“Code words for race”: What’s really behind GOP’s poverty and welfare obsession

[DonViejo]

When Paul Ryan decried the "culture" of inner cities it followed a long conservative tradition, a scholar explains

JOSH EIDELSON

“We have got this tailspin of culture,” Paul Ryan told ex-Reagan drug czar Bill Bennett Wednesday, “in our inner cities in particular, of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working, or learning to value the culture of work. So there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.” Under fire from politicians and pundits, the Wisconsin congressman – perhaps the congressional GOP’s leading voice on fighting poverty – backtracked but didn’t apologize, saying he’d been “inarticulate,” and that his cultural critique applied to “society as a whole.”

To consider those comments – and how politicians of both parties appeal to race, class and supposed “welfare queens” 18 years after America gutted welfare – Salon called up University of Southern California political scientist Ange-Marie Hancock. “I do think that they are code words for race,” said Hancock, the author of “The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen.” “But I also think they are code words for class.” A condensed version of our conversation follows.

Did anything in that quote (on Bill Bennett’s radio show) surprise you?

Nothing in that quote surprised me, other than the fact that it could have been pulled from 1994.

So I was really surprised that Paul Ryan was reverting back to arguments that have been circulating for decades, really — but certainly in the 1994 welfare reform debate, these were highly salient, particularly among House Republicans.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/03/17/%E2%80%9Ccode_words_for_race%E2%80%9D_what%E2%80%99s_really_behind_gop%E2%80%99s_poverty_and_welfare_obsession/