Posted on 09/24/2013 12:28:15 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The recent vote of House Republicans to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program reflects a deep-seated and insidious racial resentment toward Americans of color. This racial resentment rears its ugly head within the provisions for the bill that demand that non-employed participants in the program get a job, job training or do community service activities. Though the bill in its current form will most likely die in the Senate, the fact that Republicans would even pass it should concern us.
Conservatives continue to lead under the aegis of a deliberate and willful ignorance about the long-term existence of a group known as the working poor, people who work long hours in low-wage paying menial labor jobs, and therefore cannot make ends meet. Moreover, there is a refusal to accept that the economic downturn in 2008 created conditions of long-term unemployment, such that people simply cannot go out and “get a job” just because they will it to be so.
I often wonder if government officials actually talk to real human beings about these policies, because if they did, they would find many people with a deep desire to work, but a struggle to find well-paying jobs. Some of those people would gladly take jobs that pay far less, but are frequently told that their education and years of work experience make them over-qualified.
This is not a race-based problem. The American middle class itself is shrinking dramatically each year in relation to a poor economy, an insistence on austerity measures from the right, and a capitulation to these measures on the left. However, the complete irrationality and utter severity of the legislation, and the total lack of empathy and identification that inform contemporary Republican social advocacy is tied to a narrative about lazy black people and thieving “illegal” brown people.
In 1976, Ronald Reagan invented the term “welfare queen,” to characterize the actions of exactly one person in Chicago who had bilked the welfare system out of a staggering amount of money. Buttressed by an underlying white racial resentment of the liberal pieces of legislation that emerged during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations – laws that had attempted to change conditions, but could not change hearts and minds around racial inequality issues — white conservatives latched on to a narrative about lazy African-Americans stealing from taxpayers and living lavish lives financed by the welfare state.
That narrative has persisted well into the 21st century when Newt Gingrich derisively referred to Barack Obama as the “Food Stamp President” in the 2012 elections. Uninterrogated and misplaced racial resentment has been the most effective strategy for making white people support draconian social policies in the name of “taking the country back.” This is true, even though in sheer numbers, white people are the largest group of recipients of the SNAP program.
Fiscal conservative politicians (including some Democrats like Bill Clinton) have presided over a massive and systematic redistribution of wealth into the 1 percent since the 1980s. For African-Americans this means that we lost over half of our collective (and meager) net wealth, in just the last five years, due to predatory lending and the the machinations of big business. But it is easier to hate and regulate welfare recipients.
Since everyone knows that welfare queens finance their lives of luxury through the receipt of food stamps, which amounts on average to about $135 in groceries each month, cutting the food stamp program, a move that will take nearly 4 million people off the rolls in the next 10 years, is not merely a pragmatic measure or a “necessary evil,” but rather a deeply symbolic act that points to recalcitrant and entrenched racist attitudes on the right. It turns out, then, that African-Americans are not the only group of voters whose political behavior is motivated – at least, in part — by racial identity.
The Republican Party often capitalizes on these attitudes about poor African-Americans in moments of economic downturn, as a way to rally white working- and middle-class American voters. This is very similar to the strategy used by the Southern Planter class in the 1850s to curtail alliances between working-class white people and enslaved African-Americans.
Rather than create a more equitable system by freeing the enslaved and paying everyone fair wages, the plantocracy deployed a narrative about white racial superiority that caused poverty-stricken white people to disavow their own class interests in service of racial unity. In fact, as David Roediger outlines in his now classic work “The Wages of Whiteness,” this is one of the key processes that led to white people in the U.S. becoming a unified racial group, beyond the ethnic identities (Polish, German, Irish, etc.) that had previously characterized them. Without benefit of this historical context, the consistency with which contemporary white conservatives vote against their own economic interests, in order to remain beholden to fiscal and social conservatism would appear downright peculiar.
Beyond the academic implications of these choices, I am concerned about real people who need access to these services. There are members of my own family who need public assistance, because they live in economically depressed areas where job opportunities are few. There are college students and graduate students whom I teach, who are supporting themselves through school, and use food stamps so they can eat each month. And there are countless children, who come from poor homes in rural and urban areas throughout this country, who need the security that comes from being able to eat three square meals a day, so that they can be healthy and perform well in school.
A final note of caution: In a world with no food security, there will be increased violence. This is related to a contemporary crisis that we are seeing among youth. When we scratch our heads wondering why we have seen a surge of bullying in schools and bullying deaths in response, perhaps we should admit that we are a nation of bullies. Our children are merely modeling the logic of a nation that ties its own sense of status, identity and power to its ability to unrelentingly pick on the “least of these.” In this American dystopia, the disproportionately black and brown least of these will be left with no other choice but to fight back or (destroy themselves and others as they) die trying.
Lazy and corrupt people, yeah...
