Tim Wise's Blog, page 24

What’s the Matter With White Folks? Race, Class and Voting Behavior in U.S. Elections

A radio-based presentation/seminar from 2006, in which I analyze the longstanding tendency for so many white, lower-middle class/working class voters to vote against their apparent economic interests — by supporting candidates whose economic policies benefit mostly the wealthy — and attempt to explain why this happens. Specifically, I explore the inadequacies of existing theories to explain this voting behavior (traditional Marxist analysis, as well as modern liberal analyses like those of Thomas Frank), and call for an understanding that places whiteness and white privilege squarely in the middle of the narrative. Although there are some slight addenda to this theory in the wake of the 2008 election (and which I explore in my book Between Barack and a Hard Place), the fundamental core of the argument still rings very true even after that election, and will likely prove operative in 2012 as well.

Feeling No Pain – America’s Deepening Culture of Indifference

A segment of a longer speech, delivered on September 22, 2011 at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. In this clip, I discuss the ways in which the U.S. political culture is becoming increasingly indifferent to suffering and injustice, whether in the criminal justice system, with regard to health care, war, bullying or any number of other examples. Begins with a discussion of the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia the night before this talk.

Insights and Outbursts – Volume 1

These are short clips of longer speeches, focused on a particular narrow theme. Literally, sound bytes or a little more…Descriptions below the audio player.

1. A snippet of my 2005 speech at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, discussing the ways in which privilege and the obliviousness that comes with it can leave people dangerously unsafe, whether nationally (as in the case of our reaction to 9/11) or locally (as with the reaction to the shootings at Columbine High School and others).

2. A brief snippet from my 2005 speech at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in L.A. In this clip, I’m discussing the way in which white liberal and left activists sometimes minimize the issue of race and racism within social justice efforts (around the environment, health care and militarism), and the way in which that fractures potential social justice coalitions.

3. A very brief snip from my January, 1997 MLK presentation at Central Michigan University, in which I briefly note the importance of radical activists in the struggle for social justice.

4. A very brief snip from my January, 1997 MLK presentation at Central Michigan University, in which I am contrasting our national reactions to personal evil and violence committed by individuals with our lack of reaction to institutional evil and violence perpetrated by policymakers. One thing that is immediately noticeable about my speaking in those days is that I spoke waaay faster back then: partly nerves I am guessing, and also partly the inexperience that causes one not to value the power of a pause…

5. A snip from a 2001 speech at Ohio State University as part of a conference on “Organizing for Social Change.” Here I am discussing how the criminal justice system and especially the prosecution of the war on drugs has served as a mechanism of social control in the post-Jim Crow era. Even the definitions of crime and our understandings of danger and deviance serve to privilege some and disadvantage others.

6. Just a short bit about a right-wing spokesperson for the American Family Association, who I had seen downplaying (one might say justifying) anti-gay bullying while wearing an American flag shirt. Thought it was worth noting how apparently wearing the flag on your sweaty-ass body is not desecration but letting it touch the ground or burning it or just failing to salute it is seen as disrespectful by these jackasses…

Tim Wise MLK Speech 2010 – Fountain Baptist Church – Summit NJ

Here is my 2010 MLK Day Speech at Fountain Baptist Church in Summit, NJ. I posted this before, but I have just started using Soundcloud and uploading audio files there, so because this one sometimes doesn’t work on the old server where it was located, I have put it here.

Charity Versus Solidarity: What’s the Difference and Why Does it Matter? (2008 Presentation)

This is a portion of a larger speech, delivered at an event for service providers and community members, sponsored by the Milwaukee YWCA in 2008. In this segment, I discuss the difference between models of social service provision that are rooted in notions of “charity for” those in need, versus models rooted in “solidarity with” those in need, and why these differences matter.

A Kick in the Gut(feld): Racism, Welfare Dependence, and FOX’s Clown Prince of Prejudice

I’m not sure how he managed to finagle a slot on any news-related show, but Greg Gutfeld — possibly the most consistently mendacious member of the FOX News roundtable program “The Five,” and whose most important accomplishment was an accident of timing (he just so happened to go to high school with Barry Bonds) — apparently managed to convince somebody that he was witty, even though he often reads his pithy one-liners off a cheat sheet in front of him. Which is why this wanna-be comic is not a comic at all, but rather a seat-warming buffoon on a show that is stocked to capacity with others of his kind.

In any event, one could fill a book with all the asinine quips to which viewers have been subjected by Gutfeld and his gaggle of right-wing miscreants (and hapless Democratic Party punching-bag Bob Beckel, doing his very best nightly impersonation of Alan Colmes), but amid the pantheon of dumbshittery that is Gutfeld’s stock-in-trade, few nuggets can compare to that which he vomited out last week, during the Republican National Convention.

While fawning over black conservative Mia Love, a congressional candidate from Utah, Gutfeld argued that Love was the best chance to “remind America that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican” (as if modern political parties resemble in the least their mid-1800s equivalents), and that “all the policies from the Democrats have done nothing but infantilize an entire race and made them addicted to crappy programs.”

First, let us on the one hand thank Greg Gutfeld for brutally eviscerating the veil of disingenuous denial placed over the welfare discussion heretofore by the Republican Party and conservatives of all stripes in this election cycle. Up to now, whenever those of us on the left would point out the inherent racial subtext of their welfare-bashing, folks like Gutfeld would scream and bellow that we were playing the race card, and that welfare had nothing to do with race. We were, according to them, hearing things.

But now Gutfeld has said it quite plainly. In a discussion of black conservatives, contrasted with blacks generally, he talks specifically about “infantilizing an entire race” and making them addicted to crappy programs, by which it is doubtful he means Democratic programs like the GI Bill, or FHA loans, or Social Security, but rather, so-called welfare programs, and those that are generally derided as being of the “handout” variety. Memo to Greg Gutfeld: when speaking in code about black people, it really helps if you don’t actually mention black people. But ya know, thanks.

Why Yes, That Is a Racist Argument Actually: Following the Anti-Black Logic of Gutfeld’s Thinking

However, not only does Gutfeld’s statement prove that the right is indeed thinking about black people when they bash welfare programs and recipients, it is actually far more pernicious than that. It does more than simply suggest an implicit, dog-whistle kind of appeal to racial resentment. The argument he is making here is actually entirely racist in and of itself, because it casts negative and judgmental aspersions upon African Americans as a group, and it does this in multiple ways.

First, to believe that black folk are so weak that they can be infantilized by a political party or various programs supported (sometimes) by members of that party, is to think precious little of those same black persons. It is to suggest that a people who are strong enough to survive the Middle Passage (go ahead Greg, look it up, it’s OK), enslavement, debt peonage, convict-leasing, Jim Crow and lynching, can somehow be brought to their knees, and turned into dysfunctional children, by virtue of an EBT card or a health insurance policy that happens to cover their kids’ pre-existing asthma. To think black people so weak as to be rendered virtually inoperative as functioning adults by various social programs, while white folks in European nations who receive much larger safety net benefits of all kinds seem to have no similar problems, is to believe black people somehow less resilient, even inferior to those Europeans. If safety nets trap blacks in a so-called “hammock” of dependency as the right is fond of saying, and contribute to so many of the social problems that conservatives would like to lay at the feet of that dependency, why haven’t the much more generous safety nets of every other industrialized nation on the planet with which we like to compare ourselves, absolutely wrecked their people? How are Scandinavians still able to remember how to bathe themselves, let alone get up and go to work? Why do social programs cripple black people but not Nordic types? I wait with baited breath for an answer to this question that won’t be by definition racist. So, ya know, good luck with that Greg. Be sure to let us know what you come up with. And try and make it more than 140 characters of snark.

