File: powell final for Darby 792 Created on: 3/15/2009 12:55:00 PM Last Printed: 4/3/2009 10:11:00 AM DENVER UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 86.Obama Act, often described as the quintessential universal policy, was universal, only insofar as the universal was a white, male, able-bodied worker.29 In its early years, the elderly were excluded since they did not have a history of paying contributions into the system.30 Under the cultural norms of the era, men were the primary wage earners, and women typically worked in the home. As a consequence of discriminatory patterns, they were often kept out of most areas of the labor force. Unpaid household labor and child rearing responsibilities are not counted toward Social Security earnings. Even today, women who take time off to raise children or select careers with more flexible working hours will earn less, on average, then their male counterparts, and will therefore have lower social security benefits upon retirement. And because of exclusions of agricultural and domestic workers, exclusions built-in to appease Southern resistance to the Act, sixty-five percent of African-Americans were denied its protections.31 The following question helps to expose the conceptual problem: Why is it divisive to focus on race-specific programs or talk about race?32 The stock explanation is that race does not matter. But even if race does not matter why is such an approach seen as divisive? The very intensity of racial feelings in our society belies the assertion that race does not matter. The energy and need for race not to matter to whites in and of itself suggests that race does indeed matter. There is an assumption that racially targeted programs create white resentment because there is a sense that whites who are playing by the rules are having things taken from them and given to undeserving non-whites who do not play by the same rules. This resentment is, apparently, not of the Jim Crow form. These whites are willing to accept any non-white that plays by the rules. What they object to is helping those they perceive as rule- (2001). If we look at not just social security itself but how it interacts with other systems, it is clearly not universal. Even President Bush cynically noted that social security is not fair to blacks because they die earlier than whites. Michael Kranish, Bush Argues His Social Security Plan Aids Blacks, BOSTON GLOBE, Jan. 30, 2005, at A1. 29. Targeted policies and programs (poorhouses in the 19th Century, mother’s pensions in 1910, the War on Poverty in the 1960s) are likely to be viewed through the prism of zero-sum politics. At a time of perceived scarcity and contracting government budgets, targeted policies may be viewed as favoring some constituent group rather than the public good. If the target group is historically disfavored or considered “undeserving,” targeted policies risk being labeled “preferences” for “special interests.” In order to avoid alienating voters, policies are often packaged for broad appeal. See THEDA SKOCPOL, SOCIAL POLICY IN THE UNITED STATES: FUTURE POSSIBILITIES IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 250-51 (Princeton Univ. Press 1995). 30. See LIEBERMAN, supra note 28, at 34. 31. See IRA KATZNELSON, supra note 22, at 43. 32. Many liberals are concerned that any targeted or particular program will not work because it will not maintain the necessary support. See Theda Skocpol, Targeting within Universalism: Politically Viable Policies to Combat Poverty in the United States, in THE URBAN UNDERCLASS 411 (Christopher Jencks & Paul E. Peterson eds., 1990); WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, THE TRULY DISADVANTAGED (1990). They may be right to be skeptical of a targeted program, but this does not speak to the problems of false universalisms. A number of scholars who are skeptical of targeted programs have started to embrace a form of targeted universalism instead.