Ian Haney López — Is Paul Ryan Racist?

I take Congressman Ryan at his word that he is not overtly racist, which is a attitudinal and characteristic of a biased mindset. However, I am not so sure that he isn't playing the race card as a political strategy, since that has been the GOP playbook since Nixon's Southern strategy.

I suspect that most people that play the race card are not themselves overtly racist. And I am also quite sure that many people that don't consider themselves racial biased harbor subconscious "stuff" about race and other hot potato subjects that are considered out of bounds culturally in a pluralistic society. This is a complex issue, and it is now being worked out globally as different peoples interact more closely than previously.

Be that as it may, what struck me about what Congressman Ryan said is his emphasis on "inner city" culture and poverty. Curiously, he did not mention rural culture and poverty. Many of the chronically poor and culturally backward are part of the rural GOP base particularly in red states. Coincidently, most of the rural poor are white, although many are non-white too — either of African or Native American descent, and increasingly Latino, too. Could that have anything to do with the choice of words and omission of a significant portion of those in poverty?

The latest GOP nostrum to cure poverty is for the poor to chose not to be poor — that this is America where everyone can succeed. Are the poor to be faulted then? Of course, they bear some of the blame for their  condition, but the most significant causal factor in poverty is government supporting the culture of poverty with hand-outs. So not only do the poor need to stop being lazy and indigent, the welfare state has been put to rest. It's really the bleeding-heart liberals in government that are causing a culture poverty to grow by voting for increases in food stamps and extension of unemployment benefits. The underlying message is that the Democratic Party is buying votes with "your money" and therefore cynically using the poor, preventing them from bootstrapping themselves from poverty by sapping their incentive.

So the story goes. The GOP base seems to love it. Makes perfect sense to them.

BillMoyers.com

Is Paul Ryan Racist?
Ian Haney López | Professor of Law UC Berkeley, and a senior fellow at Demos