Gutfeld’s argument is also racist in that it relies on a belief that black people are too stupid to realize the harm that liberals and Democrats and so-called welfare are doing to them. It presumes that black people are so sheeplike they’ll vote for anyone with a (D) in front of their name, just to get that couple-hundred dollars a month in food stamp (or what are called SNAP) benefits, even though such things are so clearly and obviously turning them into children, or even, as some would have it, slaves. But to believe that black people as a group are that unintelligent, that craven, that easily manipulated, is to cleave to an intrinsically racist assumption about them. Whether you believe — as they did in the old days, and as some modern conservatives like John Derbyshire still do — that black people are biologically less intelligent, or whether you reject that argument (as Gutfeld surely would), and think merely that there is something about them culturally that causes them to be collectively stupid, the outcome is the same: you believe African Americans lack the basic intelligence necessary to realize when they are being destroyed. And if you believe that, you are a racist. End of story.

Beyond Racist: The Counterfactual Stupidity of Gutfeld’s Black Dependence Argument

Of course, this argument of Gutfeld’s is not merely racist but is also spectacularly ignorant, which is no surprise as a lack of knowledge is virtually a bona fide job qualification at FOX News, and when it comes to the display of stunning stupidity, Gutfeld himself is usually out there setting the curve, even for the likes of Steve Doocy, Megyn Kelly, and Eric “look at my fake tan and man-cleave” Bolling, which really takes work.

Although Gutfeld doesn’t specify which “crappy” programs he thinks black people are dependent upon, and although he can’t pronounce infantilize despite graduating with a fucking English degree from UC Berkeley (the emphasis is on the third syllable Greg, not the first), it isn’t hard to venture a few educated guesses. Given the conservative obsession with, as Rush Limbaugh recently put it, “slothful welfare recipients” who sit around “collecting checks” for doing nothing, it seems reasonable to intuit that Gutfeld is talking first and foremost about cash welfare, as in the TANF program, or what used to be called AFDC. It is this, after all, which his candidate Mitt Romney has been lying about recently, claiming falsely that the president has gutted the work requirements that have been part of the program since 1996.

But if so, this simply demonstrates what an uneducated, bloviating hack Greg Gutfeld is, because the evidence (as opposed to the uninformed opinions of virtually every conservative in the country) is quite clear: the percentage of black people who receive any benefits at all from this program is very small, and the percentage that can be considered dependent is even smaller. Though Greg Gutfeld and the right more broadly would love for people to continue believing the lie that welfare dependence is a normative condition for African Americans — and so normative that it can actually be the basis for their political voting behavior and explain their support for Barack Obama — nothing could be further from the truth.

Fact is, as of December, 2011, there were only around 358,000 black adults in the entire United States receiving cash welfare.

Let me repeat that: 358,000 black adults in the entire country receiving cash welfare.

That is 358,000 black adults out of approximately 29 million African American adults in all, which any calculator — even the kind used at FOX or by Paul Ryan — will readily indicate is only 1.2 percent of the adult black population.

And even this number is not indicative of how many are truly “dependent” on the program in any rational sense. According to the same 2011 data, 41 percent of adult TANF recipients are engaged in some form of work activity (either unsubsidized employment, for which they receive TANF as a substitute for actual wages, or job training, or actual low-wage part time jobs), and according to a 2008 report on welfare dependency, roughly half of black TANF recipients receive benefits for four months or less. In other words, we would need to reduce the 358,000 number by at least half, since few people consider short-term beneficiaries to be dependent on welfare. So rather than 358,000, we might more properly be looking at, say, a maximum of 180,000 black adults who might conceivably be considered dependent in a given year: approximately six-tenths of one percent of the black adult population.

How anyone with even a modicum of intellectual integrity could suggest that the adults of an “entire race” can been infantilized by a program that only reaches about 1 in 100 of them, and upon which only about 1 in 165 truly depend, is beyond the rational mind to comprehend. And needless to say, if the Democratic Party were really hoping to get black folks dependent on government handouts so as to secure their vote — which has been alleged time and again this campaign season by conservatives — they are failing miserably to secure said dependence: 0.6 percent down, just 99.4 percent more to go!

Which is to say that black folks must actually be voting Democratic for other reasons (imagine!): not to secure handouts but because they truly believe that the Democratic Party best represents their interests, just as they once felt the same about Republicans back in the day. One is free to disagree, of course, and Gutfeld clearly does (as do the 67 or so black delegates at the RNC this past week). But to think that the other roughly 28,999,933 are collectively stupid, or too weak-willed to resist the siren song of welfare benefits they don’t even get, is to cast aspersions upon blacks as a group, which is the textbook definition of racism. The fact that Greg Gutfeld likes the 67 others, and really likes Mia Love and Allen West — in other words, that he can find it in his utterly puerile heart to carve out exceptions for his own personal favorite black people — doesn’t acquit him of the charge, any more than having a black friend proves one isn’t racist, or being a straight man who likes and dates women somehow insulates one from the charge of sexism. Neo-Nazi David Duke, it should be remembered, actually won the endorsement of an incredibly confused and doddering James Meredith during his 1990 race for the U.S. Senate — yes, that James Meredith, the black guy who integrated the University of Mississippi — and during a 30-minute campaign commercial that year, Duke placed his arm around Meredith and called him “his friend.” But that hardly would suggest (even were it, bizarrely true) that Duke was not still a racist, white supremacist asshat. And no, I’m not saying Greg Gutfeld is the same as David Duke. Greg has less hair, for starters, and David has made a slightly more extensive use of botox. Oh, and well OK, Greg isn’t a Nazi either, but when he talks about welfare programs there is very little substantive distinction between his rhetoric and that of Duke in his myriad races for public office.

Gutfeld’s argument is no more persuasive when we look at other safety net programs either. Even if we throw in the SNAP program (what most call food stamps), and consider both it and TANF, only 5.7 percent of black folks in the country would meet the bi-partisan Congressional definition of dependence (which is relying on cash or SNAP for more than half of one’s annual income, where that income is not connected to work activity). Fifty-five percent of black SNAP recipients live in a family with at least one person in the paid labor force, which, interestingly, is actually a slightly higher percentage with connection to work than is the case for white SNAP recipients, at 53 percent.

And since many of the 5.7 percent of blacks reflected in this dependence statistic when food stamps are considered, aren’t actually on SNAP for a long period — half who enter the rolls will be off within 10 months — the true percentage who are dependent to any real degree (as opposed to those who are merely relying on benefits to get over a particularly bad economic hump), would be even smaller than that. Again, when at least 94 percent of a particular racial group is not dependent on these programs, it is utterly perfidious (go ahead Greg, look it up, it’s OK) to claim that an “entire race” has been rendered dependent on them: a truism that even the likes of Greg Gutfeld and maybe even Brian Kilmeade should be able to understand.

Who’s Dependent? The Irony of White Conservative Stereotypes

But putting the current political context and the actual data aside for a minute, what’s perhaps most infuriating about the dependence argument offered endlessly by the right in regard to black people and so-called welfare, is what an utter inversion of racial reality it truly represents. After all, no group has been more dependent on others in this nation’s history than we white folks.

We depended on the forced labor of black people to produce the wealth that financed the American revolution, and without which labor the nation could never have been built.

We depended on the stolen land of indigenous peoples and the theft of half of Mexico in a war of aggression that we started on false pretense, to then grow the nation beyond its initial geographic area and add even further to the national wealth.

Indeed, the high school from which Greg Gutfeld graduated is named for a European Friar, Junipero Serra of Spain, who depended on the forced labor of Native Californians to support the spread of Catholic missions throughout the territory, and who viewed them as children in need of harsh fatherly discipline and forced conversion from their presumably heathen faiths.

