Linda Faye Williams's book seeks to identify “how, when and why American social policy became fused with the politics of race” and what that has meant for the development and evolution of the welfare state in the United States. The author's central argument is that the welfare state was “grafted onto preexisting conditions of race relations,” and the long-term consequence of this grafting is that even today, the organization of social policy in the United States continues to reproduce advantages for whites and disadvantages for many people of color. Further, as social welfare policy institutionalizes white advantage, this in turn tends to block movement in the direction of more universalistic social policy (p. 14). Williams supports this contention by revisiting the political history of social welfare policy, from just after the Civil War up to the Clinton administration's efforts at welfare “reform” in 1996.

William's study is part of a small and relatively recent subset of scholarship on social welfare policy in the United States—including Jill Quadagno's The Color of Welfare (1994), Michael K. Brown's Race, Money, and the American Welfare State (1999), and Robert C. Lieberman's Shifting the Color Line (1999)—that looks at the ways racial subordination was perpetuated in the design and administration of various social welfare policies. Social policy has never addressed this legacy, with the result that whites generally enjoy the better of the two tracks of social welfare policy: one being the entitlements typically available by way of employment, the other being means-tested government provision.

Williams departs from these other works in two important ways. First, The Constraint of Race covers more ground historically, by beginning with an examination of Civil War pensions and the Freedman's Bureau, and offering subsequent chapters on the New Deal era, the civil rights/Great Society era, and the period of retrenchment signaled in part by Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. The author devotes two chapters to the presidency of Bill Clinton—giving considerable attention to his civil rights and social policy record—and includes a very useful chapter that documents continuing disparities between whites and people of color on a number of key economic indicators, such as income, wealth, and employment. This historical sweep supports one of her central points: In the history of the United States, the federal government has intervened twice to extend civil and social rights to African Americans and other minority groups—in the decade or so following the Civil War and in the decade or so following the Civil Rights movement. Both periods were relatively short-lived, and both efforts were limited by the segmented nature of U.S. social policy—the fact that entitlements to public goods are established and administered at the federal and state level—and by the fact that challenges to white privilege are typically followed by periods during which conservative politicians exploit white opposition to the federal government's interventions on behalf of racial minorities, who are stereotyped as dangerous, parasitic, and therefore undeserving of public support. Indeed, Williams correctly notes that in the 1990s, “the tone of public rhetoric throughout the debates over crime and welfare was eerily similar to that of the Reconstruction era” (p. 275).

Perhaps the most significant difference between this study and others of its genre has to do with its focus on white privilege, the “flip side” of nonwhite subordination. Throughout the historical analysis, Williams highlights the ways in which white identity carries with it an implicit “property value.” By this she means that “whiteness” represents and facilitates a different opportunity structure in the areas of housing, education, employment, and criminal justice. Whiteness reflects accumulated advantages of income and wealth. Here, she is drawing from concepts from the broad field of critical race theory, which seeks to explain and examine the construction of white identity and the psychological and material benefits it has conferred over history.

The reassessment of Clinton's legacy is among the noteworthy contributions of this study, and the two chapters covering that administration clearly support the central argument for looking at whiteness or white privilege to make sense of developments in social policy. Williams looks at crime, welfare reform, and other initiatives to make the point that although Clinton enjoyed broad support from African Americans, the laws he signed in these areas reflected conservative, not liberal, orthodoxy. The crime bill of 1993 stiffened mandatory sentencing and disregarded racial bias in sentencing, most significantly as it concerns the death penalty. The welfare legislation of 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, established time limits and work requirements. Clinton offered at best tepid support of affirmative action. These positions partly reflected his stance as a member of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization that advocates political centrism and a rhetoric that seeks in part to distance the party from any obvious association with racial minorities, especially African Americans. Clinton's policy choices also reflected the political dominance of the Republican Party after 1994.

The Clinton years also provide Williams with an opportunity to analyze black intragroup differences—or interests, really—that were apparent in the response of black political elites to threats to affirmative action and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and to the call for more punitive measures in criminal sentencing. Black elites vigorously defended the policy most important to middle-class interests—affirmative action—and basically capitulated on the others. This class dimension probably could have been probed more deeply.

Indeed, Williams probably pays too little attention to the social and political construction of class identity. Race and class identity are constituted mutually, and that goes a long way in explaining why appeals to whiteness, once explicit but today coded, enjoy such resonance among so many white Americans. This is a really a minor quibble, more a matter of emphasis than omission.

Williams ends her study by revisiting the debate about how best to advance civil and social rights in the contemporary era. She correctly rejects the position of Theda Skocpol, William Julius Wilson, and others who would emphasize universal policies over those that are targeted more specifically to minority groups on essentially two grounds. First, since universal policies like the Great Society are often perceived as “racial” in their impact, there is hardly any guarantee that many whites would not perceive universal programs as targeted, and therefore oppose them. Second, and perhaps more importantly, racial subordination requires special remedy because of continuing discrimination on the basis of race.

Williams's argument is convincing, and her grasp of the scholarship on the welfare state and critical race theory guarantees engaging and insightful reading. The Constraint of Race should be read by students and scholars interested in social welfare policy in the United States, and the ways that constructions of racial identity have shaped and will continue to shape debates about the nature of public provision in the United States.