“Saloon” does a disservice to every reputable bar in the
nation. May I offer “Saloony” as a substitute?
Most of us would.
But that makes the moochers feel bad. They want the money stolen from us, without out our consent. Further, they don’t want us able to turn them down, no matter how stupidly they act. Not only that they want reliable leftists paid to administer the distribution of stolen money, and to protect their beneficiaries from accusations of fraud.
Stolen money they can take without feeling bad. Stolen money they can skim from without fear of redress.
I think they have a moral inversion.
The reverse John Galt?
I’ve challenged leftists before -
“if you think it’s OK to forcefully confiscate money from me and give it to someone else, why don’t you walk over here and do it yourself?”
If they think it is ok to forcefully confiscate money from me, then Obviously it is ok for me to take it from them.
Lois Lerner retired, rather than be fired. She gets a pension for the rest of her life for her malfeasance.
She is a species of thief. Thieves should be shot. If done correctly, that would solve the pension problem, and further, would help solve the ease with which the left recruits thieves.
Figures. Because we all know that ain’t no white people on food stamps. Stupid blimp.
Democrats understand the working poor, and they like them to remain the working poor, and they want more and more of them. If they can’t grow the ranks of the working poor from the once working successful, they will settle for the non-working poor, more and more of them, unable to rise above their plantation status.
Conservatives want to empower the working poor to become the working successful, and all races are invited to participate. Those who for whatever reasons choose not to be more than working or non working poor are left to remain on their leftist plantation.
Tell you what. We should as a nation be able to feed the truly needy and clean up fraud at the same time. Hopefully the people administering the program will look at the lesser funding and decide that they need to do a little more than just rubber stamp applications.
I think it is time to get rid of Salon. Who is their biggest advertiser?
Stupid bitch
Do “people of color” really receive more foodstamps than do whites?
Zero based budgeting rears its ugly head again — and the MSM never seems to catch on.
Not even sure how you'd begin to calculate that any more. Does a "White Hispanic" count as a "person of color"?
“disproportionately”, yes.
I noticed that as well. They were always a leftist outfit but it seems they have really been jumping the shark lately. Anyone know what happened? New ownership or something?
If it’s racist to cut food stamps, then Salon must be admitting that blacks are the major recipients.
I guess cutting back on Obama phones is racist also.
But how come it isn’t racist to confiscate guns?
It’s worse than I thought:
Brittney Cooper
Next Generation Black Intellectual
Dr. Brittney Cooper will join the faculty at Rutgers University this fall (2012) as assistant professor of Women’s Studies and Africana Studies. Professor Cooper is a 2009 alumna of the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University with a Ph.D. in American Studies. She is also a summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Howard University, with a bachelor’s degrees in English and Political Science.
Professor Cooper’s research and teaching interests fall into two key areas: Black women’s intellectual history and Black feminist thought. Currently, Dr. Cooper is completing her first book project, Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual Tradition, 1892-Present. Race Women interrogates the rise of Black female public intellectuals during the watershed moment of 1892-1893. In particular, this work interrogates the manner in which public Black women have theorized racial identity and gender politics, and the methods they used to operationalize those theories for the uplift of Black communities. Along with work on black female public intellectuals, Dr. Cooper studies Black women’s organizations as sites for the production of intellectual thought. She has two forthcoming book chapters on the history of the Order of Eastern Star and the history of Black women’s fraternal and club activism in North Louisiana.
Using Black feminist thought to understand contemporary articulations of Black womanhood is Dr. Cooper’s other major research area. She has published several book chapters and articles on representations of Black women in popular culture, including a piece on the representation of the “baby-mama” figure in Hip Hop music and film, the feminist implications of Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl mishap, and the importance of Michelle Obama in the tradition of Black female leadership. She has a forthcoming article on Sapphire’s Push as a hip hop novel.
essence magazine black intellectual
Dr. Cooper is co-founder along with Dr. Susana Morris of the Crunk Feminist Collective, a feminist of color scholar-activist group that runs a highly successful blog. Three members of the CFC were recently profiled in Essence Magazine’s list of Young, Black, and Amazing women under age 35 (August 2012 issue). The CFC blog was also named as one of the top 25 Black blogs to watch in 2012 by The Root.com and one of the top “Lady Blogs” by New York Magazine in November 2011. The Collective also does speaking tours, conducts workshops, and engages in a range of activist causes related to women’s issues. Professor Cooper blogs for the CFC as “Crunktastic.”
A native of Ruston, Louisiana, Dr. Cooper considers herself a small-town Southern girl at heart, which explains her affinity for soul food, crunk music, and warm weather.
http://www.brittneycooper.com/
I don’t know who supports Salon. Fanatical leftists are going to congregate somewhere. It might as well be at Salon, or any of the other gathering places for mentally, culturally and morally challenged Democrats.
Overall or as a percentage of their numbers in the population?
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