Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear: The Proximity of Historical Oppressions to Social Policy Today

Citizenship, housing, and healthcare are basic social needs required for human flourishing. However, access to these foundational pillars of societal wellbeing have always been differentially determined, mirroring welfare policies and practices that are embedded in racism, xenophobia, classism, and sexism. By using three historical exemplars, the studies outlined in this roundtable will contest the commonplace understanding that discriminatory social policies can be explained as historical blind spots. Specifically, the experiences of racialized migrant women caregivers, federal housing subsidy recipients, and patients receiving financial support at end of life, will be used to illustrate the conscious decisions and strategies taken in the past to institutionalize exclusionary and oppressive eligibility requirements. Across all three domains, normative judgments of deserving vs. undeserving have been, and continue to be, predicated on the performance of a putative white, middle class, heteronormative standard.

For example, Canada has simultaneously utilized and devalued the care labor of racialized migrant women since Confederation. This has resulted in a long history of successive governments using the same hierarchical standards, which privilege those who are white and skilled, to determine these women's access to citizenship, thereby relegating them to temporary and precarious working conditions. Reflecting on the US housing sector reveals a similar binary of deservedness. With its growth out of the New Deal, the provision of federally sponsored housing demarcated those entitled to generous and unrestricted home buying loans from the strict and demoralizing eligibility requirements mandated for a limited number of public housing units in increasingly concentrated centers of urban poverty. Finally, the end-of-life sector of US healthcare holds strict work requirements to prove oneself deserving of disability income when diagnosed with a terminal illness. Those who cannot demonstrate a specific work history receive lower rates of monthly financial support at the end of life, or must turn to the government's Compassionate Allowance Program, which only supports individuals with distinct and rare terminal diseases.

The aim of this roundtable is to emphasize that while citizenship, housing, and healthcare are disparate domains, exclusions and inequities are consistent throughout each one's past and present. We cannot claim historical blindspots when there is such predictable ongoing harm in each social sector. As such, it remains necessary to examine the relationship between the historical developments of these institutions, their notions of deservedness and welfare eligibility, and how they manifest in the present day. It is the ubiquity of these issues across three unique domains which encourages us to ask who has historically been centered and advantaged within social policy and practice, and who, as a result, has been marginalized and excluded. This reflexive, critical analysis can foster reparative social welfare research and praxis that can interrupt the cycles of oppression and harm across a range of fields in social welfare.