It didn’t use to be the case that one needed to explain to college students why white people wearing black face was considered offensive and degrading to African Americans, much less publishing a picture of someone in black face in the school newspaper. Nor was it necessary to explain that many people would consider hanging a noose to be a threat, not a joke. Used to be …
CORVALLIS, Ore., Nov. 18 (UPI) — Oregon State University is taking steps to address racism on campus, including a noose left at a Halloween party and racist content in the school newspaper.
There are fewer than 300 black students among the student body of 27,000 at the Corvallis campus. Two of them — Shannon Warren and Roshawn Davis — joined other black students in a protest after the campus paper published a photograph of a student in blackface as part of a story on a fan “blackout” at a football game, The (Portland) Oregonian reported Sunday.
White students involved in the incident — and in the hanging of a noose at a Halloween party — said they hadn’t meant to offend anyone, the Oregonian said.
But we live in a new era, now. The Post-Reagan age, one where young conservatives revere and burnish the image of the man perhaps most responsible for making nakedly racist appeals part of our political culture. True, Rush Limbaugh and hordes of right wing talk radio hosts took what Ronnie gave them (the eradication of the Fairness Doctrine) and pushed the outer edges of the “how low can we go” envelope to get us to this point. And let’s not dismiss the efforts of people like Lee Atwater who taught us all that nothing can place an albatross around a politician’s neck quite like the accusation that he loves him some black criminals.
Yet, I believe that more than any single person, is was Ronald Reagan who created the America in which we now live. His constant use of the false “welfare queen” narrative, the one he repeatedly told of a woman (her race never mentioned, merely implied) who drove a Cadillac purchased with welfare dollars was just one example of the change in tone and attitude he ushered onto the American political stage, after such rhetoric and open appeals to racism had been absent from the national political scene for two decades. “Saint Ronnie” rode the wave of an angry white backlash to two terms as President, and paved the way for the Presidency of George W. Bush, one where what used to be hidden is now openly (some would say nakedly) on display.
So it has been amusing to watch all the Reagan hagiographers attempt to paper over his many efforts to enable racists during the 1980’s with their half-hearted responses to Paul Krugman’s and Bob Herbert’s respective smackdowns of David Brook’s ludicrous column which claimed that Reagan didn’t intend to appeal to the racist sentiments of whites when he began his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town notorious for the murders of three young civil rights workers in 1964, and where he proudly proclaimed his support for “States Rights” long a rallying cry for white segregationists, Klu Klux Klan members and other assorted racists.
You see the fall out in a generation of young people, particularly young suburban white people, who grew up with the myth that Reagan was the greatest President ever. The man who stood down the Soviets and won the Cold War single handedly, who restored fairness to our political discourse and who beat back the screaming hordes of tax and spend liberals who just wanted to give our hard earned tax dollars away to lazy, shiftless losers on welfare. In their minds he has no faults, no flaws, no humanity. And that image will likely stay permanently etched in their brains, seeing as they were children who were told fairy tales about some heroic conservative warrior rather than the truth about the man, himself. And don’t count on our “liberally biased” press to do much to disenfranchise them of their cherished beliefs, either.
Which is why we will continue to see nooses hung, and jokes about wetbacks, and illegal alien hunts, and black face parties by this crowd. It’s also why we will continue to see Republicans vie with one another to see who can be the most openly racist, bigoted candidate running for President, whether the issue is affirmative action, Latino immigration or the rights of Muslims in America. And it’s why a Republican woman calling Hillary Clinton a bitch will be used by the lucky recipient of her nasty turn of phrase in his campaign fundraising efforts. All thanks to Ronnie Reagan, the patron saint of bigots, racists and misogynists everywhere.
