Reagan: Racist Is As Racist Does
Posted by
Kevin
David Brooks seems to think that Reagan is being unfairly portrayed as a racist and he seems to think that he has that reputation because of his infamous campaign kick-off in 1980:
The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.… Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful, and can be heard at: www.onlinemadison.com/ftp/reagan/reaganneshoba.mp3. He told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.”
He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”
… But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.
Brooks, unsurprsingly, is not correct:
Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South,” he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.
In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.
And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.
Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.
PS: It has been pointed out to me that Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, giving in only when Congress passed a law creating the holiday by a veto-proof majority. But he really didn’t mean to disrespect the civil rights movement - it was just an innocent mistake.
He also leaves out a few details about Reagan’s trip to Neshoba:
A full account of the incident has to consider how the national GOP was trying to strengthen its southern state parties and win support from southern white Democrats. Consider a letter that Michael Retzer, the Mississippi national committeeman, wrote in December 1979 to the Republican national committee. Well before the Republicans had nominated Reagan, the national committee was polling state leaders to line up venues where the Republican nominee might speak. Retzer pointed to the Neshoba County Fair as ideal for winning what he called the “George Wallace inclined voters.”
… It was clear from other episodes in that campaign that Reagan was content to let southern Republicans link him to segregationist politics in the South’s recent past. Reagan’s states rights line was prepared beforehand and reporters covering the event could not recall him using the term before the Neshoba County appearance. John Bell Williams, an arch-segregationist former governor who had crossed party lines in 1964 to endorse Barry Goldwater, joined Reagan on stage at another campaign stop in Mississippi. Reagan’s campaign chair in the state, Trent Lott, praised Strom Thurmond, the former segregationist Dixiecrat candidate in 1948, at a Reagan rally, saying that if Thurmond had been elected president “we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.”
And Herbert, perhaps the most under-appreciated columnist in America, reminds Brooks that, yes, that speech was precisely as bad as people claim it was:
After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified worshipers.
Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.
The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.
That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”
Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”
Racist is as racist does, to plagerize the worst movie of my lifetime. I don’t care, really, how Reagan treated African American in his personal life. I don;t care that prominent people seem to think that he wasn’t really a racist. What I care about is that Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the Conservative Movement, made a career out of deliberately appealing to the racist vote. it brought him to power and, as the above shows, it was a constant tool throughout his career. Ronald Reagan acted in public as a racist acts. He deliberately set out to appeal to racists and continue the odious Southern Strategy. In doing so, he helped to mainstream racism in the GOP and thus the country.
Racist is as racist does, and Reagan did quite a bit of racism. He got elected in part by chanting the genteel version of “n*gger, n*gger, n*gger” and no amount of wishful thinking or historical revisionism is going to change that. One wonders why, exactly, people like David Brooks are trying to excuse such racism.
You should adjust your comments to “white is best” racism. Being white and having dealt with racist attitudes towards myself from non-whites, I have come to realize that white people are not the only racists as is often indicated (intentionally or not) in statements like the one you made. Just a suggestion.
Comment 11/13/2007
My uncle (not Meta, if KTK is reading) coined the term “retronym” to describe the phenomenon of labeling original terms as opposed to derivations thereof. “Whole milk,” for example.
There’s a little of that going on here. To see it, let’s make our best effort to understand the difference between racism and prejudice. “Isms” are powerful, “isms” are concerted, institutionalized efforts to privilege one group at the expense of another, efforts to assert the superiority of one group because of a demographic distinction, despite no credible and empirical evidence of said group’s superiority.
Prejudice describes an individual’s preferences, likes and dislikes. Prejudices can reflect isms, but only in the sense that such prejudices embody the disinformation inherent in the flawed premises that serve as justification for the isms.
Anti-white racism in this sense is ostensibly non-existent. What exists is the reaction of minorities to actual racism, manifested in the form of prejudice against members of the group of which a small minority are responsible for the overt “ism” in question. As such, even black prejudice against whites is rooted in “pro-white” racism - the only form of real racism in this society.
This is not to excuse anti-white prejudice, just to differentiate it from the “isms.” And, to identify is as an effect of the initial “ism.”
Minorities lack sufficient power, resources, and influence to transform a prejudice into an “ism.” To refer to anti-white racism in U.S. society is to demean the term and to show ignorance to the true depths to which racism pervades modern American society. It is semantically akin to referring to overcharging for goods as “raping,” or the depletion of a material good as a “Holocaust.”
“Anti-white-racism” is like “over-the-fence homerun.”
I do, however, like the notion that those who conclude that Ronnie embodied racist beliefs, or at least pandered to them for his political gain, reach such conclusions because we DIDN’T examine the evidence. That’s like saying those tho of us who categorize Paris Hilton as a pseudo cele-butante whore would change our tune if we just watched her home movies…
Comment 11/13/2007
Times have changed, and what was once perfectly acceptable now makes us ashamed, which is the only plausible explanation for this picture of Ronald Reagan and his favorite lawn ornament.
Comment 11/13/2007
“no amount of wishful thinking or historical revisionism is going to change that.”
No amount of wishful thinking or historical revisionism is going to make Reagan into a racist.
