Obama: if you were fine with big government until it served black people, rethink your biases. [View all]

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http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/12/13/13935884/obama-government-race-ta-nehisi-coates

Here’s some real talk from President Barack Obama, taken from his conversations with Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic:

" I’m careful not to attribute any particular resistance or slight or opposition to race. But what I do believe is that if somebody didn’t have a problem with their daddy being employed by the federal government, and didn’t have a problem with the Tennessee Valley Authority electrifying certain communities, and didn’t have a problem with the interstate highway system being built, and didn’t have a problem with the GI Bill, and didn’t 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 what’s different, and what’s changed."

Obama’s basic argument: If you didn’t have a problem with big federal government services until black and brown people began clearly to benefit from them, maybe it’s time to rethink your biases.

This isn’t 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 didn’t 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 person’s tax money and giving it to the undeserving.