And whites depended on forced Chinese labor to build the transcontinental railroads without which the growth of the industrial economy would have been stifled.

We depended on segregation to elevate us as white people beyond the level of wealth and power that we would have otherwise obtained, by protecting us from competition with millions of persons of color.

And even now, black folks spend about $700 billion annually with white-owned companies: money that goes disproportionately into the hands of the white owners, white stockholders, and white employees of said companies, and which dwarfs by many orders of magnitude all the so-called welfare money paid to black people combined: in fact, this amount is larger than all the welfare money paid directly to black people in the history of welfare. So who is dependent on whom? Who would be harmed more: black people if the welfare state were suddenly abolished tomorrow, or white people, if black people said to hell with transferring their money to white folks, and decided to spend all that money with other African Americans? To ask the question is to answer it.

But questions like that don’t get asked on FOX. They wouldn’t even be remotely understood by the journalistic bottom-feeders who call that propaganda mill home: folks who feel no compunction about sitting around dissing black people, without the least sense of responsibility to do their homework or engage their brains (or even Google) before running their mouths.

Of Republican Race Cards and White Denial

It’s official. The symbolic head of the Republican Party is not Ronald Reagan. It’s Pee-Wee Herman.

It was Herman after all, as portrayed by comic actor Paul Reubens, whose only comeback to every criticism was, “I know you are but what am I?”

And it is this mantra — this maddening, childlike, playground-worthy, makes-me-wanna-slap-you-in-your-damned-face mantra — that has been elevated as of late to the level of official GOP dogma. Whenever someone dares to point out the rather obvious ways in which Republicans (and especially the most conservative among them) have been using symbolic dog whistles to appeal to white racial resentment ever since the election of Barack Obama (and even long before that, going back decades), the Republican retort is hardly more complex than Herman’s above-mentioned rejoinder.

We know you are, but what are we?

Seriously, that’s pretty much it.

And so, for instance, they insist that the left has “racism on the brain,” that we “see racism everywhere,” and that by accusing conservatives of this thing, we only indicate that it is we who are really racist. Because, see, if you see racism, it’s because you are race-obsessed, and if you are race-obsessed, it’s because you are the racist. But as for them? Nah, they’re just happy-go-lucky, colorblind pixies who throw peanuts at black people while calling them animals.

I wish I was being silly and hyperbolic here, but I’m not.

And so, for instance, Newt Gingrich seriously thinks we’re the ones who are racist, when we call out the racial undertones of the totally inaccurate, utterly dishonest welfare commercials being run by the Romney campaign. Apparently, to Gingrich, it is only liberals and people on the left who think of black folks when the word welfare is used. Oh yes, because conservatives would never be thinking of that. Like, when Ronald Reagan embellished that story about the “welfare queen” driving the Cadillac to the welfare office in Chicago and getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits thanks to dozens of fake names, he wasn’t picturing a black woman and didn’t intend for you too either. Even though the story the legend was based on involved a black woman on the city’s south side, who was actually guilty of only about $8000 in fraud, he wasn’t even talking about Linda Taylor, the black woman in question. No, he was imagining a white woman in Northbrook, swinging by to pick up her AFDC check before heading off to meet her tennis pro, scamming the system at the expense of all the hard-working black taxpayers in the Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor homes. Who could possibly have gotten that twisted? I mean yes, since the story was essentially fictitious, he could have made the fictional woman from a whiter place like West Virginia or Nebraska or Vermont, but the fact that he didn’t, and instead picked a big city with a large black population was merely coincidental. And if you don’t understand that, it’s because you’re race-obsessed.

And when Reagan made up yet another story about some “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps, he didn’t specify the “buck’s” race, so if you see a black man in your mind’s eye, it’s obviously because you are the one with the problem. Why, for all you know, when Reagan said “buck,” he might have been referring to a large deer. You obviously have race on the brain!

And when the head of some Republican women’s association sent out those “Obama Bucks” back in 2008 — ya know, the ones that had then candidate Obama’s head superimposed on a food stamp certificate, surrounded by pictures of fried chicken and watermelon — that had nothing to do with race! Good grief, only a racist would make the association between fried chicken and watermelon on the one hand and black people on the other! What, ya’ think white people don’t like fried chicken? Didn’t you see all those white people lined up around the block for Chik-Fil-A recently? God, you’re such a racist!

And when Rick Santorum said he didn’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money — ya know presumably with welfare payments — he didn’t really say black people at all. He said “blah people,” and he meant it. Seriously. What, you mean you’ve never met a “blah person?” Why sure you have. They’re everywhere! And the last thing we’d want to do is make their lives better by giving them “wha” people’s money. But what does any of that have to do with race?

And when Joe Walsh (not the guy from the Eagles, but the Congressman from Illinois), made that comment about how Democrats want to make Hispanics dependent on government handouts “just like African Americans,” he wasn’t talking about African Americans as a race. He was talking about African Americans as rapping, breakdancing, basketball players. Oh, and I bet you’ll think that’s some racist stereotype too, huh? God you liberals are so predictable!

And when Rush Limbaugh recently said that Mitt Romney’s welfare ad, attacking President Obama would work because “working class whites” don’t like “slothful welfare recipients,” he wasn’t intending to racially contrast white people — whom he mentioned racially by name — with the lazy “takers” as he went on to call them. His reference was completely color-neutral, and only a race-obsessed, racity-racist would jump to the conclusion that a person who just so happens to draw a distinction between one group that he labels as white and another group, which he doesn’t label at all, is thereby implying that the second group might be something other than white! Oh, and when Hurricane Isaac was bearing down on New Orleans, and Limbaugh advocated sending bags of money to the city for use in plugging the levees, so that residents there would go to steal the bags to get to the money and then drown, he wasn’t being racist or actually advocating the death of anyone. And the people he envisioned taking the money might well have been rich white people who live on Audubon Place, uptown! I mean, you can’t really know for sure can you? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

And as for the accusation that conservative republicans have a history of making race-based appeals: why that’s preposterous. Yes, Lee Atwater — one of the most successful Republican operatives of all time — admitted that the Party manipulated coded language to attack black people, and quite deliberately at that; but honestly, he only said that on his death bed, when he was no doubt suffering the effects of chemo-brain, and so you can’t rely on such medically-induced testimony as that!

And yes, it’s true that Jesse Helms ended up winning a tightly contested race for re-election to the Senate in North Carolina, only after running that commercial, in which a white man crumpled up a rejection letter and the voice over intoned that “you needed that job, and you were the most qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a quota.” But that had nothing to do with the fact that Helms, prior to running that ad, had been trailing his opponent — the black Mayor of Charlotte, Harvey Gantt — and was hoping to link the black guy who was trying to get his job with the black guy who apparently just took yours. OK, actually that one was pretty bad, but hey, it was a long time ago and Helms is dead. Oh, and did we mention, back in the 60s, Helms had been a Democrat: so BLAM: take that, you Hitler-loving, commie bastard!

This is the level of intellectual dishonesty to which the right is willing to stoop. So long as they never actually mention a person’s race, nothing they say about them can be considered racist. So if they call Obama a foreigner, it’s not intended to push racial buttons, because there are lots of white foreigners, and hell, they could be accusing him of being from Lichtenstein. If they call him a “lyin African,” it’s not intended to push racial buttons because there are white Africans, like Charlize Theron and Dave Matthews. If they send around pictures of him dressed like a pimp, it’s not about race, because there are white pimps, like James O’Keefe. And if they say that the only way to get promoted in the Obama Administration is by “hating white people” (as Limbaugh said back in 2009), it’s not because they’re trying to scare white people about the black president. It’s because they just really need you to know how much Tim Geithner hates your cracker ass. And when they make a button that asks whether we can “still call it the White House” if Obama wins, that’s not a racial thing. It’s just that they heard that Michelle Obama is partial to soft pastels, and ya know, might want to repaint the place.

