Refuting Atwater
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)
As an illustration of how deceitful conservative talking points are– and the degree to which our national conversation is about race even when it seems not to be–this Lee Atwater quote is justly famous:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”
That quote should fill even the most hardened political cynic with revulsion, not just because of the use of the “n” word, but because of the nonchalant way in which Atwater describes the economic coding of racism.
But it’s still worth noting that what Atwater was trying to describe (in his own meager defense) overt racism was being tamped down was that through the use of economic coding. Atwater assumed that this subterfuge would eventually serve to eliminate racism over the time, and make politics more about theory than prejudice.
But the reality is that Lee Atwater was wrong even about that. Disguising race issues as economic issues doesn’t weaken racism. In fact, it makes it stronger through sublimation. Any psychologist would note that failing to address a problem head on only makes it fester and grow, and reveal itself in increasingly unpleasant ways in other aspects of life. Racism is no different. Now we have not only a race problem in America, but a massive economic one. And the two are so hopelessly intertwined at this point that it’s difficult to extricate them.
Meanwhile, fairly overt racism is starting to make a comeback. Case in point: the Koch / Tea Party effort to re-segregate schools in the South:
The stakes in the battle over the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina couldn’t be higher.
On one side are the billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, and the Tea Party and libertarian groups they fund. On the other, parents, students and community leaders who are bent on stopping measures passed by the conservative-led school board that they argue would re-segregate the county’s public schools, which had been a national model for diversity and integration.
Since 2000, Wake County has used a system of integration based on income. Under this program, no more than 40 percent of any school’s students could receive subsidized lunches, a proxy for determining the level of poverty. The school district is the 18th largest in the country, and includes Raleigh, its surrounding suburbs and rural areas. It became one of the first school systems in the nation to adopt such a plan.
But Wake County’s plan became a political flash point when five conservative candidates, bankrolled by Americans for Prosperity, a political activist group funded in part by the Kochs, were elected to the school board on a “neighborhood schools” platform that would dismantle the existing integration policy.
The new board touted their plan as one that would end busing and eliminate class, and subsequently race, as a factor for student school assignments. The “neighborhood schools” plan would assign students to schools closer to where they lived, meaning students from mostly poor and black communities would likely attend schools whose demographics were much the same. White children from well-heeled families would be more likely to attend schools filled with upper-middle class white children and enjoy more resources.
The elections led to heated protests. Under pressure from community groups and activists, the school board halted the plan for further review. It has since developed a number of alternative plans, though most of those would still have some re-segregating effect.
The NAACP filed a complaint with the Department of Justice in response, and there have been legal challenges based on the plan’s constitutionality.
Remember that this is happening in supposedly post-racial America, when we have our first African-American president. In reality, America is in many ways moving backwards on racial issues because the Tea Party, the Koch Brothers and their allies are treated as economic libertarians rather than as the racist crackpots they really are. With Lee Atwater’s help, they have sublimated their racism into economic issues, but ultimately the racism still comes to fore when the rubber meets the road–and often in fairly virulent forms. No one is using the “n” word anymore. But they don’t need to in order to destroy communities and re-instate de facto segregation.
Finally, the case illustrates how important it is that conservatives not be allowed to win elections at any level, and how important it is that every single race right down to dog catcher be partisanized. Many progressives may be upset with the Democratic Party as a general rule, but party affiliation is by far the easiest shortcut to determine the overall worldview of a candidate for non-partisan office. Asking voters to evaluate each candidate based on position statements is simply too much to ask of busy people who don’t obsess over this stuff. This is part of the reason we have political parties, and why they’re so useful in cutting through the clutter. Progressives regardless of party affiliation need to be focused on booting Koch-friendly Republicans out of school board and city council elections all across America so that the experience of the Wake County school system is not repeated elsewhere.
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