Humanity and Institutional Categorization of the Unemployed Poor in the Context of Czech Welfare System

When welfare professionals in the Czech Republic speak about unemployed, they specify different kind of humanity of the unemployed and qualify them as „deserving“ or „undeserving“ poor. Similar processes of moral differentiation among the poor are ethnographically described by sociologists and anthropologists such as Howe, Haney, Dubois etc., who in their analysis focus on changes of welfare systems in Europe. They focus specifically on the process of creation of categories and thus also moral communities according to which the unemployed were measured and evaluated as „un/deserving“. In the Czech context this process of evaluation is highly loaded with ethnicity - Gypsynness. Roma/Gypsy are the only visible „group“, that is publically assigned to the „undeserving“ category. The welfare professionals has to stand up to paradoxical situation: they mostly share the common-sense and understanding the Roma as „undeserving“, on the other hand they stress neutrality and standard criteria for distributing money to the poor and thus pretend the welfare system as not being ethnically loaded field. The paradox in their standpoint brings ambivalences also into everyday situations among professionals and claimants. These ambivalences open space for responses and for the negotiation of quality of humanity by professionals and by claimants themselves. In the paper (that comes up from participant observation at two Czech welfare offices that I did in 2012) I show, how this pretended neutral space is in Czech context morally loaded field that always come up from racial differentiation among different quality of humanity. In other words I show how these ambivalences are filled with specific meanings of humanity and how claimants stress their humanity in opposition to other claimants alongside the racial line.