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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsObama: if you were fine with big government until it served black people, rethink your biases.
http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/12/13/13935884/obama-government-race-ta-nehisi-coates" Im careful not to attribute any particular resistance or slight or opposition to race. But what I do believe is that if somebody didnt have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government, and didnt have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying certain communities, and didnt have a problem with the interstate highway system being built, and didnt have a problem with the GI Bill, and didnt have a problem with the [Federal Housing Administration] subsidizing the suburbanization of America, and that all helped you build wealth and create a middle class and then suddenly as soon as African Americans or Latinos are interested in availing themselves of those same mechanisms as ladders into the middle class, you now have a violent opposition to them then I think you at least have to ask yourself the question of how consistent you are, and whats different, and whats changed."
Obamas basic argument: If you didnt have a problem with big federal government services until black and brown people began clearly to benefit from them, maybe its time to rethink your biases.
This isnt a straw man drawn up from nowhere. When sociologist Arlie Hochschild went to the Deep South to, as she has called it, scale the empathy wall and understand Tea Party voters for her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, this was a theme that popped up again and again. Many of the Tea Party voters she talked to didnt mind using government services for themselves. (As one man told Hochschild, If the programs are there, why not use them?) But when it came to other people getting government services with heavy racial undertones implied it was seen more as the government taking the hard-working persons tax money and giving it to the undeserving.
Cha
(303,048 posts)or small gov.. but a Smart Government.
Thank you, .99
JI7
(90,115 posts)otherwise the parties would not be so divided by race.
it's why white southerners voted for FDR and other democrats BEFORE civil rights.
Dawson Leery
(19,358 posts)as soon as minorities were given the invite to participate in society....isn't it...
mcar
(43,205 posts)Of course.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)oasis
(51,322 posts)bravenak
(34,648 posts)He can say whatever comes to mind now, and I'm glad
BlancheSplanchnik
(20,219 posts)❤️ Must read article ! Thanks!! Hope my brain cells can keep up!
Quayblue
(1,045 posts)betsuni
(27,121 posts)Buckeye_Democrat
(14,986 posts)Is there a perception among AA voters that Democratic candidates who focus on the plights of the "working class" are excluding minorities somehow?
Jerry Brown didn't fare well with his blue-collar message in 1992 either.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/09/opinion/the-myth-of-the-black-vote.html
Jerry Brown, the former California Governor, never exceeded 10 percent among blacks in the South. In Connecticut, however, he won 30 percent of the black vote. In New York he improved that showing somewhat, to 37 percent.
http://africanamericanvoterrep.org/aavrep-poll/
Seventy-one percent (71%) of black voters indicate support for Hillary Clinton, compared to Bernie Sanders, who garners 16% of the vote.
If it takes an African American candidate to preach a pro-working class message in order to win, it's fine by me! I'd prefer to have nothing but minority and female candidates from now until the end of civilization if that is what's required to get more progressive policies to help everyone who's struggling.
JI7
(90,115 posts)democrats from states with larger black populations have more connections to the black community.
elmac
(4,642 posts)using the welfare queen stereotype in his campaign speeches and his war on welfare. He also started his 1980 campaign by delivering a speech in a small town in the Deep South that just by coincidence happened to be the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. He started what has become the racist, fascist GOP of today.
erpowers
(9,356 posts)Is that the town where the three civil rights workers were killed? I thought sure I was told that Ronald Reagan launched one of his campaigns in the same town where the three civil rights workers were killed.
elmac
(4,642 posts)I think the three civil rights workers were killed outside of Meridian, Mississippi . They started there for a reason. It was a message to all the white racists that he was there man.
bettyellen
(47,209 posts)Dark n Stormy Knight
(9,972 posts)so very far off base.