April 13, 2021
Today, the administration issued a proclamation on Black Maternal Health Week. It noted that Black American mothers die from pregnancy-related complications at two to three times the rates of White, Hispanic, Asian American, and Pacific Islander women, no matter what their income or education levels. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris declared their commitment to “building a health care system that delivers equity and dignity to Black, Indigenous, and other women and girls of color.”
There has been talk lately about President Biden assuming the mantle of Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who piloted the nation through the Great Depression and World War II. There is a lot to that. Biden is enthusiastically embracing the idea that the government has a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure. That ideology has been on the ropes since voters elected President Ronald Reagan, who argued that the government pioneered by Roosevelt smothered business growth and stifled individualism by levying taxes for programs that Washington bureaucrats thought would benefit the nation.
Since he took office, Biden has used the government to help ordinary Americans. He began by ramping up coronavirus vaccines at an astonishing rate, and then got through Congress the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, designed to rebuild the economy after the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. Now he is turning to the American Jobs Plan, another massive package designed to remake American infrastructure as it creates high-paying jobs, just as FDR’s New Deal did.
Biden is clearly trying to undermine the Republican mantra that government is inefficient, and he is succeeding. His own chief of staff, Ron Klain, has made it a point to compare the two men.
But an article by Laura Barron-Lopez, Alex Thompson, and Theodoric Meyer in Politico begs to differ. Based on an interview with House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), the piece makes the argument that Biden is far more President Harry Truman than FDR. Unlike FDR, who constantly had to compromise with white southern Democrats to get his measures through Congress and thus had to back off on issues of racial justice, Truman worked to advance civil rights in the U.S. More like Truman than FDR, Biden has focused on addressing racial equity in his response to the various crises he has taken on in his first days in office.
To my mind, though, what jumps out about Biden and Harris is not their focus on either jobs or Black Americans, but rather their attention to the needs of children and mothers. Even before the pandemic, 21.4 million American women lived in poverty, as did nearly 11 million children, about 14.4% of kids under the age of 18.
The American Rescue Plan increased the Child Tax Credit from $2000 to $3600 for children under age 6 and $3000 for other children under age 18, offering monthly payments immediately, in advance of the 2022 tax filing season. The measure also provided $15 billion in expanded childcare assistance, and it increased food benefits (SNAP) by 15%.
Experts estimated that the American Rescue Plan could cut child poverty in the U.S. by more than half.
The administration’s American Jobs Plan continues the focus on children and their mothers as it sets out to shore up the caregiving economy. The coronavirus pandemic hit women particularly hard as women, particularly women of color, left the workforce to care for children when childcare centers closed. Women have lost 5.4 million jobs, nearly a million more than men. The American Jobs Plan would invest $400 billion in the caregiving economy; $137 billion in schools, early learning centers, and community colleges; $111 billion in clean drinking water; and $621 billion in transportation.
FDR tried to shore up the nuclear family, headed by a man—usually a White man—enabling him to support a wife and children. Truman nodded toward including men of color in that vision. But Biden and Harris are recentering American society on children and on their mothers, giving mothers the power to support their children regardless of their marital status. Theirs is a profound reworking of American society, much more in keeping with what has always been our reality despite our mythological focus on an independent man and his family.
The crisis in Black maternal health is not new; a 2017 report from the LA Times revealed that maternal death rates more than doubled between 1987 and 2013, with Black women suffering in the highest percentages. But it is hard to imagine any previous president making it a priority. That Biden does suggests that his vision of rebuilding America is not that of FDR or Truman, but something entirely original.
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Notes:
https://msmagazine.com/2021/03/31/biden-infrastructure-child-care-mothers-work-women-jobs/
https://www.childrensdefense.org/blog/american-jobs-plan/
https://www.clasp.org/publications/fact-sheet/child-care-estimates-american-rescue-plan
https://www.fns.usda.gov/news-item/usda-003721
https://www.latimes.com/world/global-development/la-na-texas-black-maternal-mortality-2017-htmlstory.html#nws=mcnewsletter
It's remarkable how President Biden is exceeding the expectations of even his supporters. Compared to Trump, he was always going to do a good job. But Biden must be maddening to the Republicans. Not just his aggressive agenda that is anathema to the do-nothing-but-cut-taxes GOP, but his low-key empathetic leadership. It's a daunting PR challenge to effectively attack a president whose major policy proposals are supported by significant majorities of the American people.
We must remind ourselves daily that the legislative progress achieved so far and more ahead wouldn't be possible without the outcome of Georgia's two Senate races. So much more needs to be done. But everything hinges on the next round of elections in 2022 and overcoming a party hell-bent on suppressing voting.
