This is the book we have been waiting for since 1996. When teaching courses on racism and class, I am always overwhelmed by discussions of welfare policy with my students. This is for two reasons. First, it is one of the most enraging and depressing subjects of the course; the realities of welfare are bleak in the United States. Second, it is daunting to explain how and why these state welfare systems are structured in terms of policy design and implementation after the elimination of Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996.Footnote ¹ Although much has been written about this dramatic policy shift, Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram's book provides the definitive answer to this latter problem. It does so, however, without leaving behind a discussion of the fundamentally political nature of poverty governance: “[T]he poor exist perennially as subjects who must be governed” (p. 1). As an admirer of the authors' individual and collective work on welfare over the years, it is gratifying to see the culmination of these efforts in a book that is so comprehensive and far-reaching in its significance to scholars, activists, and policymakers.

The structure of Disciplining the Poor mirrors the multilayered approach to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)Footnote ² policy studied by the authors, albeit with one key difference: It is highly organized and coherent. Soss, Fording, and Schram's central goal is to “provide a critical analysis of how neoliberal and paternalist agendas fit together and get enacted as a concrete approach to governing the poor” (p. 9). These agendas converge to “define a strong state-led effort to bring discipline to the lives of the poor so that they can become competent actors who recognize and act on their interests as freely choosing agents of the market” (p. 27). The authors provide precise details of these governing logics without allowing them to become catchall answers for every empirical finding. Moreover, they are careful to note how contemporary poverty governance is linked closely with previous welfare regimes. The upshot of their analysis highlights this continuity: “In essence, the welfare poor have moved into a world of precarious work that leaves them just as poor” (p. 276). Even caseload reductions are “a mirage of success” (p. 275). Although the welfare poor remain poor, they note the change in the disciplinary regime that leaves them in this position: “The root of the problem lies in a governing approach that forcefully pushes the poor toward low-wage work while asking nothing in return from the employers it services” (p. 276). Similarly, they find that race remains of critical importance in poverty governance, though the contours of these dynamics appear altered.

The examination of this turn in poverty governance is unique in its thorough overview of multiple rather than single stages of (welfare) policy processes. This is a mammoth undertaking, but one that is necessary given the complexities of devolution and the second-order devolution of TANF. This is where the authors' multimethod approach is both necessary and appropriate. The methodological seamlessness of their qualitative and quantitative analyses is breathtaking. They explore the implementation of the central concrete and symbolic disciplinary policy of TANF, called “sanctions” (“penalties that reduce or terminate welfare benefits in cases where clients are deemed to be out of compliance with program requirements” [p. 145]), along with four other disciplinary state TANF policy options. Although they track policy differences across states pre- and post-1996, the heart of this analysis is a study of Florida. Florida is a perfect case study for the perils of neoliberal paternalism, through the continuing racial disparities in sanctioning patterns, perverse incentives created by privatization of services, corruption, and lack of accountability, not to mention the sobering analyses of the intersection of the carceral and welfare state.

Soss, Fording, and Schram's approach to poverty governance not only adds much-needed empirical analyses of welfare but also reframes, or at least readjusts, previous theoretical work by Loïc J. D. Wacquant (Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, 2009) on the welfare and carceral state (as well as Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward's Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, 1971). The strength of the authors' approach is that they do not disagree with the broad strokes of Wacquant's analysis, but argue that political agency matters, from the president to the worker at the front desk of a welfare office, while still taking into account the bureaucratic constraints of individual groups of actors. Individual actors, even those with little institutional power, are not simply automatons of the state: “[Caseworkers] are more than just agents of the state and more than just organizational actors. Their conflicted mentalities, and the strategies they use to govern, are equally rooted in social identities that come from outside the welfare system” (p. 234).

The authors find that the caseworkers themselves, at least in the Florida program, have more overlap with “clients” in terms of identities and personal histories than they have in the past. Nevertheless, they are left with the finding that racial stereotypes still play a major role in sanctioning patterns in Florida: “The influence of client race rarely takes the crude form of white case managers consciously discriminating on the basis of prejudice … As frontline workers use their discretion, their choices and actions are not always biased by racial classifications. But when clients of color have markers that appear to be consistent with negative racial stereotypes, they are targeted for disciplinary action in ways that white clients are not” (p. 235).

From the casework patterns of sanctions to the policy choices made by states in designing their TANF program, the authors demonstrate how racism is endemic to the welfare system, albeit, they argue, in contingent and often specific geographical ways. While this racism of a neoliberal paternalist welfare regime may appear different from that of the old, this point underscores the historical continuity of the “persistent power of race.” This is readily apparent in the role of federalism in policymaking: “American federalism functions today as a powerful mechanism for the protection of racial disparities” (p. 296).

