The distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor has always been critical in the context of American poverty policy. Recent work by Martin Gilens (1999), Ange-Marie Hancock (2004), and Deborah Ward (2005) has demonstrated the ways in which this distinction has been racialized. Such work illustrates the promise of an intersectional approach for fields ranging from the study of public opinion to historical institutionalism and contemporary policy analysis. Indeed, at this point in our disciplinary history, it is difficult to imagine how research in any of these areas can be done in either an empirically satisfying or normatively responsible way without attention to intersectionality.