When a Republican presidential candidate goes around talking about Barack Obama as the “food stamp president,” eventually reporters are going to have to write about racism. But how they talk about the issue in instructive. In today’s New York Times (1/18/12), Jim Rutenberg has a piece headlined “Risks for GOP in Attacks With Racial Themes,” where we learn this about Newt Gingrich’s food stamp rhetoric:
Mr. Gingrich was clearly making the case that he is the candidate most able to take the fight to Mr. Obama in the fall, but he was also laying bare risks for his party when it comes to invoking arguments perceived to carry racial themes or other value-laden attack lines.
This is the kind of language one expects to encounter when reporters have to figure out ways to talk about racism without calling it racism. In Monday’s Times (1/16/12–Martin Luther King Jr. Day), John Harwood reported on why several Republicans didn’t pursue the presidential nomination:
Political heavyweights who declined to enter the 2012 race all had uniquely personal reasons. Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana faced family resistance; former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi feared being bogged down in the politics of race; Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey doubted his readiness for the Oval Office.
People who remember the Barbour story might not recall anything about a bog. Barbour talked to the Weekly Standard in late 2010, and he professed fond memories of the white supremacist Citizens Council groups in Mississippi. In Barbour’s mind they were anti-Klan activists, which as critics pointed out, is a rather remarkable description of groups that were founded to oppose school integration and protest civil rights advocates.
That controversy brought up other unpleasant Barbour stories, like this anecdote from a 1982 New York Times article (dug up by Ben Smith at Politico) about Barbour’s Congressional campaign:
But the racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be “coons” at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks,he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.
That the obvious racism on display is characterized as “racial sensitivity” suggests the Times hasn’t changed a whole lot over the years.
One point that Rutenberg’s piece today makes is that the pointed questions that were posed to Gingrich at the recent debate were asked by a black reporter: Fox‘s Juan Williams. To Williams, there’s nothing subtle about what Gingrich is doing here; it is “more than a dog whistle…. It’s a hoot and a holler.”
It could be that journalists of color would be more likely to call out a candidate making these kinds of appeals. That’s less likely when there are few journalists of color covering the campaign. To take just one outlet as an example, Richard Prince recently noted in his Journal-isms column (1/4/12) that Time magazine does not have any blacks or Latinos covering the 2012 political season.
“[I]nvoking arguments perceived to carry racial themes or other value-laden attack lines.”
I wonder if that’s how the Times described Hitler’s campaign rhetoric.
As for the White Citizens Council, my daddy was a member, and I can tell you that there wasn’t a racist bone in his body.
The soft tissue was another matter.
Food Stamp use in no way suggests a race or even a religion. They are the result of miss management of the politicians…that insist there be a division in the labor force and even in the amounts of wages…using the currency as a means to control the commerce of human beings is a bit twisted itself.
Presidents are not popular unless they can generate money for their political parties…and both the Democrat and Republican parties are a single act to insure you end as an extremist.They practice a refuted assent of the law…extremism.
When deciding this next time to vote…use the historical facts and you will find the uS had more success giving out commodities than they ever will allowing anyone to use food stamps.
Many retired folks use food stamps…and their needs are just as much.
If the phrase food stamp president bothers Obama…then he may have some type of pychological problem…he ran for president and achieved his goal…so let him enjoy the mature act there in Congress.Have a good day everyone…
George, when you have a calamity in the econony that is the worst since the Great Depression, you are going to see more people applying for and receiving food stamps. There are about 30 million people in this economy who are either underemployed or unemployed. The Food Stamp program originated in 1962 when Humphrey and Dole decided it would a good thing if farmers could have an extra market for their food, so they found a way both to feed the poor and to help the farmer. So now the farmer has his crop subsidies and the poor their food subsidies. Obama is no more responsible for the food stamps than he is for the Tennesse River flooding its banks.
Good post, John. As for Newt, he’s a man who can dish it out but can’t take it.
As long as our ruling class is trying to distract the people down below over the real causes of their insecurity and decline, the elite must be free to divide and conquer by any means necessary, including racism, so NYT and other outlets have to be very careful about how they reprot on it, lest they deligitimize racist appeals (except when the racists are attacking the establishment and then its okay to call them racist).
this wasn’t newt blowing the dog whistle, it was newt setting off the fire alarm….i’d also note that a lot of the families of our military’s rank and file use food stamps.
Newt stated a simple fact.It aint pretty,but it aint racism.Food stamps cross racial lines.The Obama economy is a mess plain and simple.The idea that a Republican candidate cant tell it plain and simple without being called a racist is pure Obama politics.It wont work this time.