The authors develop a “Racial Classification Model” (RCM) to explain why race continues to matter in welfare policy in this ostensibly (and nonsensically, I argue) “postracial” era and, in a nod to Wacquant, how it intersects with carceral policies. They view racial classifications as one of many influences over policy choice, but want to understand the conditions under which these racial classifications are salient, using Anne Larason Schneider and Helen Ingram's (1997) study of target populations (p. 14). Soss, Fording, and Schram's model rests on three propositions: 1) “To be effective in designing policies and applying policy tools to specific target groups, policy actors must rely on salient social classification and group reputations; without such classifications, they would be unable to bring coherence to a complex social world or determine appropriate action” (p. 77); 2) “When racial minorities are salient in a policy context, race will be more likely to provide a salient basis for social classification of targets and, hence, to signify target differences perceived as relevant to the accomplishment of policy goals” (p. 78); and 3) “The likelihood of racially patterned policy outcomes will be positively associated with the degree of policy-relevant contrast in policy actors' perceptions of racial groups. The degree of contrast, in turn, will be a function of (a) the prevailing cultural stereotypes of racial groups, (b) the extent to which policy actors hold relevant group stereotypes, and (c) the presence or absence of stereotype-consistent cues” (p. 79).

The RCM is an attractive model for policy process scholars; its utility is that it uncovers racist dynamics in a system in which overt expressions of racial hostility are supposedly unacceptable. It is also useful for understanding convergences between punitive policy choices across policy domains, whether it is the targeting of people of color or the privatization of formerly state-run bureaucratic functions.

The authors' findings should put to rest any doubts about how welfare and, by extension, hyperincarcerationFootnote ³ are, at their heart, about race. Yes, neoliberal paternalism matters, and it certainly matters to those who are subject to its whims, as I have found in my own research. This book gives us an opportunity to move now to a larger discussion about language and policy choices. My discussion of the RCM is not so much a critique of the authors' work; methodologically and substantively speaking, it deserves much praise. Rather, the book opens the possibility for political scientists to begin to discuss white supremacy as an overarching political system.Footnote ⁴

The RCM is a useful model for understanding TANF policy, and, by extension, other policies that are highlighted as racially “salient.” It is a cumbersome tool, however, not because the propositions are imprecise but because the language we use to describe “racial” phenomena is imprecise. All too often, race is used as a term to stand in for Black/African American, as is the term racial minority. Although the authors are careful to include Latina/os in their empirical analyses, the use of “racial” or “race” simply becomes a coded term for African American. Asian Pacific Islander Americans and American Indians/Indigenous Peoples/Native Americans are omitted. This is problematic for two reasons. First, the relationship between racialized and colonized people in this context is fundamentally important for understanding these political dynamics: “Rather than a series of self-contained, dyadic relations between whites and various racial others, white supremacy comprises a web of crisscrossing discursive and practical ties.”Footnote ⁵ Second, white Americans are invisible and normalized unless there is a point made about their status compared to “racial minorities.” This points to a larger problem, which is how the language of race is used to obfuscate political realities, as Dylan Rodríguez explains: “There is no ‘race’ outside of the historical genealogies and multiple political derivations of white supremacy, and to posit race without an essential and critical engagement with its structuring white supremacist genealogies is (at the very least) a profoundly ahistorical gesture.”Footnote ⁶

The authors' own arguments and analyses would be bolstered by using racism and, more specifically, white supremacy as lenses to describe the phenomena they track. For example, they describe a shift in the demographics of caseworkers in Florida. Caseworkers are no longer primarily white Americans. According to the authors, this means that the disparate sanctioning outcomes between white Americans and African Americans are not necessarily due to acts of prejudice by white American workers. It is arguable that the welfare system ever relied primarily on individual acts of racism to function in a racist manner, even when white American workers were the majority of caseworkers. As the authors aptly observe, “race” has always been integral to welfare policy in the United States, even when, and perhaps most especially when, people of color were excluded from these programs. Denying African Americans, for example, access to welfare, is in itself a part of white supremacy. That whites need not be individually prejudiced in order for racism to exist is a basic part of the definition of institutionalized racism. Although its effects are all too real, welfare serves primarily as a symbolic policy of racial domination.

Normalizing the usage of white supremacy to describe the continuing assault on the poor and hyperincarceration is, of course, fraught with the risk of simply replacing one term with another while denying the political urgency behind the concept. The goal of policy studies should be to avoid building overly complex models that miss the proverbial forest through the trees. Using this as a starting point, rather than the endpoint of analysis, will help us understand basics about how policy choices that target the poor for both discipline and punishment are structured. Disciplining the Poor is the definitive study that allows us to begin to move toward that goal by recalibrating our discussions of race or, more precisely, white supremacy.