sister souljah.

FILE UNDER: AMERICA/A Moment of Clarity.

words.

"...government control experienced by black women on federal assistance during the 1960s and 1970s was not unlike the forms of control experienced under state psychiatric care in the 1950s. For example, both regimes discouraged poor women of color from becoming mothers, either via sterilization or financial abuse. Even today, women receiving assistance under the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids program (CalWORKs) are restricted to family caps; if they have an additional child after they sign up for CalWORKs, that child may not receive aid. Women of color on welfare who had additional children were accused by caseworkers of just wanting more aid, even though the money was never enough to live on. In the early 1990s, when I was filling out the financial aid papers to apply to San Francisco State University, I learned that my mother survived on $9,000 a year.

During this time, Ronald Reagan’s infamous “Welfare Queen” stereotype conditioned how caseworkers behaved towards poor black women on welfare. I remember once, when my mother had forgotten to fill out one of the many necessary forms, the caseworker curtly told her that she could get “cut off” for a mistake like that. My mother lived in constant fear of having her mental illness discovered. She also feared the rampant crime in Sunnydale, as well as the rumors of “development” that could lead to us being relocated and potentially homeless while they remodeled the dilapidated housing units. She thought she would be free after being released from Napa, only to learn that she had exchanged one form of incarceration for another.

Currently, as Northern California prisons become overcrowded, Napa Hospital has taken in more of the criminally insane. Meanwhile, many people with mental illness remain in the prison system, where they are not getting the treatment they need. In California’s carceral state, the twin institutions of welfare and public housing are the new punishment industry for poor women of color."

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS: Black Women, Mental Hospitals, and Public Housing — A California Carceral Story by Siobhan Brooks