And if they portray Obama as a monkey or a chimpanzee, or even call him “the first monkey president,” that’s not because they’re trying to play along with the long-standing racist association between black people and apes. And anyway, everybody likes monkeys and they’re known to be really smart: which is actually what a conservative talk show host who recently called the president a monkey and e-mailed a picture of him as a monkey said in her defense. Because as someone who is militantly opposed to President Obama and everything he stands for, she nonetheless really wants you to know how smart she thinks he is.

And they want you to know that when they say that the Department of Justice is oppressing white people just like blacks were oppressed in the 50s, or that the health care reform bill is Obama’s way of getting “reparations” (both of which Glenn Beck said a few years ago), it’s not an attempt to get white people all geeked up about some racial “payback.” It’s just because they lack all rational perspective and are stupid as fuck.

Hell, even if they call you the n-word that’s not racist, because Toure, who’s black, used it in a totally different way, on television this month (and, ya know, actually had to apologize for it, unlike any white person who’s used it in the last, forever), and anyway they have “black friends,” which is apparently the new word white conservatives use for the guy who shines their shoes at the airport. And we all know that if you have black friends you can’t be a racist, just like, obviously, if you are a straight guy, who likes and dates women, you couldn’t possibly be a sexist!

Yes indeed, the only people who are really racist are the people who talk constantly about racism. Ya’ know, people like Martin Luther King Jr. and all the folks in the civil rights movement. Talk about race obsessed!

Oh, and Barack Obama, because of that tax he imposed on tanning bed customers, who we all know are mostly white. That sneaky racist bastard! Trying to make tanning more expensive for white people, and thus, perhaps cut down on how often white people go to the tanning salon, and thus, ya’ know, save lots of white people from skin cancer…all so he can keep us alive and milk us even longer for taxes! That bloodsucker!

Look, this is simple, really. The reason we say political appeals that rely on images of welfare recipients are about priming racial resentment and even racism, is because study after study after study after study after study after study says they are. The actual research, by actual scholars, indicates quite clearly that this is the effect of such tactics. Now granted, maybe Republicans didn’t know that (bullshit), because, after all, conservatives don’t read social science literature, because it has that word “science” in it, and science is scary and makes baby Jesus cry. But the bottom line is, we on the left are not race-obsessed. We’re fact obsessed. We have a thing about evidence. You should try it, really. It’ll be OK, and God won’t punish you for your lack of simple faith.

Oh and one last thing: please enough with that whole “race card” term.

Race, if you learn nothing else, is not a card. And this thing we’re talking about is not a game. It’s real life, where actions have real consequences. Your actions have consequences and we’re just counting them up. You don’t have to like that. But you can’t blame the calculator.

If It Walks Like a Duck and Talks Like a Duck: Racism, Bigotry and the Death of Respectable Conservatism

For the most part, I’ve tried to be restrained.

Although conservatives accuse those of us on the left of thinking that all critiques of President Obama are rooted in racism, this has certainly never been my argument. Indeed, I’ve written two books highly critical of Obama’s positions on a number of issues (from a place well to his left), and am fully aware that decent, honest people can disagree with Barack Obama from the right, too, without their disagreements serving as proof of some latent, let alone blatant, bigotry or anti-black bias.

That said, what I have also long maintained — and what seems increasingly evident as we move into the heart of the 2012 campaign — is that the style of opposition, its specific form, and its particular content are too often embedded in a narrative of white racial resentment, white racial anxiety, and a desire to “other” the president in ways that go well beyond the politically partisan. It is not that criticisms of Obama are quantitatively racist, per se, but rather that they are qualitatively so in too many instances; a distinction, yes, but one that does not alter the underlying reality.

In other words, it is one thing to disagree, even mightily, with a president’s policies.

It is quite another to suggest that that president is really a foreign imposter: over, and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And to accept no proof, no matter how extensive, that he really is an American after all.*

Or to suggest that he is a secret Muslim who wishes to see Sharia Law imposed in the United States, and who is working to usher in just such an outcome, and that he and his wife engage in “terrorist fist jabs” as their preferred form of greeting.

Or a Manchurian Candidate, bent on destroying America, or at least deliberately destroying the economy so as to pay whites back for slavery and racism, and insisting that he only appoints people to his administration if they hate whites, and that he only received the endorsement of Colin Powell because he’s black.

Or that he’s the equivalent of an “African colonial despot,” who is “more African” than American, and who chose to go by the name “Barack” rather than “Barry” specifically as a way to thumb his nose at America, and who “hates this country” and is trying to dismantle it “brick by brick.”

Or that his political model is Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, and that soon he, like Mugabe, will be confiscating white people’s farms. Or that, even worse, he is just like Hitler, that his administration is a throwback to the Nazis, and his calls for national service and volunteerism are tantamount to the creation of a new SS.

Or that he uses the New Black Panther Party as his personal “army of thugs”, that he stands by while they intimidate white voters (despite the evidence that utterly contradicts that conclusion), and that his Department of Justice has targeted whites for oppression just like blacks were oppressed in the 1950s.

Or that he’s an “Indonesian Muslim” and a “welfare thug”.

Or a vampire, sucking the blood of American businesses, who deserves a stake through the heart.

Or maybe even the anti-Christ.

Or that he isn’t a real American because he didn’t sufficiently gloat over the killing of Osama bin Laden, and because he didn’t desecrate bin Laden’s body the way a real American presumably would have.

Or that he’s a “third worlder,” who is “appeasing his Islamic overlords,” who wants to put Jews on trains to extermination camps because he is an “evil” anti-Semite, who is responsible for “Kick-a-Jew day” hate crimes at certain schools.

Or arguing that his health care reform bill, which will of course amount to literal “armageddon,” is really just about getting “reparations for slavery,” and portraying him on anti-health care reform signs, or mass e-mails, as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose.

Or to claim that his presidency causes black kids to beat up white kids on school buses.

Or that he plans to put whites in slavery.

Or that his proposal to impose a small tax on visits to tanning salons is a racist imposition on whites who comprise the bulk of such customers.

Or that he looks like a “skinny ghetto crackhead,” who by virtue of meeting with an African leader from Gabon, and inviting rapper Common to a presidential event, is hosting “hoodlums in the hizzouse”, and whose drinking of a pint of beer in an Irish pub when visiting that country is derided as “chugging 40s”, as in 40-ounce bottles of Malt Liquor.

Or implying that he didn’t really deserve to get into Columbia or Harvard Law School and that he may have been admitted as an affirmative action case, and that he was “involved with a crack whore” in his youth.

Or choosing to portray him as a pair of white spook eyes against a black background in a picture of the nation’s presidents, or perhaps as a pimp.

Or arguing that he is a “power hungry black man”, or perhaps a “raghead,” one of whose daughters is “ghetto street trash” and a “typical street whore.”

Or that he is waging an all-out assault on the values of the American people, and that he might be planning to replace the annual White House Easter egg hunt with a watermelon hunt instead.

Or wondering whether we should still call the presidential residence the White House at all, given the family that currently lives there.

Or insisting that Obama needs to “learn how to be an American,” as Romney surrogate John Sununu suggested last month, and that he is taking us down a course that is “foreign” in the words of Romney himself.

Or suggesting that the president doesn’t, for some unspecified (and surely not racial reason) “fully appreciate” the “Anglo-Saxon heritage” shared between the U.S. and the U.K., and that he had a bust of Winston Churchill removed from the Oval Office because of his anti-colonial hatred for the West.

