Welfare Stereotypes Come Creeping Back Into Play
http://www.nationalmemo.com/welfare-stereotypes-come-creeping-back-into-play/Welfare Stereotypes Come Creeping Back Into Play
September 1st, 2012 12:00 am
Cynthia Tucker
The Republican Party is facing extinction, doomed by demographics to an ever-smaller slice of the electorate. It is increasingly a faction of aging whites, particularly those who tend to discomfort with racial diversity.
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There isn’t a political strategist, political scientist or political journalist who doesn’t know that “welfare” is code for “poor black people.” Though black Americans don’t account for even half the recipients of TANF, common prejudices and news media coverage have conspired to create a conventional wisdom of cash handouts to lazy and undeserving black folk. (According to government statistics, blacks account for about 38 percent of TANF beneficiaries, whites account for about 32 percent, Latinos make up about 25 percent, and other racial minorities account for the rest.)
In “Divided by Color,” political scientists Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders described the not-so-subtle bigotry to which Romney panders. “A new form of prejudice has come to prominence, one that is preoccupied with matters of moral character, informed by the virtues associated with the traditions of individualism. At its center are the contentions that blacks do not try hard enough to overcome the difficulties they face and that they take what they have not earned,” they wrote.
I’m guessing that Romney didn’t intend to sink into the stinking swamp of racially coded appeals when he started this campaign. He would win, he thought, by persuading Americans that a wealthy businessman could do a better job of lifting the economy from the doldrums than the current occupant of the White House. But as time grows short and he grows desperate, stuck in a neck-and-neck race with Obama, he has done what Republican candidates before him have done: pander to ugly racial stereotypes.
That’s why the Grand Old Party is a dinosaur in a browning America.
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In 1990-91 I worked in a 7-11 store right on the border between Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, in an area which was very heavily minority already by the mid 80s. It was about 1/3 each black-hispanic-white, but is now almost entirely hispanic.
Anyway, when I worked in that store, the owner let a lot of abuses go on in the name of profit. Many, many times a family would come in, and each of the children would buy a single five cent piece of candy or bubble gum, and collect 95 cents change. Four kids times 95 cents was enough for a six pack of beer or a couple of 40 oz. malt liquors, or two packs of cigs (remember this was back in 1990), and that would inevitably be what the adults would buy. It was probably about a dozen different groups of adults and kids who would come in and do this throughout the day.
The thing is, though, that the overwhelming percentage of people who pulled that shit nearly every day were white. A few were black, but I don't recall any of the hispanics doing that.
About this time, I remember that the owners of many of the other convenience stores in the area -- which I would visit often to play the various video games they had -- implemented policies whereby any food stamp purchase had to be 50 cents or more. But the owner of the store I worked in wouldn't do that. He also violated several health codes by letting people refill the old paper and wax drink cups at our soda fountain, and other things which really pissed me off because I knew they were wrong.
Oh, and the owner was also a staunch Mormon.
I'm not trying to display insensitivity towards anybody with this post. I'm merely relating the facts of my experience working in one particular store for nearly two years. 
