“Even so, unlike most in society, these politicians thought long and deep about how to turn race to their advantage. We’ve previously defined strategic racism as purposeful efforts to use racial animosity as leverage to gain political power (or material… — Ian Haney López Copy Share Image
“Alabama in 1927 alone, 27,701 men were arrested on misdemeanor charges and offered for sale by county sheriffs. In Blackmon’s estimation, “roughly half of… — Ian Haney López Copy Share Image
“Start with the first half of Phillips’ statement, the claim that economic issues favored the Democrats when government programs “taxed the few for the many.” This represents 1964, when Goldwater assailed the New Deal and lost in a landslide. To this point, liberalism still comprised programs primarily geared toward helping whites. Thus, the “many” were the white middle-class beneficiaries of… — Ian Haney López Copy Share
“the confluence of racial prejudice and conservative politics is the new racism. It’s a product of almost a half-century of ethnic discourse and coded race-baiting that has remade racism into a set of ideas jointly demonizing nonwhite culture and activist government. These ethnic-racial-political stereotypes have become staples of modern racial discourse, and now seem like self-evident truths to a staggering… — Ian Haney López Copy Share
“When the children were asked how many white people were “mean,” they commonly answered “almost none.” But when asked how many blacks were mean, many answered “some” or “a lot.”1 The thrust of the article seemed to be that children possess racial biases. However eye-catching the title, though, it pointed in the wrong direction—at infants and little children rather than… — Ian Haney López Copy Share
“Kevin Phillips also saw clearly that success lay in stimulating racial antipathies among whites across the country. For Phillips, if there was a regional dynamic at work, it was instead an anti-Northeast one: he predicted that the whole country except the Northeast (and also the sparsely populated and largely white Northwest) would soon turn reliably Republican.44 Phillips argued that those… — Ian Haney López Copy Share
“The Tea Party that reenergized the GOP in 2010 and that implacably attacked Obama turned out to be a familiar nemesis of liberalism and… — Ian Haney López Copy Share Image
“Reagan Democrats increasingly extended their antipathy from nonwhites to government as a whole. “These white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics. These sentiments have important implications for Democrats, as virtually all progressive symbols and themes have been redefined in racial and pejorative terms.”57 This last insight,… — Ian Haney López Copy Share
“In the wake of 1984’s pummeling the Michigan Democratic Party commissioned Stanley Greenberg, then a political scientist and later a preeminent Democratic pollster, to help it understand the mindset of the voters abandoning the party in droves. Greenberg placed race at the epicenter of the tectonic shift. First, Greenberg found that many whites conflated middle-class identity with white identity, and… — Ian Haney López Copy Share
“After 2012, Republicans controlled all 11 state legislatures of the former Confederacy, and their campaign tactics centered more than ever on depicting themselves as… — Ian Haney López Copy Share Image
“We would like to believe that if the polity understood that race-baiting continues to be widely practiced, people would repudiate it. Yet many whites… — Ian Haney López Copy Share Image
“The core insight of modern liberalism is powerfully simple: we all benefit from a society that provides for the economic security and wellbeing of each member, whatever the heartbreaks of life. True, this vision was originally restricted by race to primarily help whites, but this was a tragic distortion that undercut the universal potential of New Deal liberalism. Johnson’s Great… — Ian Haney López Copy Share
“Racial attacks on liberalism shifted the enemy of the middle class from big money to lazy minorities, and transmuted economic programs that helped to… — Ian Haney López Copy Share Image