Or that he is a “revolutionary” who believes in creating economic hardship as a way to atone for the nation’s founding, which he naturally views as “illegitimate” and “unjust.”

Or joking that he’s thinking of taxing aspirin “because it’s white and it works,” or quipping that the first lady is a close relative of a gorilla, and that Obama himself is a monkey.

Or portraying him as a slavemaster, whipping a white taxpayer.

Or insisting that he doesn’t have a life story that “has much in common with anybody in this country,” (in part because he didn’t grow up in the Midwest) and that he “cannot relate” to the “American Experience.”

How many times, one is left to wonder, must a person be called un-American before it’s accurate to claim that he’s being accused of being foreign, and a danger to the nation? A cancer to be excised from the body politic?

How many times can a man be the butt of racist humor, or likened to black dictators, or accused of seeking racial revenge upon white people, before it is no longer outrageous or the playing of some mystical, magical race card to assert that, indeed, the people doing these things are really just race-baiting white nationalists in conservative garb?

How long, in short, before we call that which walks and talks like a duck, a fucking duck?

And yes, please, I realize that not all of these criticisms are explicitly about race (though most quite obviously are), but even those that seem free of racialized content at first glance, continue a process of othering, whereby the president becomes not just someone with objectionable policies, but someone who actually wants to hurt you, to destroy your country, to pillage the values you hold dear, to crush you and everything you believe into dust. One would have to look far and wide to uncover any rhetoric that apocalyptic said about previous presidents. Even Bill Clinton, whom the right dearly loathed, never was characterized as a would-be dictator, whose re-election would potentially spell the end of America, or whose presidency was seen as literally endangering the republic. Indeed, even when Clinton proposed health care reform that was about as moderate and lukewarm as Obama’s, those who opposed the plan never accused Bill of advocating death panels, or using health care to exact racial revenge on whites, or looking to take money from old white people and spend it on health care for undocumented immigrants. Interestingly, the extent to which Obama has been effectively othered thanks to racial resentment, actually causes whites to oppose his health care reform plan, even while they profess support for the very same plan so long as they’re told it was Bill Clinton’s.

In addition to the blatant othering of the president, so clearly demonstrated in the above-mentioned examples, there are any number of more subtle ways that his political opponents have sought to separate him from the circle of human decency and Americanness to which they themselves insist they belong.

So to suggest that there is something fundamentally un-American about Barack Obama’s views — that, for instance, his belief that the rich don’t build their fortunes alone, or his support for government intervention in various arenas such as health care or housing, or his support for slight tax increases for upper-income individuals place him beyond the pale of the American political tradition — is so transparently nonsensical as to leave very little doubt that it is his visage and not his vision that provokes much of the hostility. After all, Abraham Lincoln agreed that labor created the wealth of business owners, and that labor was indeed prior to and superior to capital. It was Dwight Eisenhower who presided over some of the biggest government projects in history like the Interstate Highway program, the expansion of the FHA and VA loan programs for housing, and under whose leadership tax rates on the wealthiest Americans reached a whopping 91 percent: well above double that which would exist even if all the Bush-era tax cuts expired, and President Obama got his every wish on tax policy. Ronald Reagan signed one of the biggest tax increases in history so as to protect the solvency of Social Security, and ran up massive deficits by substantially expanding military spending, and it was George W. Bush who spent money like a drunken sailor on a three-day pass for the projects he believed in (principally unfunded wars and a prescription drug benefit), all without incurring the kind of “otherization” to which Barack Obama has been subjected. Even when those men are thought of today, and critiqued by some, their fundamental location at the heart of the American experiment, and their Americanness itself are not what are being questioned. Their views on capital, on taxes, on government spending, all may provoke disagreements, but those are rarely if ever disagreements in which these persons are placed outside the orbit of mainstream Americanism itself.

Likewise, although it is fine to criticize the president for his approach to rectifying the economic crisis and to disagree with the methods he has employed for doing so, it is also legitimate to point out how certain of those critiques — like referring to him as “the food stamp president,” or claiming (falsely as it turns out) that he has removed work requirements for persons receiving cash welfare assistance — are predictably calculated to trigger long-held racial stereotypes about who the beneficiaries of those programs are presumed to be. That there are actually only about 1.1 million able-bodied adults in the nation (only about 450,000 of them black) receiving cash assistance (and even many of these work at least part-time) doesn’t alter the fact that the perception of welfare recipients — and especially the perception that commentators like Rush Limbaugh play upon when they contrast welfare recipients with “working class whites” — is that large numbers and percentages of African Americans are dependent upon government support, and that Obama is on their side. That it’s all a lie only makes its continued repetition more transparent as to its real purpose. They know exactly what they’re doing.

Just like they know what they’re doing when they dishonestly blame the economic crisis, and especially the housing meltdown, on poor people of color, who received home loans for which they weren’t qualified thanks to the presumed meddling of civil rights activists. Although there is literally no evidence to support the bogus claim that the Community Reinvestment Act and other lending regulations caused the crisis (indeed the vast majority of bad loans weren’t even written by CRA-covered institutions, and those loans that were covered under CRA tended to perform better than others), by connecting economic insecurity to people of color — to financial “affirmative action” if you will — the right hopes to create synaptic and memetic links between white pain and black gain.

So too with their baseless claims that people-of-color led organizations like ACORN were responsible for massive election fraud in 2008, and their suggestions that such fraud may even have stolen the election for Obama. Though the claims are the stuff of ignorant and paranoid fantasy (the only fraud uncovered was registration fraud, which ACORN itself discovered and reported, and which involved registrants filling out cards with names like Donald Duck — unlikely to result in actual vote fraud unless Donald actually managed to waddle into the booth), they push oversized buttons of white fear and trepidation that those people are stealing your country from you!

And to consistently contrast the president with the founders, as the Tea Party is so quick to do, is hard to countenance other than as an implicitly racial message about how the nation has changed, and not for the better. After all, other presidents have created government programs every bit as large or larger than anything implemented by the current administration; they have created far higher taxes, and added much more to the deficit. Yet it is this president, whose beliefs and actions we are to see as uniquely breaking with the nation as the founders envisioned it. And more to the point, we are to revere without comment that bygone nation, making no note apparently of the founders’ racism, sexism, or classist elitism. Indeed, to critique the founders for their prodigious shortcomings in this regard is seen as an unjust and evil calumny. The nostalgic reverence for people who openly held to a belief in white supremacy, who believed in restricting the franchise to white male property owners (as do at least some among the contemporary right wing), and who in all regards intended to establish a white republic, with liberty and justice solely for a few, is an inherently racial message. Whether it transmits that message loudly, like a cell phone on full volume (to borrow a metaphor from Michael Eric Dyson), or quietly, like the same phone on vibrate matters little. The call is received, and the message is left in the inbox of an anxious white polity.

When you look at the persistent racialization of anti-Obama rhetoric, and the lost cause-type nostalgia that is so central to the modern conservative narrative, it is very difficult to ignore how whiteness and implicit white supremacy forms the cornerstone of the Republican Party and especially its rightmost wing. And when you then examine the particular strategies being employed by the right to help “take the country back” from the interloper they feel has hijacked it, such as limiting early voting (because it tends to increase turnout among folks of color and the poor), or the Voter ID craze (which won’t actually stop mythical fraudulent in-person voting but which will disproportionately effect turnout among people of color and the poor who are less likely to have photo ID), the relationship between white anxiety and modern conservatism becomes even clearer.

