Ain't No Trust. Judith Levine
acknowledge my dear friends Elizabeth Clifford, Brian Gran, David Shulman, and Christopher Wellin, who lent their encouragement and perceptive advice throughout the duration of the project.
During a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholars postdoctoral fellowship, I enjoyed the hospitality of Sandy Danziger, Sheldon Danziger, Ariel Kalil, and Catherine McLaughlin. Mary Corcoran read my work and promoted it enthusiastically. Denise Anthony, Betsy Armstrong, and Paula Lantz not only became good friends but also gave advice over the years at key moments. Denise, an expert on the trust literature, provided entrée into it, read most of the manuscript’s chapters, and served as my go-to person for checks on how I was integrating concepts from the trust and poverty literatures.
Temple University has been a wonderful environment in which to bring the project to fruition. I treasure the support and insights of my colleagues here. Julia Ericksen, who (as chair at the time) recruited me to the department, read the manuscript in its entirety—including some chapters more than once. As both cheerleader and insightful critic, she was invaluable in helping me complete the book. Sherri Grasmuck and Matt Wray both read chapters and advised on how to make the arguments clearer and more engaging to readers. Conversations with Gretchen Condran, Kim Goyette, and Josh Klugman helped me hone my arguments. My current department chair, Bob Kaufman, is supportive in every way. Thanks are also due to Rebecca Alpert, Kevin Delaney, Rosario Espinal, Joyce A. Joyce, Laura Levitt, Peter Logan, and Heather Thompson.
I also benefited from the knowledge and supportiveness of a host of other colleagues. Evelyn Brodkin gave early encouragement to pursue this project, and her ethnographic work on caseworkers has been an invaluable resource for checking the validity of my respondents’ reports. Susan Lambert was central to helping me see the consistency of the theme of distrust across the contexts I studied. Julia Henly is a steadfast friend who spent endless hours talking with me, reading my work, and generally being in my corner. Harold Pollack discussed the book’s ideas with me and offered his support in multiple ways. Aimee Dechter has continually provided constructive criticism and equally enthusiastic support. Kate Cagney, Peter Conrad, Clifton Emery, Malitta Engstrom, Helen Levy, M. Katherine Mooney, and Bill Sites have given me both encouragement and insights. My students in both my graduate course on inequality and my undergraduate course on poverty have given me helpful feedback on the book’s material. Susanne Rosenberg, my dear friend since childhood, proofread the manuscript meticulously.
Annette Lareau has long been a champion of this project. She read the entire manuscript twice. I thank her for her tremendous generosity and sage advice. Maia Cucchiara also read the entire manuscript and provided terrific insights on how to reshape several chapters.
The project was sustained through funding provided by a variety of sources. During the first round of interviews, I was supported by an NSF Dissertation Improvement Award; the NSF fellowship program in Poverty, Race, and Urban Inequality at Northwestern University; a Northwestern University Dissertation Grant; and a Northwestern University Alumnae Association Dissertation Fellowship. In later stages, I received funding from the Center for Health Administration Studies; the Center for Human Potential; the Sloan Center for Children, Families, and Work; a Temple University faculty summer research grant; a Temple sabbatical semester; and a Center for Humanities at Temple faculty fellowship.
It has been a pleasure to work with my editor Naomi Schneider, who has given me astute advice throughout, and with the editorial and production staff at the University of California Press. I thank the reviewers whose thoughtful suggestions benefited the manuscript greatly. I also thank Carolyn Bond for her keen editorial eye.
I was blessed with parents who considered it their job to provide unending support without ever expecting anything in return. It is painful that my father, who was in effect my earliest academic adviser, is not here to see the completed book. But I am comforted that he knew of my contract with University of California Press before his death. My mother’s quiet sensitivity and insightfulness set a great example to try to follow in conducting qualitative work. I thank her for all the sacrifices she has made for me. No sister has ever had her sister’s back better than Jan Levine has mine. And my brother-in-law Michael Zuckerman is right behind her. I thank them for all of the meals, conversations about politics, and encouragement. My brother Jonathan Levine died before I knew what profession I would pursue or that I would write this book. But the gifts he gave me while he was here—his confidence in me, his wisdom about what is important, and his example of how to tell a story well—will last my lifetime. My parents-in-law Shelly and Bob Sobel arrive for visits wanting to know what they can do to help and how my work is going. I thank them and my siblings-in-law Laurence and Joan Sobel and David Sobel for their wonderful support. I also have a rich network of aunts, uncles, cousins, and dear friends. I am deeply grateful to them all.
My daughter Julia has brought pure joy to my life. She has supported me in numerous ways, from decorating my office with signs, to coming up with ideas for the book’s cover, to being more patient than children should have to be when their mothers are busy working. Writing the book would have been a much drearier experience without exposure to her cheery disposition. Ed Sobel has seen this project through from glimmer of an idea to completion. He has listened to me battle through the ideas, given me writing advice, and put up with my faulty estimations of when I would be finished. There are many positive adjectives I could use to describe Ed. If I were forced to pick one, though, it would be trustworthy. Now that I have written this book, I understand how valuable that is.
Introduction
One afternoon during the broiling hot summer of 1995, I sat in a tiny attic apartment on Chicago’s West Side talking with Bethany Grant, a thirty-four-year-old divorced African American mother.1 Bethany was living with the youngest three of her five children and, temporarily, with her friend Sheena and Sheena’s children. The two-bedroom apartment was cramped for such a large number of people, and stifling hot, but the trees surrounding its windows made it feel like a tree house. Bethany’s willowy frame and flair for creating fashionable outfits from even the simplest of clothes gave her a certain grace. Just like her tree-house home, Bethany seemed to float above the stark reality of her meager resources.
Bethany spoke calmly while reporting her struggles as a single mother experiencing financial hardship. By the time she paid for rent, gas, and electricity, she had almost no money left to get through the month. She had no cushion to soften the blow of any unforeseen setbacks. As a result, she was keenly aware of the risks involved if her navigation of the welfare system and the low-wage labor market went awry. On the basis of personal experience, she also had a deep skepticism of both the employers and the welfare caseworkers who guarded the gates of entry to resources. Bethany liked working, but whenever she took a job while she was on welfare she felt she risked that her caseworker would cut off her welfare benefits, even the ones to which she was entitled and on which she relied for survival.2 Sometimes the hassle of “fighting to get them back” made her think working was “not worth it.” Once, Bethany and her kids almost ended up homeless after she took a part-time job and reported it to the welfare office. Her earnings from the job were so low that she still qualified for a portion of her welfare benefits as well as food stamps and Medicaid coverage for herself and her children,3 but her caseworker “messed up” her case by mistakenly cutting off the benefits she still was legally allowed.4 “Every time I’ve worked, they wind up messing my whole case up. My case was messed up for like almost four months. I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was just by luck I had a friend that gave me a place to stay because my gas was [shut] off during the winter. . . . If he hadn’t been around, I don’t know what, I probably be on the street.”
Bethany also doubted that employers could be trusted to treat her fairly. This distrust, like her distrust of her caseworkers, kept her out of the labor market at times. For instance, her concerns about one work supervisor led her to leave the job and return fully to the welfare rolls before eventually cycling into another job. Bethany’s brother had gotten her the job at the lobby concession stand in the downtown office building where he worked. At first Bethany enjoyed the position and appreciated the new skills it gave her, but as time wore on she became increasingly displeased with her boss’s shirking of duties while talking on the phone and requests that Bethany run personal errands for her. Bethany was happy to work hard running