White Georgia politician Jimmy Carter says that white Georgia politician Newt Gingrich knows exactly what he’s doing in his race-baiting and racist campaign talk:
“He knows the subtle words to use to appeal to a racist group,” Carter [said].
“When you emphasize, over and over, welfare, food stamps, and ‘why don’t the black people get jobs,’ and if I’m president, I’ll make sure they turn toward a work ethic, rather than an ethic of welfare and food stamps, that’s appealing to the wrong element in South Carolina.”
The history informing Carter’s observation there is perhaps best summarized by the late Lee Atwater, the Republican political consultant and advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Dennis G. at Balloon Juice reminds us of Atwater’s startlingly frank description of what politicians like Gingrich are doing and why:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N—–, n—–, n—–.” By 1968 you can’t say “n—–” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economy things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. …
Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that an appropriate response to such tactics is impossible unless we honestly and accurately recognize what people like Gingrich are up to when they are, as Carter put it, “appealing to the wrong element.” We need to recognize that they know what they are doing and that they chose to do it.
Gingrich isn’t just appealing to racism, he’s siding with it. He’s promoting it, fueling it and fanning its flames in the hopes that it will smolder on and continue to shape the politics of future generations just as it did the politics of the past.
Here’s the heart of Coates’ argument, but go read the whole thing:
I think (again) this Jane Austen is appropriate:
“The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough: for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them.”
People who are regularly complicit in wrong, are not in the habit of admitting such things. The unwillingness to admit wrong, the greedy claim upon the powers of disappointment, the deep sense of injury is not coincidental — it is a necessary fact of wrong-doing. The charge that the NAACP are the actual racist is the descendant of the notion that abolitionists wanted to reduce Southern whites to “slavery,” that the goal of civil rights was the rape of white women. That Barack Obama would have a “deep-seated hatred of white people” is not a new concept.
Racism is, at its root, a lie. The habit of lying does not end with the racism itself. It is a contagion that extends to the defense of the initial lie. The expectation of intellectual honesty, from a candidate who employs dishonesty, and from a slice of the electorate that stakes their political lives on that dishonesty is rather bizarre.
When a professor of history calls Barack Obama a “Food Stamp President,” it isn’t a mistake to be remedied through clarification; it is a statement of aggression. And when a crowd of his admirers cheer him on, they are neither deluded, nor in need of forgiveness, nor absolution, nor acting against their interest. Racism is their interest. They are not your misguided friends. They are your fully intelligent adversaries, sporting the broad range of virtue and vice we see in humankind.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In