The new scholarship on race has made major contributions to our understanding of social welfare politics. Yet when it comes to placing race in the context of other forces shaping social policy, it tends to falter. Few scholars, of course, are so bold as to claim that race is the motor force of welfare state development. But in their emphases and their arguments, they generally suggest that citizens inevitably judge social provision through blinders heavily shaped by racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice. Martin Gilens, in his (1991) account of Why Americans Hate Welfare, argues, for example, that distrust of antipoverty relief in the United States reXects the twin beliefs of white Americans that most people who receive welfare are black and that blacks are less committed to the work ethic than are other Americans. While Gilenss point is restricted to antipoverty beneWts, the general tenor of the new work on race and social policy is that such beneWts are the leading case for a basi

In pointing toward this more ambitious claim, the new scholarship on race risks running aground on two opposed shoals. On the one hand, relatively straightforward arguments about how racist beliefs inform the formation and evolution of social programs are clear in their mechanisms and in their implications about what supportive evidence should look like. Yet they are also limited in their reach, for many areas of the welfare state do not appear racialized in the sense of being motivated by explicitly racist intentions. On the other hand, the claim that social policies are race-laden because they intersect with larger features of society marked by racial hierarchy has considerableindeed near-totalreach, but the political mechanisms it highlights are diVuse, and quite problematic as subjects of empirical inquiry. Ironically, in fact, the broadest of such claims are quite similar in their observational implications to the arguments of dissenting scholars who have argued that what is notab

If race risks being is everythinghidden, all-encompassing, unchangingthen it nothing, too.

2 Gender and Social Policy ......................................................................................................................................................................................... While race has long been a central theme in the study of the welfare state, gender has not. This despite the fact that women represent chief beneWciaries of the major family assistance programs of the welfare state, and despite the fact that female reform leaders have played a large role in the development of social policy in many nations. No doubt a good deal of this neglect can be chalked up to the biases of traditionally male-dominated and -oriented research. Yet this explanation is incomplete. Long after gender was a major focus of work in the social sciences, the welfare state was mostly viewed through the lens of male wage-earners and their struggle for expanded social protection.