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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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 <i>Slavery As It Was.</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Rose Huskey<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:24.0pt'>Commentary Leonard Pitts Jr. From Nixon to Reagan, from Bush to Gingrich, the GOP plays race card <o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>In so doing, they tap a rich vein of stereotype and preconception about the supposed laziness of African-American people.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>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."<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>It works every time.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:14.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></body></html>