Hard though it may be to remember, there was once a time when movement conservatives, precisely because of the patrician erudition to which they aspired, tended to speak in measured tones, and sought to engage on the battlefield of ideas with a rhetoric that — however filled with nonsense it may have been — nonetheless imagined itself as the very embodiment of enlightened reason. Conservatives were like the prim and proper family members who told you never to speak of sex, religion or politics at the dinner table. Even when they engaged in the most despicable forms of racism, such as William F. Buckley’s defense of segregation and whites-only voting in the pages of his National Review, you got the sense reading through the claptrap that, though it be utterly venal codswallop, it had been written less with a sense of hatred and more with a sense of sad and pitying regret. Buckley, it seemed, really wanted black people to be civilized enough to participate in the election of public officials; it’s just that, as he saw it through his blinkered and privileged phony-accented Connecticut eyes, they simply weren’t there yet. Offensive? Yes, as hell, in fact. But when you watch him getting his argumentative clock cleaned by James Baldwin at Oxford — Baldwin having been both his literary and intellectual superior by many orders of measurable magnitude — you get the sense that he was almost relieved. It was as if he even then began to take the turn that many, many years later would cause him to admit (at least partially) that he had been wrong in his support for southern apartheid.

Would that conservatives today were even half as introspective about the more extreme of their own ventilations. When one can be wistful for the likes of a Buckley, or even a Goldwater or a Reagan for goodness’ sakes — who for all their mendacity and support for policies the effects of which were racist and classist to the core nonetheless would have likely avoided calling the objects of their political derision “vermin,” who should be “hung high” or “human parasitic garbage,” or that they should be beaten to death with shovels — one knows, or should, that respectable conservatism is dead. It is rotting in a grave, out of which hole has crept the most nefarious and zombified substitute, reeking of an acrid and putrescent characterological rot, upon which no calm and dispassionate bit of reason may find even a temporary home.

Of course, even as the right has changed (and for the worse), in quite another way, perhaps there’s really nothing new to see here. Black and brown peoples have always had to prove, even to the more restrained among the conservative cognitariat, that they were really human beings and deserved to be treated as such.

And it is this reality, about which peoples of color are so well aware and white Americans so splendidly naive, which makes this process — of having to prove, again and again that the world really is round and that people of color really are experiencing their lives and are more capable of interpreting the meaning of those lives than we are — so maddening. Being forced in every new generation to demonstrate, whether you’re Barack Obama or anyone else, that you really belong here — indeed that for most, your ancestors were here before most white folks’ ancestors were, and in that sense you are, if anything, more entitled to be here than they — is exhausting. Having to prove that you are not, in the main, looking to go all Nat Turner on our asses, to burn all of our proverbial barns, to rape “our women,” to take “our jobs” or “our children’s college slots,” but that instead you would like simply that for which you have worked, and toiled — that which you have Goddamn earned — is like having to prove that one is not an alien from Venus, or a child molester, or a wife-beater, or a Satan worshipper. In short it is something that can never be proved to the satisfaction of those whose minds have become so besotted with fear and insecurity that the lie is, to them, more comfort than the truth, for it allows their tidy worldview, however stressful, to be maintained; for their sense of righteousness and superiority, amid substantial evidence of their own utter and stifling mediocrity, to be kept whole.

Their mentality is transparently obvious, and sounds roughly like this within the echo chambers of their own ideologically diseased brains:

If we can keep you and others like you constantly as junior partners in this thing called America, then we can retain our status as the prototype, the floor model, the one in the corner office, with the gold-trimmed nameplate who makes the rules, allows you in the boardroom occasionally — but only on our terms — and who, when we damned well feel like it, can send you to get us coffee. But when the nation’s political leader no longer looks like us, has a name that sounds funny, and a family history too exotic for our liking, and when the popular culture changes into one that is thoroughly multicultural, and as the economy melts down, confronting us with a kind of insecurity that hadn’t been our lot for three generations, however normal it might have become for the black and brown, and as the demographics — of the local school, the towns in which we live and even the country — change, confronting us with the possibility that, have mercy, within 40 years our kind will no longer be the majority, the norm, the walking talking definition of an “all-American boy or girl” (which is a concept we fucking created), then the patience with which we have tolerated you begins to wear thin.

You are at the gates, and because we believe those gates are ours, that we built them — even though in every conceivable way you did — we begin to lose our sense of self. We cannot be special except in relation to you and your lack of specialness. If you gain access to that which has always been ours — be it the presidency, or just affordable health care, a decent job, access to a college education and a home to call your own — then you pose a symbolic threat to our sense of worth. What good is membership in the club if it can’t be restricted? The distance we have been able to put between ourselves and you is how we’ve been able to daily remind ourselves of our betterness. It has mapped the territory of our greater work effort, our superior morality, our more significant sacrifices, and so too the territory of your indolence, laziness, dysfunction and pathology. Your failure, at least in relative if not absolute terms, is a necessary prerequisite for the proper functioning of our contorted egos. Your gains, however much they fail to truly challenge our disproportionate advantages in every measurable realm of daily life, manage nevertheless to pose an existential threat to the psychological wages of whiteness, which W.E.B. DuBois told us (though we hardly wanted to hear it from such an uppity Negro as he) were central to our existence roughly a century ago.

In short, how will we know we’re good if we don’t know you’re bad? And how will we know you’re bad, if you’re able to live next door, work beside us (or perhaps even as our superiors), and if our kids have posters of people like you all over their bedroom walls? Our entire self-concept has been rooted in your otherness. We do not exist in any meaningful sense without you as a reference point, to remind us of the floor beneath which we are not to fall. And when you say enough of that, and force us to examine our own anxieties, our own lack of specialness (at least in any terms other than those we invented in our fevered imaginations and used as substitutes for real accomplishment), well then, we will not be the ones who remember to speak in measured tones at that dinner table. We will turn the fucking table upside down.

And we’ll say you did it.

________

* According to a spring, 2012 survey, roughly two-thirds of Republicans say they believe Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and with many others saying they aren’t sure either way, only about 1 in 5 accept the truth of Obama’s citizenship. Which is to say that only about 1 in 5 Republicans can claim the mantle of being even remotely rational and informed human beings.

We’re Gonna Scapegoat Like It’s 1995: Welfare and the Never-Ending Lies of the American Right

In the pantheon of right-wing dog whistles, none is as tried, true, and generally effective as “welfare” bashing. Ever since the days of Ronald Reagan, who fabricated tales of a “welfare queen” collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash benefits by using multiple identities and Social Security numbers, conservatives have known that articulating an inchoate rage against welfare spending and recipients, who are cast as irresponsible leeches, living off the rest of us, pays real political dividends. Even though welfare reform in the mid-1990s largely eliminated no-strings-attached cash assistance from the nation’s social safety net, millions of Americans act as if nothing ever changed, as if welfare reform never happened. They are just as upset about it today as they were twenty years ago, which is why Mitt Romney and his surrogates at FOX News, along with commentators like Rush Limbaugh, continue to hammer the theme of undeserving poor people, getting handouts while they sit on the couch, don’t work, and (according to Romney’s latest campaign commercial), are poised to be let out of whatever minimal work requirements have existed for the past 16 years, thanks to the liberalism of Barack Obama.

