This book examines the conceptual, historical and practical implications that various social policies in the United States have had on ethnic minorities.

Comprises 33 papers grouped under five themes: The Nature of social policy; The History of social policy; Social policy and the social services; The Political economy of social policy; and International and future perspectives on social policy.

Critical analyses of policies that significantly affect African-American families and communities! African-American Social Workers and Social Policy is the first book of its kind to combine the voices of African-American social work professionals on social policy in one volume. You'll learn about the impact of health, child welfare, and aging, the implications of welfare reform, and the harsh statistics about race and imprisonment from respected practitioners in the field. Each chapter ends with recommendations for policy advocacy, giving you the tools you need to help reform the system. The issues addressed in African-American Social Workers and Social Policy include: how proposed Social Security reforms can help or hinder efforts to bridge the wealth gap the role of grandparents as caregivers the implications of child welfare policies, including the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act of 1994 the effects of race, class, and gender discrimination on African-American women's health the significance of the Human Genome Project how social workers can stand up to the biases of the criminal justice system African-American Social Workers and Social Policy also presents an eye-opening review of the history of mental health policies for African Americans and an action agenda focused on knowledge and empowerment as a solution to pervasive institutional racism. This book is a welcome forum for policy educators, advocates, and those committed to social justice. You will value African-American Social Workers and Social Policy for its clear identification of issues, thorough analysis of the social policy arena and its impact, and comprehensive description of new goals, directions, and possibilities. This book will help you better understand vital social policies that affect African Americans today.

Black Women, Cultural Images and Social Policy offers a critical analysis of the policy-making process. Jordan-Zachery demonstrates how social meanings surrounding the discourses on crime, welfare and family policies produce and reproduce discursive practices that maintain gender and racial hierarchies. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), she analyzes the values and ideologies ensconced in the various images of black womanhood and their impact on policy formation. This book provides exceptional insight into the racing-gendering process of policy making to show how relations of power and forms of inequality are discursively constructed and impact the lives of African American women.

Many social policies of the 1960s and 1970s, designed to overcome poverty and provide a decent standard of living for all Americans, ran into trouble in the 1980s with politicians, with social scientists, and with the American people. Here Nathan Glazer looks back at what went wrong, arguing that our social policies, although targeted effectively on some problems, ignored others that are equally important. Glazer's knowledge and judgment, distilled in this book, will be a source of advice and wisdom for citizens and policymakers alike.

Thirty years after Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, the United States still lags behind most Western democracies in national welfare systems, lacking such basic programs as national health insurance and child care support. Some critics have explained the failure of social programs by citing our tradition of individual freedom and libertarian values, while others point to weaknesses within the working class. In The Color of Welfare, Jill Quadagno takes exception to these claims, placing race at the center of the "American Dilemma," as Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal did half a century ago. The "American creed" of liberty, justice, and equality clashed with a history of active racial discrimination, says Quadagno. It is racism that has undermined the War on Poverty, and America must come to terms with this history if there is to be any hope of addressing welfare reform today. From Reconstruction to Lyndon Johnson and beyond, Quadagno reveals how American social policy has continually foundered on issues of race. Drawing on extensive primary research, Quadagno shows, for instance, how Roosevelt, in need of support from southern congressmen, excluded African Americans from the core programs of the Social Security Act. Turning to Lyndon Johnson's "unconditional war on poverty," she contends that though anti-poverty programs for job training, community action, health care, housing, and education have accomplished much, they have not been fully realized because they became inextricably intertwined with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which triggered a white backlash. Job training programs, for instance, became affirmative action programs, programs to improve housing became programs to integrate housing, programs that began as community action to upgrade the quality of life in the cities were taken over by local civil rights groups. This shift of emphasis eventually alienated white, working-class Americans, who had some of the same needs--for health care, subsidized housing, and job training opportunities--but who got very little from these programs. At the same time, affirmative action clashed openly with organized labor, and equal housing raised protests from the white suburban middle-class, who didn't want their neighborhoods integrated. Quadagno shows that Nixon, who initially supported many of Johnson's programs, eventually caught on that the white middle class was disenchanted. He realized that his grand plan for welfare reform, the Family Assistance Plan, threatened to undermine wages in the South and alienate the Republican party's new constituency--white, southern Democrats--and therefore dropped it. In the 1960s, the United States embarked on a journey to resolve the "American dilemma." Yet instead of finally instituting full democratic rights for all its citizens, the policies enacted in that turbulent decade failed dismally. The Color of Welfare reveals the root cause of this failure--the inability to address racial inequality.