ABSTRACT
One of the curiosities of the debate over welfare and the legacy of the Great Society is the way in which critics in both the conservative and liberal camps have implicated African Americans. The contradiction between neoliberals and conservatives has erected a racial mythology of the American welfare state. This chapter argues that the race-neutral or nonexclusive social policies elides this history and the relationship between race and social policy at the core of the American welfare state, with consequent implications for any notion of a biracial class coalition. Exclusion of African Americans from the Social Security Act and other New Deal legislation left a tangled, bitter legacy that reinforced racial inequalities. Social and political changes ignited by the New Deal set the stage for the unraveling of Jim Crow in the South and the second great wave of migration from sharecroppers' shacks in the South to the tenements of northern ghettos.