For a moment, let’s put aside the fact that the state waivers advocated by the Obama Administration were actually sought by conservative Republican Governors, and that they would only allow states the flexibility to design better ways of actually helping recipients find jobs. So too, let’s ignore the fact that even welfare reform’s chief advocate, Newt Gingrich, and former GOP operative and architect of the reform, Ron Haskins, have acknowledged that the Romney campaign’s take on the waivers is dishonest. For now, let us simply examine the far larger problem: namely, that the characterization of welfare as some huge program, dispensing massive benefits to the poor, and the characterization of recipients as lazy slackers who sit around collecting checks at taxpayer expense is rooted entirely in fantasy. For conservatives to continue beating this tired drum is to deliberately seek to make an issue where there is none, to scapegoat the poorest and most vulnerable Americans for problems they did not create, and to engage in a kind of class warfare for which the right frankly lives. To criticize the rich is, to hear them tell it, untoward and unbecoming; but to bash the poor is a venerable pastime. To the extent such invective manages to stir up racial resentments (given how racialized the image of welfare recipients has been for the past forty-plus years), all the better, especially when your guy is running against the nation’s first black president. Anything to suggest that Barack Obama is bending over backwards for black folks plays well with the angry white men who increasingly make up the core constituency of the Republican Party.

Think that’s too harsh? OK. Well then, perhaps you’d like to explain the meaning of the not-so-thinly-veiled racial resentment embedded in recent comments made by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show, in a long diatribe about welfare, President Obama, the state waivers, and the upcoming election. While discussing the president’s response to the Romney campaign’s claims — the ones called dishonest by virtually every media outlet of record — Limbaugh insisted that the primary reason Obama is upset about the attack is because it has the potential to reinvigorate white male working class voters: a group whose vote Limbaugh claims Obama had been trying to suppress. To wit, here’s Limbaugh on August 10th:

Okay, let’s stick with the Romney welfare, gutting-welfare ad that…the regime is so upset about. No question Obama is trying to suppress the white vote. The white, working, middle class vote. Obama’s trying to suppress that…A lot of Obama’s ads and the PAC ads on television have been designed to suppress that vote by portraying Romney as anathema to them…he knows they’re not going to vote for him. But if he can get them to not vote period, then it doesn’t matter that he’s written them off. If they’re not going to vote for him, the next task is to make sure they don’t show up for Romney. How do you do that? Well, you portray Romney as some rich moneybags guy who isn’t going to help them. And, not only that, doesn’t even like them!…And so where (Obama’s) in the middle of trying to suppress the votes of the white, working class, here comes Romney with a truthful ad that’s going to whip them back up into a frenzy…Whatever success Obama has had in angering white working class voters towards Romney where they might just sit out and not vote, now he’s whipped them up into a frenzy…This is why the Romney welfare ad has got them so discombobulated, because they’ve done it to themselves. Obama has undercut his own strategy. Which again is to so depress or anger the white, working class that they don’t vote.

And why does the waiver request — again, one that was initiated by conservatives — whip the white working class into a frenzy? Returning to Limbaugh:

Because the one thing the white, working class voters don’t like is slothful welfare recipients. They don’t like slackers. They don’t like takers. They don’t like people sitting on the couch, getting a welfare check, watching television, when they know they’re paying for it.

Of course, there would be no reason to discuss this as a racial issue — as an issue for the white working and middle class — unless it was fully understood by the person discussing it in that manner that the image of welfare recipients (the “takers” in Limbaugh’s formulation) was something other than white. By discussing this matter in racial terms, it is quite apparent that Limbaugh knows what he’s doing, and what the popular imagery of welfare recipients is: it’s black and brown folks, eating bonbons and having babies out of wedlock, while salt-of-the-Earth white men break their backs and pay the taxes that help support them in their idleness. It is blatant. It is transparent. And of course, it is thoroughly dishonest on multiple levels.

To begin, there is the simple fact that contrary to popular belief, the numbers of people “receiving checks” from the government (the common imagery and that which is being played upon by Limbaugh) are at an all-time low. So although FOX very cleverly ran a segment recently during which they claimed (and with a graphic no less!) that over 100 million Americans were now receiving “welfare,” that number does not refer to the common understanding of welfare — and the understanding that Limbaugh is deliberately trying to cultivate with his image of people receiving checks — but instead, includes anyone receiving benefits from any government program, targeted to low and moderate income persons, households or communities: what are called “means tested” programs. But a quick look at the House Ways and Means Committee’s annual Green Book, which catalogs these programs in detail, indicates how different the reality of government programs and program beneficiaries is, from the common and stereotypical beliefs about both.

So, for instance, the only way you can get anywhere near “100 million” Americans receiving welfare from the federal government, is to include huge swaths of beneficiaries whom few would consider to be welfare recipients, in any traditional sense. You would have to include the millions of elderly and disabled persons who receive two-thirds of all Medicaid benefits. You’d have to include the 10 million low-income seniors who receive a prescription drug subsidy under Part D of Medicare. You’d have to include the 27 million working adults who receive the refundable portion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, because their incomes are too low to owe federal taxes, as well as 18 million working parents who receive the refundable child tax credit because their incomes are too low to qualify for the standard, non-refundable credit available to middle income families. You’d also have to include the 2 million low income elderly Americans who receive benefits under the Nutrition Program for the Elderly, which guarantees adequate meals in congregate settings or home-delivered meals to older poor folks; as well as the 2.5 million people who benefit from adult education and literacy services, funded by the federal government and operated by states and various educational agencies; and the 8 million or so low-to-moderate income students who receive Pell Grants to make college affordable; and the 1 million or so children who reap the benefits of pre-school readiness programs like Head Start, which has been proven to reduce dependence on other forms of assistance.

So, as far as the folks who “get checks” are concerned, unless Limbaugh means to bash the folks who get refund checks under the Child Tax Credit, or the EITC — which most sane people don’t consider welfare, since one has to work in order to qualify for them, and which even Ronald Reagan praised as among the most effective anti-poverty programs ever created (and which he supported because it reduced dependence on other forms of assistance) — the numbers of such Americans is not 100 million. It is not 50 million. It is not 20 million. As evidenced by the House Ways and Means Committee’s Green Book, it is approximately 12 million, of which 7.7 million are elderly, blind or disabled persons receiving checks from the SSI program, and who are not likely the folks Limbaugh and his ilk are condemning as slothful. That leaves about 4.3 million who receive benefits from TANF (what used to be Aid to Families With Dependent Children, or AFDC), roughly three-quarters of whom are children. Which means that only about 1 million adults receive cash from this most vilified of programs: less than one-half of one percent of the adult population.

And what’s more, of those who do “receive checks” so to speak, it is simply false that they are dependent on those benefits, or receive them for long periods of time, rather than work. As indicated by the Department of Health and Human Services, in any given month, about half of all TANF recipients live in a family unit with at least one person who is employed, but whose earnings are so low as to make them still eligible for a small cash welfare subsidy. Nearly 30 percent of TANF recipients live in a family with at least one person who works at a full-time job, and yet, whose income remains at or below poverty level.

That dependence is an uncommon state for welfare recipients should really come as no surprise, given how minimal are the grants offered to poor persons and families. TANF benefits, for instance, have fallen in value by 20 percent since the mid-1990s in 34 states, adjusted for inflation; and this is after the real value of benefits had already plummeted by more than 40 percent from 1970 until 1996 in 2/3 of all states. As of 2011, benefits came to less than half the poverty line in all 50 states, and left recipients below 30 percent of the poverty line in most. Indeed, in 14 states, benefits left recipient households below one-fifth of the poverty line, receiving, on average, less than $300 a month for a family of three, while in states like Alabama and Mississippi, TANF benefits have reached an almost incomprehensibly absurd low: $215 and $170 per month for a family of three; hardly sufficient to sustain a welfare dependent lifestyle. By 2010, average monthly TANF benefits stood at less than $180 per person and only $428 per household.

