful employment. Nor does it matter that his life was beset by one trauma after another. America, with its patriarchal heritage and conception of marriage, has no sympathy for the millions of Black men it has actually excluded from patriarchal privilege and trapped in cycles of imprisonment, labor exploitation, or unemployment and poverty since the earliest days of debt slavery to the rise of the prison industrial complex.

Although American presidents have given welfare new names across the decades—ADC, AFDC, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and others—its patriarchal logic remains constant. Federal and state welfare policies typically require women seeking government aid for their children to sue the absent fathers (husbands, partners, boyfriends) for child support that the government will subsequently collect to replenish its own coffers. Fathers earning less than $10,000 per year were responsible for two-thirds of the nation’s child-support debt in 2006, and these poor men easily could have seen the majority of their salaries garnished and their driver’s licenses suspended or revoked.92

Though these findings were published more than a decade ago, the policies remain in effect across many states, often sowing seeds of bitterness and distrust between young unmarried couples who might otherwise develop healthy and cooperative means of coparenting—couples who might even preserve their romantic bonds and eventually seal them with marriage vows. When mothers are “forced to name absent fathers, and then sue them—and sue them again and again,” poor fathers find themselves trapped in a closed system of utter privation. “Because the fathers are often also poor, the vast amount of assigned child support goes unpaid and insurmountable arrearages quickly result. The fathers who try almost always fail as the automated enforcement mechanisms throttle endlessly: a trucker’s license is suspended, so he cannot work; a laborer’s wages are garnished at sixty-five percent, so he cannot afford

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