You don’t give up, do you? Remember it was your precious democrat party who was in the forefront in denying rights to blacks and was dominant in the south during the civil rights movement. Bull Connor and George Wallace were not Republicans. Bill Clinton’s racist mentor, William Fulbright, was not a Republican. During the killings of civil rights workers in Mississippi, the governor and senators were democrats, as were most sheriffs and judges. Ask Al Gore what his father’s positions were on civil rights. Get over it and move on. Your race-baiting does nothing to advance civil rights.
No matter how many times you repeat your tripe (and you keep doing it over and over), facts don’t change.
Comment 11/13/2007
Democrats were the party of racists in the 50’s and 60’s. Republicans have been the party of racists in the 70’s and since then. What’s your point? You love to bring up the fact that the segregationists started off as Democrats, but for some reason you also love to ignore the fact that the Democratic party gave them the boot, and that after they did, after a short failed “Dixiecrat” run, the GOP welcomed these racists with open arms, and continue to employ their strategies to this day. No amount of “But Wallace was a Democrat forty-plus years ago” is going to change that fact.
In short, you’re quick to decry the racism of the Democrats of half a century ago, but are wholly unwilling to address what your own party does today. That’s quite telling.
Comment 11/13/2007
Yeah Morris, If I wanted to attack the Democratic (that’s the correct adjective form, by the way) Party on race issues, go with the “Taking African-Americans for granted” theme. It’s not entirely true but it has much more rhetorical potential than the dredging up Dixiecrats, most of which became Republicans (Strom Thurmond anyone?)
Comment 11/13/2007
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Comment 11/13/2007
digglahhh > Merriam Webster Dictionary defines racism as “racial prejudice or discrimination”.
Racism is racism. Period. There is never a good reason for anyone to make judgments about another human being based on race. Anyone who does is being racist. And if you think that racism is only a white issue, you are mistaken.
Comment 11/14/2007
As I noted over at my place this morning, the symbolism of Reagan’s Neshoba speech went beyond civil rights. Reagan won the governorship of California in 1966 as an aggressive critic of the Berkeley protests, and he governed as a forceful opponent student activists. Chaney was a native Mississippian, but Goodman and Schwerner were New York student organizers, in Mississippi as participants in the Freedom Summer project.
Goodman and Schwerner were killed by Mississippi sheriffs for engaging in precisely the kind of activist work that Reagan had used state power to suppress and disrupt in California as governor. When he signaled his solidarity with their murderers, he was reminding his audience of his record of opposition not just to civil rights, but to all the progressive social movements of the sixties.
Comment 11/14/2007
As a long time Democrat that served in the military and has often felt that the problem with our party is the inability to separate fact from fiction. I have found a person that I can support. Tom Tancredo is correct the cost to our nation caused by week politicians from both party has placed us in terrible times.
Our current leadership including our miss guided and miss leading president, our agenda promoting congress and our try to make law supreme court are heading us into a collision course with disaster.
Tom Tancredo is honest, authentic, and the best candidate to run for office since The R.R. got my vote twice.
I have only voted for one Republican for President. I will vote for Tom Tancredo or another person who represents his views on border security and illegal immigration.
I urge all conservative Democrats to support Tom Tancredo for President.
www.joecrose.com
Comment 11/14/2007
[…] Publius has some good thoughts on the whole Reagan editorial thing that Kevin addressed earlier. Publius is a little to eager to think that racism is strictly a thing of the past, rather than still being quite prevalent today (well that, or he’s operating from a quite different definition of racism than I am), but apart from that he makes some excellent points. Go read it. […]
Pingback 11/14/2007
Besides finding it unbelievable they’re spilling this much NYT ink over a 27-year old Ronald Reagan speech, I published a retort to Herbert here.
Comment 11/14/2007
“Democrats were the party of racists in the 50’s and 60’s.”
Yeah, the 1850’s and 1860’s through 2007.
“Republicans have been the party of racists in the 70’s and since then. What’s your point?”
That is nonsense.
” You love to bring up the fact that the segregationists started off as Democrats, but for some reason you also love to ignore the fact that the Democratic party gave them the boot,”
When did that happen? Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are still in the democrat party.
Comment 11/14/2007
“Minorities lack sufficient power, resources, and influence to transform a prejudice into an “ism.” ”
Good grief! What sophistry!
Comment 11/14/2007
Think small “r” and big “R,” people.
The dictionary is not a sociological reference tool.
Good grief - shit, that’s what I said!
Comment 11/19/2007
[…] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerptHe told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.” He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: … […]
Pingback 11/25/2007
[…] There’s been a lot of talk lately about politicians using coded language to appeal to portions of their base. Reagan used terms like “states rights” and “strapping young buck” to appeal to racists. In 2004, George Bush made an odd reference to Dred Scott as a way of signaling his desire to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Now with Huckabee, the Ric Flair endorsement seems like a wink towards the more hawkish elements of the GOP base (ie. 99% of them) that he shares their view of “the enemy”. posted by greg on November 26, 2007 @ 12:43 pm […]
Pingback 11/26/2007
Let’s not forget that the Reagan administration was practically the sole supporter (along with Israel) of the pariah apartheid government in South Africa at a time when the rest of the world was uniform in its opposition to that government’s racist policies. Why the continuing support for the apartheid regime, if Reagan wasn’t a racist?
Comment 11/29/2007