And since most persons who inveigh against welfare dependence do so because of a belief that beneficiaries remain on various government program rolls for long periods, it also might help to note how inaccurate are the regular claims of long-term welfare reliance. Fact is, half of all persons who enter the TANF rolls and begin to receive cash benefits from the program will exit the rolls within 4 months, three of every four TANF entrants will exit within a year, and only about 1 in 6 will receive benefits for 20 months or longer. Long-term welfare use has fallen by half since the 1990s, and even by the ‘90s had fallen considerably, relative to prior decades. So when it comes to able-bodied people who get cash assistance (or checks) from the government, both the numbers of such persons, the amount of money received by such persons, and the length of time they receive benefits are considerably different than common mythology, and the right-wing lies spread by professional prevaricators like Limbaugh.

But, just to be generous, let’s assume that the Limbaughs of the world, and the folks at FOX, don’t mean to limit their critique to cash welfare. Sure, they talk about people “getting checks,” but maybe that’s just a metaphor for the larger panoply of benefits that millions of people receive from government. Surely, when you add in those other programs, like food stamps, and housing subsidies then we’re talking big money, massive dependence, and an out-of-control welfare state!

Well, no, not really. First, let’s examine food stamps, or what are now known as SNAP benefits (which stands for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). On the one hand, it is certainly true that due to the economic crisis of the last several years, the SNAP rolls have gone up dramatically. And it is also true that most persons who receive cash benefits under TANF do in fact receive SNAP (although, it should be noted, only about 8 percent of SNAP recipients also receive cash). However, the image of these benefits as being sufficient to engender laziness and dependency is nonsensical. Even when households receive both cash and food stamp benefits, recipient households are left below the poverty line in every state, below 75 percent of the poverty line in 45 states, and below half the poverty line in several southern states. In 2011, SNAP beneficiaries received an average of only $134 per month, and according to 2009-2010 data, the average household benefit came to only $290 per month. So even the combined monthly average of food stamps and TANF — at around $315 per person, and $720 per household — is hardly sufficient to allow the poor to become dependent on these benefits for long periods. Even the maximum monthly SNAP benefit for a family of four (an amount received by very few recipient households), is only $668, which comes out to less than $2 per person, per meal.

Of those poor people who do receive means-tested cash and food assistance, only 15 percent receive both TANF and SNAP, and about three-quarters of those receiving any such benefits (TANF, SSI or SNAP) received them from only one program. And although it is often assumed that the poor receive not only cash but also free or reduced priced housing from the government, less than 14 percent of TANF recipients (or about 1 in 7) are currently benefitting from some form of public housing subsidy. Only 9 percent of TANF recipients receive child care assistance, and only 12 percent benefit from the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). In other words, it is simply not true that so-called welfare recipients receive multiple benefits from multiple programs, sufficient to provide for an extravagant or even remotely decent lifestyle.

And as with TANF, most SNAP beneficiaries do not remain on the program for long periods of time. Half of all new SNAP participants will leave the benefit rolls within 10 months, and three in four recipients will leave within two years. Although critics of the program often point out that a large share of recipients on the rolls at any given time will indeed remain on for a long time — an average of seven years for about half of all persons receiving SNAP at any given moment — there is an explanation for this seeming long-term dependence that is far less damning than SNAP critics would like us to believe, and which explains how it can nonetheless be true that most SNAP recipients will receive benefits only for a short period.

The difference between the percentage of SNAP recipients who are short-term versus long-term beneficiaries, on the one hand, and the percentage of SNAP recipients on the rolls right now who will be long-term beneficiaries, on the other, should be obvious. By definition, if one is on the rolls right now, then one cannot be off the rolls right now at the same time, thereby eliminating automatically all persons who may have come onto the rolls at some point in the previous year but who had cycled off before now. What one will be left with is, by definition, a disproportionate number of recipients who will remain on the rolls for a longer period. But this should not be taken to mean that long-term dependence is the norm, nor should it be accepted as a critique of the program.

As an analogy, consider the population of the nation’s jails and prisons. If we look at the number of people who are incarcerated at any point in a given year, we know that the vast majority of them will be incarcerated for relatively minor offenses, and will be released in a relatively short period of time. But if you looked at the population of incarcerated persons, say, right now, or at any given moment, as a snapshot in time, a disproportionate number of them would likely be persons with long prison terms. Not because most criminals are hard-core violent offenders who receive long terms, but because anyone who is a hard-core violent offender is likely to be captured in the data at whatever time you sample it, while minor offenders will have cycled out of jail or prison and not be evident in the same way.

Likewise, imagine if we were to examine hospitals and hospital beds. If one were to look at those who are currently occupying beds at your local hospital, at this very moment, it is likely that a disproportionate number of them would be hospitalized with serious, chronic conditions, from which they may well not recover, and certainly not quickly. On the other hand, if one were to look at the entry log of all persons admitted to that same hospital over the course of the year, what would you find? Obviously it would be something very different: the overwhelming majority of persons admitted to the hospital would prove to be persons who didn’t have serious chronic conditions, and whom the hospital was able to get well and back on their feet pretty quickly. So if you were trying to assess the efficacy of the doctors at the hospital, based solely on the share of chronically and seriously unhealthy patients remaining at any given moment in a hospital bed, your assessment wouldn’t be very good. On the other hand, if you were assessing their effectiveness by looking at all patients admitted — a far more statistically and intellectually honest method — you would give them much better marks.

The same is true with SNAP and other welfare benefits. The important point is that most people who come onto the program will not stay long, and it is for this reason that we can say, definitively, that such efforts do not create a culture of dependency among those who receive benefits. If the programs did engender dependence, we would expect that large numbers, perhaps most, of all persons coming onto the program rolls would find themselves trapped on them, unable or unwilling to leave; and that is simply not the case.

In fact, the government, thanks to a bi-partisan advisory committee established in 1994, actually has a definition of welfare dependence that it uses to calculate just this issue. What is that definition? Here it is, as discussed in the most recent available report on welfare dependence, submitted by the Department of Health and Human Services:

A family is dependent on welfare if more than 50 percent of its total income in a one-year period comes from AFDC/TANF, food stamps, and/or SSI, and this welfare income is not associated with work activities.

Now if anything, even this definition may be too broad, in that it includes those who depend on SSI benefits, even though SSI is for people with bona fide disabilities or the elderly or blind, and it includes people who may only receive benefits for a short period of time, and who would not, therefore be considered dependent by most. But even using this definition, fewer than 4 percent of Americans meet the bi-partisan and accepted definition of welfare dependence. Of those receiving any means-tested cash or food stamp benefits, 58 percent rely on those for less than 25 percent of their income, and only 1 in 4 were truly dependent on the benefits for half or more of their income. In racial terms, only 1 in 10 blacks nationwide and about 1 in 17 Latinos (5.7%) meet the criteria for welfare dependence, contrary, again, to common belief.

If we use a more rational definition however, one that excludes from the dependence classification those persons whose cash income comes from SSI due to a disability that prevents them from working, or because of their age, and examine only TANF and the food stamp or SNAP program, only 2.1 percent of the population would meet the criteria for welfare dependence, with 1.1 percent of whites, 3.5 percent of Latinos, and 5.7 percent of blacks meeting the dependence criteria. In other words, and contrary to racial stereotypes, fully 94 out of 100 African Americans and between 96 and 97 out of every 100 Latinos are not dependent on government welfare programs.

But to the denizens of the right, facts don’t matter. What matters is that by playing upon the class and race prejudices of their base (and sadly, many independent minded voters as well), they hope to, using Limbaugh’s own words, “whip white working class voters into a frenzy,” and push them to vote against Barack Obama, the black president who wants to give handouts to black people. It is a racist, classist campaign rooted in blatant lies. It is unbecoming of decent people, but perfectly predictable for the indecent, which is to say, for the American right. Lies are their currency. Cultivating bigotry and resentments are literally all they have left. It is up to the rest of us to destroy them, politically, once and for all.

Hey White Guys: A Public Service Announcement

Brilliant!