Republican racism rears its ugly head – again
Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
“Are GOP candidates playing the race card?” reads the headline to a January 9th article in the Washington Post.
You might as well ask if Pope Benedict is a Roman Catholic.
The recent comments and decades-old newsletters of several of the leading Republican candidates clearly show that the GOP is definitely playing the race card, and that it has been doing so since Ron Paul was an obscure and considerably younger politician.
A better question might be when, since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson and Congress had the temerity to enact into law what this country is supposed to stand for—fairness, equal rights—have Republicans stopped playing the race card?
Granted, a party that consistently stands for the interests of the richest one percent (as the tax policies of George W. Bush implicitly demonstrated and the current GOP-controlled House of Representatives has shown more explicitly) needs to conjure up a lot of scapegoats and to sow the politics of division, fear, and hatred to make the 99 percent forget their material interests for the sake of symbols, prejudices, illusions, and delusions.
At one time or another, gays, immigrants, women (especially feminists, single mothers and welfare recipients), poor people, hippies, anti-war activists, union members, and many other constituencies—not to mention foreign enemies real and imagined—all have felt the sting of demonization at the hand of Republicans.
Each general election brings forth a fresh Satan—this year it is “illegal aliens.” But there is one group in particular that is perennially at the top of the list of GOP scapegoats: African Americans.
If there is one predominant key among the several factors responsible for the Republican/conservative political ascendancy during recent decades, it is the use of the race card. Since Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, the GOP presidential candidate in 1964 and the precursor of the conservative counterrevolution, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it has been no secret to either blacks or whites with whom the Republicans side.
But it took the “Southern Strategy,” dreamt up by then-Republican operative Kevin Phillips and first implemented by Richard Nixon in 1968 to turn a whole region from nearly monolithic Democratic control into a Republican bastion in one generation. The racial message was also effective in converting many formerly Democratic working and middle class whites outside the South into “Reagan Democrats.” The Southern Strategy worked not only in Confederate states like Alabama and South Carolina, but also in places like Ohio, Illinois, Idaho and Wyoming
The message conveyed to whites by Republicans, from the outset of the Southern Strategy to the 2012 campaign, is a simple one—we are the party that is on your side. But the means by which Republicans have had to use to communicate that message in a world in which overt racism has become anathema have often been disguised or coded. This has required a balancing act. The message has to be clear enough to reach the intended sector of the electorate—not the most educated sector at that—but not so obvious as to alienate white middle class voters who don’t want to think of themselves as racist or to cause a furor in the media. These messages are never so veiled as to require Navaho code-breakers, and they certainly don’t fool African Americans. But they do give Republicans a veneer of “plausible deniability” with regard to racism and allow many white voters to go GOP with a clear conscience.
Although this scam has been remarkably successful—some authors have written credibly about a Southern takeover of American politics—like all frauds it doesn’t always work. Republican politicians sometimes let the mask slip in a moment of “excessive exuberance.” It happened a few years ago to former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott when he said, on the occasion of South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond’s retirement from the Senate, that the country would not be having so many problems if Thurmond had been elected president in 1948.
The real problem for the Republicans was that Thurmond had run under the colors of the ephemeral Dixiecrat Party, a political grouping created to resist equality for blacks, and that he ran on a fiercely segregationist platform. The very belated endorsement by a top Republican leader of an openly racist candidacy accidentally crossed the thin line the GOP is forever negotiating between overt and covert racism. Lott eventually had to quit his leadership position amid public outrage and criticism from members of his own party.
Yet other Republican politicians, including GOP icon Ronald Reagan, have gotten away with arguably more brutal offenses, albeit better disguised ones. Reagan, for instance, kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign near the site of the notorious 1964 racist murder of three civil rights activists which served as the basis for the movie ‘Mississippi Burning.” Reagan aides claimed coincidence. As president, Reagan railed against “welfare queens,” conjuring up a mythical trove of women receiving public assistance while living an opulent lifestyle, a veiled reference to low income single black mothers. For all this, Reagan won two elections handily, his image was not tainted by his political use of the race card, he is cited as model by nearly all Republicans, and he is occasionally lauded even by the likes of Barack Obama.
Lest anyone believe this is ancient history, the comments of Rick Santorum in early January 2012 during the Iowa campaign should erase all doubt. After attacking Obama for allegedly trying to make Americans more dependent on public assistance, Santorum made clear the real targets of his remarks:
“I don’t want to make black peoples’ lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and for their families.”
Such comments did not faze Iowa Republicans. Santorum lost the caucus contest by only 8 votes to Mitt Romney, the candidate of the Republican establishment who spent much more money and had a political machine Santorum could only dream of. A side note: Santorum is a militant Roman Catholic. His comments are diametrically opposed to the message of the New Testament and the social teaching of the church today, as evidenced by the many pronouncements by the U.S. Catholic Bishops as well as the Vatican concerning society’s obligations to the poor. Apparently, his faith applies only to “the sanctity of marriage” and his homophobia, which he shares with the Catholic Church, but which, in the case of Santorum, is much more extreme and lacking in pity.
Now take Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and until recently a leading contender for the GOP nomination. In 2008, I had the misfortune of stumbling into a bookstore near Washington, DC while Newt Gingrich was presenting one of his “counterfactual history” novels. The genre is based on the author’s imagination about what would have happened if X event had taken place at a given crucial historical juncture instead of what actually happened. The new Gingrich book was about the Civil War. I wasn’t in the audience or listening closely to Gingrich, but I distinctly heard him say that if such and such would have happened “we (the slave-holding South) would have won the war.”
During the current campaign, Gingrich called Barack Obama the "best food stamp president in history." In case any crypto-racist missed the message, Gingrich said he that he would be willing to go the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), if invited, and tell African-Americans to “demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”
But why single out African Americans? Contrary to Gingrich’s association of food stamps with blacks, the reality is that especially during the current economic crisis, food stamps have been nearly the only component of the U.S. safety net preventing Americans of all races from descending into destitution.
The Department of Agriculture, which runs the food stamp program, reported in 2010 that 34 percent of food stamp recipients were white, 22 percent were African-American, 16 percent were Hispanic, 4 percent were Native American and 3 percent were Asian. The rest did not indicate ethnicity.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and Republicans are in for a comeuppance for their racist policies and demagoguery. Contrary to the comments of former candidate Herman Cain, blacks have not been brainwashed into supporting the Democrats and opposing the Republicans. Instead, they have been listening to what Republicans have been saying and, more importantly, watching what they have been doing and aim to do in the future.
Republicans have systematically shredded the social safety net for the poor while coddling the rich. Now they want to finish the job by destroying the safety net for the middle class—Social Security and Medicare—while bestowing even more largesse on the superrich. Few blacks have been helped by tax cuts for millionaires while many have been hurt by the dismantling of social programs and the radical downsizing of public sector jobs. The racist subtext of Republican discourse adds insult to injury.
In this election cycle, Republicans, with their incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric, are also playing the race card vis-à-vis Latinos. It’s a dangerous game, given the demographic trends. And the rise of the Occupy Wall Street Movement may be the harbinger of the awakening of a significant sector of whites to the fact that black welfare queens or undocumented Latino maids have not been the ones screwing them but rather the political party that does the bulk of the bidding for the denizens of lower Manhattan and other inhabitants of the economic stratosphere.
