Great Society programs functioned as top-down incorporation rather than radical empowerment

Evidence

Many civil rights activists went to work in the housing, healthcare delivery, legal services, education, and “community action” programs set up as part of the Great Society (McAdam 1988). These people were the foot soldiers of service provision, advocacy, and to some extent mobilization. Programs such as the War on Poverty, Model Cities, and Head Start, among others, brought resources and jobs to the ghettos, barrios, and reservations. But reforms of this type could also be interpreted as classic examples of incorporation, at times resembling the “machine” politics of Chicago or Philadelphia more than the radical work of the black freedom movement in the South such as SNCC’s “freedom schools,” for example. The landscape created by new reforms thus echoed the critical reflections originally posed by E. Franklin Frazier in his classic text Black Bourgeoisie (1957a). — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 181

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the racial-formation concept of ‘incorporation’ as the state’s answer to racial insurgency, anchoring vault claims on co-optation vs radical change. — connects to: General incorporation laws dissolved a major instrument of social control — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 4449; Public service programs stabilize capitalism by softening its harms while stigmatizing recipients — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 126; Programs that ignore people’s worldview constitute cultural invasion despite good intentions — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 275
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: General incorporation laws dissolved a major instrument of social control — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 4449; Public service programs stabilize capitalism by softening its harms while stigmatizing recipients — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 126; Programs that ignore people’s worldview constitute cultural invasion despite good intentions — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 275