The Times does a great job of covering racism. In the South, that is. Anywhere else, it’s “a lack of diversify” or, at best, “discrimination”. Extremely rarely, even “racial discrimination”. At my urging they wrote an article called something like “Not as Diverse as We Thought”. In which facts not usually checked by Fair appeared. The fact that Detroit is the most segregated city in the country, followed by Milwaukee; then, bless us, NYC. There seems to be a delusion, as stated above, that if we just cut off the South and, say, Arizona, from America racism would disappear. To “diversify” Zuccotti Park, required a schlepp of blacks and hispnaics down from the Bronx way downtown. Harlem is now majority white. I worked hard for integration but that bothers me.
A friend recently revisited the South after having been in the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties. He found Occupy Savannah, Ga, integrated and filled with lovely interracial couples holding hands. Is there racism in the South? Of course! Is there racism in the North? Of course! Michelle Obama wasn’t proud to be American until after her husband’s election in part because while she was a hospital administrator in Chicago, a study was proposed to test the safety of the Herpes vaccine. The proposal was to have white girls be controls and black girls take the vaccine. In fact, I imagine Chicago is right up there along with Detroit in regard to segregation.
Ever heard of the reverse migration? While there were still African Americans here on the Yupper West Side, I made a friend around the corner, sitting on her stoop. We discussed our worries about her son while Giuliani’s well named “street crimes unit’ was killing an unarmed black man every two or three weeks. Did media ever use the word “racist”? Imagine if he’d been mayor of Atlanta! Then we worried about her grandson under Bloomberg’s cops harassing African American men for making “furtive movements”. (And helping to fill the prison industrial complex.) She moved back to Virginia. I hope her son and grandson went with her. Bob Herbert, sadly departed from the Times, titled an article on NYC cops “Jim Crow Justice”. I recently asked two cops here with strong NYC accents what a furtive movement looked like, imagining it as ducking behind a car, or something similar, at the sight of a cop car. One asked if I liked cop killers. I said No, holding myself back from saying “Especially when it’s a black or hispanic off duty officer who pulls a gun in an emergency and is shot by white cops as he yells “police”. They told me, “This is a nice neighborhood,” meaning white. “Say a guy is standing in a door, looking side to side.” I: “He might be waiting for someone to pick him up, taking the air, seeing what it’s like outside.” Very few African Americans in my building. I told the cops of being from the South and like many white Southerners having been in the Civil Rights Movement, told them of having put my life in danger and how. On shook my hand, the other, (cop killer guy), said he had something in his mouth, (spit?), so he couldn’t shake my hand.
Unlike many yankees neither asked “On which side?” To which African Americans reply, “That’s why we called it a movement!” That question angers me. On “All Things Considered” one evening last fall a woman was interviewing Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center about a horrific racist incident in Mississippi I hadn’t heard of, having been out of the country. She asked “So what do you say about yet another terrible incident in the South’s troubled racial past?”
“And the rest of the country,” said Morris. End of interview. As Jimmy Carter had when the Tea Party started. “This is due to racism in the South and the rest of the country,” that great under appreciated ex president said. (Who had the balls to not invade Iran with troops, just tried to get the hostages out. And the balls to write the prescient “Peace Not Apartheid”. Not to mention solar panels on the WH roof). Southern presidents appointed the first, the first woman – Carter’s as head of the Education Dept as he started it, and the most African American cabinet members.
The thing about the “rest of the country” is that they haven’t read Faulkner, instead read the two dimensional “To Kill A Mockingbird”, yet use as their mantra, Faulkner’s line: “The past is still with us, in fact it isn’t even past.” And that’s the way the rest of the country needs to be to keep it, to stop any chance of confronting their own region’s racist history and present. But it seems the R word is reserved for the South. When will the North let the Civil War be over? If ever. When they google Slavery in the North and Slavery in New England. Who do you think my puritan ancestors blamed the terrible conditions in their descendants’ “colored towns” on? One guess. We should stop quibbling and start a second rights movement. Economic Rights for African Americans, especially, since they’re still getting the short end of the stick every damn where!
April I am a tea party conservative.I wonder what you mean by” economic rights for African Americans”?What rights are denied people of any color or creed in this country?We have just elected a black president.We have had a sectary of state(male and female)that were black.A head of the joint chiefs of staff.A republican presidential candidate.Everywhere i look I see integration.In every aspect of society and life here.Is there still a gap?Yes there is.And it is a complicated issue.I think a lot of it is the plantation mentality of a grown underclass that the left has fostered.Everywhere blacks have stepped out of this they have prospered.The civi rights movement was for the right to equal opportunity.Not equal result.Days ago Dr.Rev Martin Luther Kings nephew said if he were alive today he would be a conservative.Notice that missed the press big time.Racism is stupidity.Many still carry the seed.Many will always carry it.But economic rights for African Americans?You need to explain further.