Policy design fails when it flattens multiply-situated welfare recipients into a single archetype.

Evidence

By delineating all these identities, I am not calling for balkanization ad infmitum. Strategic essentialism can be theoretically useful and practically necessary, particularly when the goal is to enhance our ability to design solutions for those subordinated in society. For example, current US welfare reform efforts focus on class and gender - poor women. Often implicit in the analysis is race, that is, concern for the black “welfare queen.” Yet there are many different types of welfare recipients. The needs of a minimum-wage black lesbian single parent may be very different than a single white male who is mentally disabled and homeless. A Latina migrant worker, speaking very little English, married to an illegal alien who is battering her, would have different requirements as well. These last examples have just highlighted several identities we have not mentioned previously, including immigration status. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1189

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘strategic essentialism’ for policy design runs into the multiplicity of actual welfare-recipient situations, and what a design that honors intersectionality would look like.
• XREF: Connects to Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory and to critiques of the ‘welfare queen’ trope as a racialized class/gender category.