Edward Wyckoff Williams writes: The leaders of today’s Republican Party are expert storytellers. When it comes to manipulating racial stereotypes for political gain, they are akin to animation artists of the 1920s: coloring the lines in black and white.
Last Thursday Newt Gingrich told a crowd of senior citizens in New Hampshire, “The African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” Rick Santorum was even more egregious, claiming he doesn’t “want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money” (although he later claimed that he never intentionally said “black”).
Gingrich’s latest offense comes only weeks after he received widespread criticism for saying that poor children should work as janitors and clean toilets. He specifically made a point of addressing “inner city” youths — which has become conservative code for black and brown people everywhere, from the South to the coasts, the suburbs to the metropolises, regardless of where they actually live.
The report states;
Of the 46 million people living in poverty in America in 2010, the U.S. census revealed that 31 million were white. Ten million were black. Of the 49 million people without health insurance coverage, 37 million were white; 8 million were African-American. The face of poverty in America is overwhelmingly white, but as a 2009 study on children in poverty [explained], the white American poor, especially those in rural areas, are “forgotten.”
