hi journalists, teachers, friends et al. it is I with some book recs! there’s a lot of great historical scholarship to help contextualize news like proposed Medicaid work requirements, the food stamp blue apron box (?!) proposal, etc. here is a thread with a few starting points:
Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor, is classic overview of tendency to divide the poor into more or less “worthy” of aid: global.oup.com/academic/produ… here’s an article version: berfrois.com/2014/01/michae…
Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, traces how punditry and policy proposals about “poverty” as a problem (often disconnected from structural analysis of capitalism or voices of poor themselves) became a cottage industry: press.princeton.edu/titles/7077.ht…
on debates about what level of government is responsible for the poor, and how we got our current federalist patchwork, check out @kmtani States of Dependency: amazon.com/States-Depende… which you can also hear about here: newbooksnetwork.com/karen-tani-sta…
to understand how the federal War on Poverty morphed on the ground into a War on Crime, with govt funding police not programs, there is @elizabhinton hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…
especially relevant perhaps, on why/how many American lawmakers came to define welfare recipients not as full citizens deserving aid, but as scheming manipulators that govt has to protect everyone else from, see @julillykh on “Getting Tough” in the 1970s: press.princeton.edu/titles/11017.h…
and lastly, as the antidote to simplistic “the War on Poverty failed” takes, read the intro to this collection, which has a much more precise & interesting account of its successes, failures, and the narrative of failure: ugapress.org/index.php/book…
feel free to add more to the thread! there’s way more out there of course, but those I’ve listed are a good starting place, in my view.
