[Vision2020] Playing the Race Card

[Rosemary Huskey]

Leonard Pitts provides a thoughtful analysis of (or, perhaps for some V2020
readers, an introduction to)  Southern code-talking.  Since the days of the
morphing of the old Southern Dixicrates into a right-leaning, "strict
constructionist,"  Republican party, the GOP has been embraced by white
southerners, Michelle Bachmann - Jan Breweresque  groupies,  and local
defenders of Southern Slavery As It Was.  Many GOP national leaders have
amply demonstrated that they are little more than private schooled,
carefully polished versions of George Wallace and in this opinion piece Mr.
Pitts calls them out.

Rose Huskey

Commentary Leonard Pitts Jr. From Nixon to Reagan, from Bush to Gingrich,
the GOP plays race card 

I got my first job when I was 12. The deacons at my church paid me $2 a week
to keep it swept and mopped.  So I do not need Newt Gingrich to lecture me
about a good work ethic. In this, I suspect I speak for the vast majority of
39 million African-Americans.

There has been a lot of talk about whether Gingrich's recent language,
including his performance at the recent South Carolina debate and his
earlier declaration that Barack Obama has been America's best "food stamp
president," amounts to a coded appeal to racist sensitivities. The answer is
simple: yes.

In this, Gingrich joins a line of Republicans stretching back at least to
Richard Nixon. From that president's trumpeting of "law and order" (i.e., "I
will get these black demonstrators off the streets") to Ronald Reagan's
denunciation of "welfare queens" (i.e., "I will stop these lazy black women
from living high on your tax dollars") to George H.W. Bush's use of Willie
Horton (i.e., "Elect me or this scary black man will get you") the GOP long
ago mastered the craft of using nonracial language to say racial things.

So Gingrich is working from a well-thumbed playbook when he hectors blacks
about their work ethic and says they should demand paychecks and not be
"satisfied" with food stamps. As if most blacks had ever done anything else.
As if an unemployment rate that for some mysterious reason runs twice the
national average does not make paychecks hard to come by. As if blacks were
the only, or even the majority of, food stamp recipients.

When challenged on this by debate moderator Juan Williams, Gingrich went
after it like Babe Ruth after a hanging curve ball, delivering a strident
defense of the need to teach poor kids the value of a paycheck. "Only the
elites," he lectured, "despise earning money." It won him a standing
ovation.

Let's be clear. To the degree Gingrich's argument is that stubborn,
intergenerational poverty is often fed by habits and ways of life inimical
to the building of wealth, he is exactly right. But those habits and ways
afflict the white hollows of Appalachia as much as the black heart of urban
America, and when Gingrich defines poverty solely as blackness, he is not
critiquing poverty, but race.

The South Carolina audience sure got the message. That state is one of the
poorest in the Union: fifth-lowest median income, poverty rate of 18.2
percent. So if the point is just that the poor must get up off their
backsides, why would they applaud? They are the poor.

They applaud because they understand he is not talking about them. He is
saying, "Elect me and I will get these black people's hands out of your
pocket." For as much as Republicans decry the so-called politics of envy,
they still seem right at home practicing the politics of racial resentment -
and mass distraction.

In so doing, they tap a rich vein of stereotype and preconception about the
supposed laziness of African-American people.

One of my students shared this parable: A rich white man sits with a poor
white man and poor black man at a table laden with cookies. The rich white
man snatches all the cookies but one, then turns to the poor white man and
says, "Watch out for that darky. I think he wants to take your cookie."

It works every time.

 

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