How the GOP Stokes Racism

Associating African Americans with 'poor and lazy' welfare recipients, GOP candidates are employing tactics that exploit racial fears and animus for their own political gain.

Republican presidential contenders Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich ramped up their racially bigoted rhetoric in their primary two weeks ago to convince white Euro-Americans that if they voted for them, their interests would always trump those of other racial groups. A day before the Iowa caucuses, Santorum, while denouncing state efforts to enroll poor citizens in the Medicaid program, implied that being black is synonymous with being poor and lazy: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” Days later, in South Carolina, Gingrich tapped into his bigoted repertoire to proclaim U.S. President Barack Obama “the greatest food-stamp president in American history.” In addition, during the Jan. 16 South Carolina debate, Gingrich lectured a member of the audience about the amount of federal handouts blacks receive, bringing into question African-Americans’ work ethic.

Though the allegations that Gingrich and Santorum have made are easily refutable, they nevertheless have their intended effect. Gingrich and Santorum use these tactics to exploit white Euro-Americans’ racial fears and animus for their own political gain. Despite Gingrich’s claim that he merely spoke factually about the outcome of Obama’s public-assistance policy, he surely knew, through political focus-group testing, that his racially coded discourse about Obama would resonate with many white Euro-American Republicans who view African-Americans as welfare cheats. Though racial prejudice and stereotypes among white Euro-Americans are less overt than in the past, studies consistently show that many Euro-Americans' perceptions of blacks as lazy and undependable lead them to cognitively associate African-Americans with welfare. This negative association, together with stereotypes about African-American work ethics, fuels Euro-American opposition to welfare policies.

Understanding this dynamic, white Euro-American politicians use racist discourse to engage in conversation with the white Euro-American electorate about public-assistance policies. This discourse is characterized by negative portrayals of African Americans in conjunction with a positive representation of white Euro-Americans as the deserving beneficiaries of public assistance. The objective of the discourse is to avoid and allay positive portrayals of African-Americans and harmful representations of white Euro-Americans.

This technique uses three main strategies. The first accentuates difference between African-Americans and white Euro-Americans. The difference is usually evaluated negatively, in that African-Americans are portrayed as less smart and hardworking than white Euro-Americans. The implication of this language is that African-Americans are all the same, while white Euro-Americans are all different. The second strategy is the “us versus them” division that is used to characterize African-Americans’ work habits as deviant, hence breaking white Euro-Americans’ normative perceptions regarding work ethic. However, when African-Americans do abide by white Euro-American work-ethic norms, they are still vilified as “the other,” as Santorum and Gingrich’s comments demonstrate. Third, by disparaging African-Americans as welfare recipients, it is possible to characterize them as taking hardworking American taxpayers’ (code for white Euro-Americans) money via public-assistance programs. This is the most prominent threat because, through everyday conversations, the media, and political discourse of various kinds, white Euro-Americans invariably see African-Americans’ efforts to make the government more responsive to their needs as extortion.

Contrary to popular belief, racial bigotry and discourse are the result of deeply rooted social and institutional processes referred to as systemic racism – a complex array of racially bigoted practices, ideologies, and attitudes justifying white Euro-Americans’ privilege and power. Because white Euro-Americans are so immersed in the propaganda of systemic racial conditioning, politicians like Santorum and Gingrich stir the pot of white Euro-American racial anxiety as a means to acquire their consent to terminate the nation’s social safety net in support of inhuman economic austerity policies.

Thanks to global and domestic protest movements against political machination and economic inequality, the power that racist political discourse holds over many white Euro-Americans, especially those in the middle class, is starting to wane. Despite the persistence of racism and racist discourse legitimizing doing nothing to help poor and working Americans escape their economic quagmire, many white Euro-Americans within and outside of the Republican party are starting to recognize that the politico-economic system as it is currently constituted, and not the African-American population, is the real source of their struggles.