New Book Looks At Social Welfare Policy

ATHENS, GA  -- Jerome H. Schiele, associate dean and professor in the University of Georgia School of Social Work, released Social Welfare Policy: Regulation and Resistance Among People of Color this January. The book, edited by Schiele, is a collection of manuscripts by various authors who frame social welfare policy in the United States from a racism-centered viewpoint and discuss how people of color have organized to resist those policies.

“Racism continues to be part of the implementation and development of policies, both historically and in contemporary times,” said Schiele. “What’s unique about this book is that several social welfare policy scholars discuss how social welfare policies have regulated the lives of people of color, but they haven’t really spent much time talking about how people of color have organized to resist the oppressive features and consequences of those policies.”

The book covers a range of national social welfare policies that address employment, health care, education, welfare reform, immigration and child welfare matters.  Each section of the book focuses on a different segment of the population and includes African Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, Latino Americans and Native Americans.

“Not many texts in social welfare policy have relied on a racism-centered framework,” Schiele said. “Although racism is discussed in the major social welfare policy texts, it usually is eclipsed by greater attention devoted to social class, gender and other non-racial issues.”

Schiele dedicated the book to his late father, W. Bernard Schiele, a pastor and community leader in Newport News, Va. “Using Christianity as a backdrop, he fought against the consequences of the confluence of racism and poverty, which is what this book attempts to illuminate—that racism and poverty impact people of color in major ways, and we need to continue to understand how that is done,” he said. “But also, we need to understand how people of color have organized to resist these unjust policies.”

Whitney Morreau, an advanced standing MSW student who graduated in 2010, assisted Schiele in editing the manuscripts.