For the longest time I have lamented the lack of public will to support child welfare programs. The media sensationalizes the worst events of child deaths, and even ostensible investigative journalism seems more like a reporter’s quest for a Pulitzer than on bringing problems to light in order to help make things better. A journalist might include a statement about agencies that are understaffed and have high caseloads, but what’s to be done about that? Nothing.
In my lamenting, I have appreciated the various prevention programs, starting with early childhood education. Substance abuse, domestic violence, physical abuse, and sexual abuse perpetrated by adults invariably reveal antecedents in parents’ own life experiences, going back to their own childhoods. Intergenerational child abuse and neglect is particularly heart-breaking. Well, it’s all heart-breaking. But at least the power of state legislations, backed by federal programs such as Medicare, SNAP, SSDI, KinGAP, Adoptions Assistance Program, and Indian Child Welfare Act, provide the authority to intervene for the protection of children while affording parents due process in court, which if finding cause, issues family maintenance or reunification orders for counseling and parent education to fix the presenting problem.
Dr. Richardson’s citation of Ms Magazine points out that the American Rescue Plan Act only “restored a baseline that will help more than 60 percent of the child care programs in the United States…Many parents, especially mothers, will be able to return to their jobs, paving the way for a just and equitable economic recovery.”
I’m a glass-half-full person, but this childcare glass is still 40 percent empty. We’ll take what we can for now, but we need to keep advocating for more than even restoration to the 100 percent level because that is NOT SUFFICIENT.
What to do about substance abuse, domestic violence, physical abuse, and sexual abuse? Education based interventions really work—not at all perfectly, but overall, significantly, to help families get to a better place, even as this is far down the line of a person’s openness to new learning.
In the bigger scheme of things, the earlier, the better. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is real. From infancy, security grown from having basic needs met matters. Food security (quality nutrition, not just quantity), safe housing, sufficient sleep, and freedom from violence matter. On the other hand, prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol and childhood exposure to abuse, chronic neglect, and/or violence cause trauma that often has lasting detrimental effects on child development, including hypervigilance, learning disabilities, and deleterious acting out behaviors—like repeating what they saw the grown-ups do or what the grown-ups did to them. And so the cycle continues to the next generation.
By the way, these issues are not limited to poor, marginalized families. These issues are also prevalent in wealthy families where children can still be emotionally neglected and grown with a toxic mix of entitlement, thrill-seeking, and lack of responsibility.
HCR readers often have asked what can we do—about trumpers, QAnon, insurrectionists, far right Evangelical Christians, white supremacists—and the answer comes down to early education. HCR herself has said we can change a society in 20 years, which is the time it takes to raise a new generation. Education means attending to how and what children learn both at home and in school—and more and more, in the media.
How: At home, learning by example, the example set by parents and meaningful adults, is the single most powerful method of teaching.
What: Teach children critical thinking skills. Respect authority and question authority. Both/and paradigm, not just either/or. Grow intellectual curiosity and empathy. Pride and humility. Learn self-reflection and taking responsibility. Conflict management, redirection, and de-escalation. Civics education. Financial literacy. Respect differences, and step up anti-racism, advocacy, and being an ally. Have moral courage. Learn how to listen. Walk your talk about equal opportunity and RESPECT for women, LGBTQ, people of color, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, refugees, differently abled people, and people who don’t have a lot of wealth.
All this starts with supporting families, however they are structured, and having quality education starting with childcare as needed.
Biden and the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan Act only restored 60 percent of childcare programs. That's quantity. Quality? Pay more than minimum wage for childcare workers? Pay for teachers and school programs and higher education for our children to learn all those critical thinking skills and civic responsibility? We still have a long way to go.
Casting a vote is no longer a guaranteed way to make our wishes known to our elected representatives. The Republican agenda of the past 40 years, backed by dark money, is in full force in state legislatures across the country to restrict voting so as to manipulate minority Republican numbers to have power over the majority of the people.
Make your voice heard to oppose voter suppression bills and to support voter expansion bills.
Most importantly, make your voice heard to support HR1/S1 For the People Act to ensure voting rights, end gerrymandering, reform campaign finance, and reform ethics in all three branches of government. Even moderate Republicans like hearing about getting billionaires out of politics.
HR1/S1 is the necessary foundation for passing subsequent progressive, humanistic legislation to both make this world a better place in the here and now, and to grow our children to become good citizens of the future.
For all our differences in this group of HCR Substackers, we have amazing brain power and big hearts. Turn our good words into good action.