“Bombs Cost More Than Welfare”: Rethinking “Responsibility” in Sapphire’s PUSH

Abstract

Sapphire’s first novel, PUSH, is the story of a young girl becoming an adult amidst the dual cultural challenges of poverty and receding social welfare resources in 1980s Harlem. The novel was published in 1996, the same year that the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was passed. PRWORA emphasized “workfare,” getting welfare recipients into the workplace and off assistance as soon as possible and generally cutting funding for and restricting welfare benefits.² The debate regarding initiatives to cut or restrict welfare benefits often grew ugly, at times trading on racist and sexist stereotypes that especially targeted single African American mothers. Three decades before PRWORA, in 1965, the Moynihan report, citing matriarchy as a large causal factor in African American poverty and “pathology,” in part legitimized the tendency to blame the dominant role of the single African American mother for her and her family’s poverty (US Department of Labor).³ Getting welfare recipients into the workplace was the major emphasis of the PRWORA reform. Sapphire’s text argues that, rather than pushing recipients off welfare and into any job available, reformers should push welfare recipients towards the pursuit of education, literacy, and self-expression, pursuits that will eventually lead to the individual no longer needing or wanting welfare. Though this type of reform could be more time-consuming and costly than PRWORA-type initiatives, it is ultimately more humane, compassionate, and beneficial to both the individual and the society that the individual’s contributions strengthen.

[B]ombs cost more than welfare. Bombs to murder kids ’n shit. Guns to war people—all that cost more than milk ‘n Pampers. —Sapphire, PUSH ¹