Ta-Nehisi Coates — The Secret Lives of Inner-City Black Males

Paul Ryan's explanation for urban poverty isn't much different from Barack Obama's. Why did it make liberals so angry?

The Atlantic
The Secret Lives of Inner-City Black Males
Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are two separate issues here. First is the racism endemic to the United States. Secondly, is the use of racism as a political tool by the GOP since Nixon's Southern strategy. Both are despicable but they are different.

There is little more cynical that a politician claiming not to be racist using coded racist strategy and tactics for political advantage. That is why liberals were angry.

With regard to endemic racism that makes such a political strategy not only viable but worth resorting to, ending is a primary national challenge that America has not yet risen to. It's difficult because it has become endemic, but that's no excuse to ignore it, or, worse, blame the victims.

Ian Haney López — Is Paul Ryan Racist?

I take Congressman Ryan at his word that he is not overtly racist, which is a attitudinal and characteristic of a biased mindset. However, I am not so sure that he isn't playing the race card as a political strategy, since that has been the GOP playbook since Nixon's Southern strategy.

I suspect that most people that play the race card are not themselves overtly racist. And I am also quite sure that many people that don't consider themselves racial biased harbor subconscious "stuff" about race and other hot potato subjects that are considered out of bounds culturally in a pluralistic society. This is a complex issue, and it is now being worked out globally as different peoples interact more closely than previously.

Be that as it may, what struck me about what Congressman Ryan said is his emphasis on "inner city" culture and poverty. Curiously, he did not mention rural culture and poverty. Many of the chronically poor and culturally backward are part of the rural GOP base particularly in red states. Coincidently, most of the rural poor are white, although many are non-white too — either of African or Native American descent, and increasingly Latino, too. Could that have anything to do with the choice of words and omission of a significant portion of those in poverty?

The latest GOP nostrum to cure poverty is for the poor to chose not to be poor — that this is America where everyone can succeed. Are the poor to be faulted then? Of course, they bear some of the blame for their  condition, but the most significant causal factor in poverty is government supporting the culture of poverty with hand-outs. So not only do the poor need to stop being lazy and indigent, the welfare state has been put to rest. It's really the bleeding-heart liberals in government that are causing a culture poverty to grow by voting for increases in food stamps and extension of unemployment benefits. The underlying message is that the Democratic Party is buying votes with "your money" and therefore cynically using the poor, preventing them from bootstrapping themselves from poverty by sapping their incentive.

So the story goes. The GOP base seems to love it. Makes perfect sense to them.

BillMoyers.com

Is Paul Ryan Racist?
Ian Haney López | Professor of Law UC Berkeley, and a senior fellow at Demos

Ian Haney-Lopez — How Ronald Reagan used coded racial appeals to galvanize white voters and gut the middle class

 Saint Ronald?

When Reagan picked up the dog whistle in 1980, the continuity in technique nevertheless masked a crucial difference between him versus Wallace and Nixon. Those two had used racial appeals to get elected, yet their racially reactionary language did not match reactionary political positions. Political moderates, both became racial demagogues when it became clear that this would help win elections. Reagan was different. Unlike Wallace and Nixon, Reagan was not a moderate, but an old-time Goldwater conservative in both the ideological and racial senses, with his own intuitive grasp of the power of racial provocation. For Reagan, conservatism and racial resentment were inextricably fused.

In the early 1960s, Reagan was still a minor actor in Hollywood, but he was becoming increasingly active in conservative politics. When Goldwater decided to run for president, Reagan emerged as a fierce partisan. Reagan’s advocacy included a stock speech, given many times over, that drummed up support for Goldwater with overwrought balderdash such as the following: “We are

faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.” Reagan’s rightwing speechifying didn’t save Goldwater, but it did earn Reagan a glowing reputation among Republican groups in California, which led to his being recruited to run for governor of California in 1966. During that campaign, he wed his fringe politics to early dog whistle themes, for instance excoriating welfare, calling for law and order, and opposing government efforts to promote neighborhood integration. He also signaled blatant hostility toward civil rights, supporting a state ballot initiative to allow racial discrimination in the housing market, proclaiming: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.”

Reagan’s race-baiting continued when he moved to national politics. After securing the Republican nomination in 1980, Reagan launched his official campaign at a county fair just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town still notorious in the national imagination for the Klan lynching of civil rights volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner 16 years earlier. Reagan selected the location on the advice of a local official, who had written to the Republican National Committee assuring them that the Neshoba County Fair was an ideal place for winning “George Wallace inclined voters.” Neshoba did not disappoint. The candidate arrived to a raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000 whites chanting “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”—and he returned their fevered embrace by assuring them, “I believe in states’ rights.” In 1984, Reagan came back, this time to endorse the neo-Confederate slogan “the South shall rise again.” As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert concludes, “Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.”

The racism at the heart of the Reagan presidency
How Ronald Reagan used coded racial appeals to galvanize white voters and gut the middle class
Ian Haney-Lopez | John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley

Not just about Reagan and racism. It is also a  history of the ultra-conservative takeover of the GOP, purging the Eisenhower and Rockefeller Republicans, and later all moderates and now even conservatives that are not arch-conservative.