US Foundations 🧱

• The first couple hundred years of the United States are marked by Slavery and Genocide, these underlay the founding of america and created the racial wealth gap between minorities.
• Land dispossession is a major deal to native Americans and greatly hurt their economic capacity leading to other issues like dumping, improper infrastructure, and climate based economic costs
• Millions of black people worked without pay or access to land, resources, etc, with families broken up, and unable to join unions.
• Black americans were often last hired, and first fired, combined with constant economic issues black people were often displaced.

New Deal Era 💶

• New deal programs reexamined what the federal government was meant to do, leading to an expanse of Relief checks and job programs to lower unemployment, recovery programs to stimulate the agriculture industry, and reform to correct problems in the economy and prevent future depressions
• FDR increased rights for labor, created social security, farm assistance programs, and others
• The WPA (works progress administration) worked to push the federal writers project and public works of art projects, which gave money to writers and artists to document and grow black art. This explosion of civil service explosion from 1933 to 1946
• The national recovery act of 1933 claimed to help end racism, but just increased the gap and created union exclusion
• The right to work movement claimed to solve inequality, however it did the complete opposite. As the national labor movement was taking hold, black workers campaigned together working with whites in desegregated unions, causing black Americans to start moving into the middle class. The southern elites found their answer in an oil elite, he lobbied states to pass anti union laws which kept black workers disenfranchised.

<aside> <img src="/icons/library_pink.svg" alt="/icons/library_pink.svg" width="40px" /> Even though the federal government was doing good, local state governments would deny black people benefits by withholding relief

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• As new support systems were put in place, they disproportionately benefited white people.

Welfare 🪙

• Many on welfare feel that the state is designed to hurt people, rather than helping them
• Poor people often feel mistreated, spied on, and culture makes many feel that they need to live poorly instead of buying things of any quality
• Economics created a culture that is hierarchical and paternalistic
• Welfare reform came after New Federalism, which created TANF policies, focused on promoting work, reducing spending, promoting responsibility, and addressing out of wedlock.
• New TANF (temporary assistance for needy families) requires strict time spent looking for jobs.
• The concept of a walfare queen, which was just one person who had two IDs, started a wave of movements against welfare policies.