March 3, 2005

Observer Q & A: Celeste Watkins

Assistant professor of sociology and African American studies talks about the welfare office’s move from claims-processing bureau to social support agency

Stephen Anzaldi

Celeste Watkins, assistant professor of sociology and African American studies and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, talks with Pat Vaughan Tremmel, assistant director of media relations.

What was the focus of your dissertation?

I studied welfare offices in Massachusetts, looking at the impact of welfare reform and examining how these agencies can move from claims-processing bureaus to social support agencies, in which workers focus less on policing recipients to make sure that they’re eligible for public assistance and more on coaching and advising low-income women as they transition into the labor market. How does such an organizational transition happen? What are the challenges involved in that?

Why are welfare offices resisting the coaching component of reform?

The desire is often there, but in terms of how welfare workers are rewarded and evaluated, both formally and informally, the focus overwhelmingly has been on efficiency and accuracy, on insuring that fraud is reduced. Thus, it’s difficult to fully realize the goal of coaching clients to become self-sufficient.

Did you find the resistance to social work to be universal in welfare offices?

At this point, there is great diversity among caseworkers in how they define their jobs. Some appreciate that their job title has been changed to social worker and take the rhetorical cues of welfare reform seriously, even though they’re not formally trained as social workers. Others don’t buy into this new professional model and focus on the pragmatic, everyday demands of assuring efficiency and accuracy, of making sure that fraud is quelled. Social work is really not what they’re about. To them, it has not been what they’ve emphasized, and they’re not about to start now.

So it’s sort of chance as to whether or not you get help?

Basically. A woman’s experience in a welfare office is largely shaped by how her worker defines his or her professional identity — as a social worker whose job is to assist and coach her or as an eligibility compliance officer who is happy to use the sanctions and time limits of welfare reform to get her out of the system.

What is the race component of your welfare culture research?

One of the locations of the welfare offices we studied was a medium-sized town about 60 miles outside of Boston, a predominantly white, working-class town that did okay during the textile industry boom, but has been in economic blight ever since that industry moved out of the state. But the community does have affordable and available housing, which attracts low-income families from Boston who are struggling with housing. Many of the office’s clients and caseworkers went to high school with each other, and they’ve worked with each other for years. That small-town colloquialism is challenged when a large number of people move into the area, especially people of color who are easily visible as newcomers. The tension centers caseworkers’ perceptions of these newest residents — many of whom become clients — and concerns that resources are being distributed fairly, in a way that holds true to the feel and culture they’ve been experiencing for years.

Where are the other welfare offices you studied?

In the Boston area. The question I explored is: why do minority caseworkers there, for the most part, support rather than oppose welfare reform, particularly with the racial politics that play into welfare reform and the experiences of poor minority women in the labor market? Part of the reason is that middle-class minority welfare caseworkers see welfare reform as an opportunity for their clients to disprove the stereotypes around minorities and welfare. They adopted the “politics of racial respectability,” the belief that individual behavior and the policing of it are the answer to collective social mobility. If minorities “play by the rules,” how can we then be denied basic human rights and opportunities?

What else are you working on?

A study for which we’re recruiting black women who are HIV positive living in Chicago. African-American and Hispanic women together represent 25 percent of all women, yet they account for 83 percent of AIDS diagnoses reported in 2003. It raises the question of why there’s no public health outcry.

Why isn’t there a public outcry about this growing threat of HIV among women of color?

Many people believe that while SARS and the West Nile virus could happen to anyone, HIV/AIDS is based on what you do. Yet, there is so much evidence that socioeconomic conditions can make a big difference in risk factors. Factors that must be addressed include limited access to quality health care, unbelievable incarceration rates of people of color in this country, where sexually transmitted diseases might unknowingly spread within and outside of prison walls, and economic conditions that might lead to risky sexual practices for survival.