The Boot on Hester Prynne's Neck

America would be a qualitatively different society by now had lawmakers ever taken child welfare policy seriously. There are thousands of counterfactual Americas you can imagine for us to be living in had, for example, our response to poverty been a Christian one, one focused on alleviating poverty rather than shaming the poor.

We know that in America, the crisis of child poverty remains with us, as about one in five American children, today are living under the federal poverty line. Most antipoverty scholars insist that this threshold for defining poverty is actually far too low given the soaring costs of housing and childcare. So in other words, we know that far more children than one in five are suffering from poverty and so this statistic is, in truth, a comforting systemic lie that we’re telling ourselves about ourselves.

Any way you look at it, child poverty policy in America is a human rights crisis. No other way of talking about it that would do justice. Austerity policy means that we are choosing every day to be a country where millions of children must grow up under-resourced, without the basics of safe and adequate housing, nutrition, and healthcare. We subject the most vulnerable of our own citizens to the psychic torture of material deprivation for eighteen years for the crime of having been born to a mother too poor to afford life’s necessities. This is our America. This is what we’re voting for every time we go to the polls.

And we allow this immoral and unjust arrangement to endure because collectively we still really hate Hester Prynne. It’s as simple, stupid, and cruel as that.

A capitalist economy requires an underclass to function. The danger to our present economy posed by women’s liberation is that it would be centered around the liberation of the single mother and making the suffering borne by her children, the collateral damage of this fucked up system, apparent.

By making public aid to children conditional and contingent on the basis of a mother’s marital or employment status, we keep giving the State enormous leverage power over women, who so often find themselves as poor, unwed mothers, one way or another. It’s a kind of weird sexist extortion that we’ve all normalized and accepted because we all hate these single mothers, all the more readily it appears if they happen to be Black. Policymakers try to this all seem more palatable by padding around the edges a bunch of income tax credits and childcare subsidies, but the system, on the whole, is stupid as hell, literally designed with maximum cruelty in mind. It’s hard to imagine any way of reforming it.

Instead of loving the poor as Christ would love them, we’ve created social policies that meet harm with further harm. We still allow our representatives to talk of poor single mothers as if they exist beneath dignity, a pathological need to stamp the boot forever and ever on the neck of Hester Prynne.