[Vision2020] Playing the Race Card

[lfalen]

Rose
Pitts makes some good points, but is wrong to accuse Newt of playing the race card. Please be clear I am not particularly a Newt fan. In my opinion it is Pitts who is playing the race card by impling that anything unfavorable to Blacks is racist. Other positive facts about them is that a good share of them are fairly conservative socially and in religion.
Roger
-----Original message-----
From: "Rosemary Huskey" donaldrose at cpcinternet.com
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:38:00 -0800
To: "'Moscow 2020 Vision'" vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] Playing the Race Card

> 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.
> 
>  
> 
> 
>