State restructuring since Reagan institutionalized non-compassion toward poor black citizens

Evidence

When Kanye West declared on the national telethon to raise money for the victims of Katrina that George Bush “doesn’t care about black people,” he personalized and individualized what for the past 20 years has been turned effectively into a deeply institutional rationality. Since the Reagan administration, and exacerbated dramatically under George W. Bush, the state has been restructured in such a way that poor people generally, which means especially black and brown citizens, are not to be taken into consideration, cared for, or exhibited compassion by the institutional apparatuses representing the state. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 443

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with Saad-Filho and Johnston’s account of the disciplining ‘new poor’ in the world order literature on punishment and the ‘liberal-repressive’ state. — connects to: Reagan’s California welfare reform enacted neoliberal family-responsibility policies — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 242