Two problems with that statement: First, are you arguing there aren’t pathologies in the black community? Second, we’re not talking about how to help a poor person, we’re talking about how to help poor people, so there’s no way around talking about them as a group.
From a politician’s perspective, it’s hard to avoid that. Couldn’t it be argued that the administration’s push to get young people enrolled in the exchanges is explicitly paternalistic? Wouldnt this be offensive to young people? And politicians make their living pretending to have the answers and lecturing. I’m not sure you can have politicians talking about race at all under those circumstances, much less speaking about it frankly.
I see zero evidence that Paul Ryan was attempting to be racist on the downlow. Even Paul Krugman, who wrote a whole column about it, didn’t want to impugn Ryan personally, just the ideology behind his statement.
Which is fair enough. If there isn’t actually a problem of inner city men not working and not even thinking about work, then we shouldn’t say that. But there is a problem like that, and it’s reflected in government statistics.
I’d have to be clear on the definitions of “pathologies” and “the black community”, so I’m not convinced. There are pathologies with individuals (of any group), for certain.
Perhaps that’s why such efforts are doomed. It also assumes that most poor or otherwise disadvantaged people are in their situation because of mistakes they’ve made that can be overcome.
This probably could be argued, but it strikes me as a bad argument.
The ones (like Bill Clinton or Obama) don’t make the same blunders that Ryan (and others) make, because they use different language and avoid those tripwires. Ryan should have known better (and probably did).
I don’t really care what Ryan’s motives were. It’s very possible that he was not trying to be racist at all. But what he said is still racist, or can be reasonably interpreted as racist.
Which has nothing to do with accusations of racism. It’s entirely possible to talk about these topics without saying racist things.
It doesn’t have to be a famous person. I think it’s probably likely that someone in history (not necessarily famous) has been harmed by such a false accusation. I just don’t know of anyone – please find one for me.
I did the google search, and a cursory search did not find any cases of significant suffering due to a false accusation of racism. Again, this isn’t a gotcha game – there probably are people out there. I just can’t find them – can you? I’d love to read about the real stories that may well be out there.
Yes, it’s bad. And I still am not convinced that more than a very few people (of whom I’ve yet to find evidence), if that, have actually suffered significantly from false accusations of racism.
This is possible, but I think this supposed storm of false racism accusations (or false rape accusations), other than perhaps the anonymous (and meaningless) hordes of twitter and the like, is a fantasy. Basically, I think there aren’t that many false accusations of racism – this is a right-wing victimization fantasy, for the most part, IMO. Both in the frequency, and even more in the severity.
Again, please show me some people who suffered significant harm because of false racism accusations.
No it’s not. If you say “niggers are dumb”, you just said something racist, even if you meant it as a joke. Maybe you’re around your buddies, and they all take it as a joke, so it’s no big deal. But that’s a racist thing to say.
When someone says “black people are genetically inclined to lower intelligence, on average, than white people”, they are saying something racist, no matter what their intent is. Even if they believe it’s true and they have good reason to believe so.
Life is tough, and being a politician is tough. The cream will rise to the top. I don’t know of any politicians who had great careers thrown away because of false accusations of racism.
I agree that if you have consequential views that are false, then that can make you racist even if your intent is not to be racist.
But I distinguish that from rational or true views that simply hold a group in a bad light. African-American males are much less likely to be in the labor force than males of other races. They are also much less likely to be present fathers. As Obama would say, “We know this.” Which brings me to my next point. If a person says something about a group that most members of that group would readily agree with, it’s not racist. A racist statement is a racist statement irregardless of who says it. And I don’t feel a statement can be true yet also racist unless the statement is designed to incite hatred.
Ryan’s statement was true, and was designed to identify a symptom of a problem that needed to be solved. He was not trying to appeal to rednecks, who aren’t even electorally relevant given their geographic distribution and voting habits. The “dog whistle” accusation only makes sense if you think there is a huge groundswell of white anger that Republicans can take advantage of to ride to electoral success.
I’m not talking about people, I’m talking about statements. Statements can be racist regardless of intent.
So far, okay. You’re just talking about statistics.
WRONG! Or at least it was not a factual statement – it was an opinion.
Again, it doesn’t matter why he said it. Based on the history of the use of such language, what he said could be reasonably interpreted to be a racist statement. Assuming he is an intelligent and well-versed politician, he should know this. But his intent didn’t matter if we’re just judging the statement.
As for judging Ryan, he should recognize that this is a reasonable interpretation, and apologized. It’s not the end of the world to say something that might be interpreted as racist, and if one is open-minded, one might learn something from it.
Of course rednecks are electorally relevant given their geographic distribution and voting habits. How do you think such a misplaced Jeff Foxworthy joke as W got to be POTUS?!
Actually, he told them to help, and not just help by relying on government, but actually go to the inner cities and help.
Now unless “help” is a code word for “form a lynching party”, he wasn’t seeking to cast blame, he was trying to help solve the problem.
Making African-Americans rich is a far more effective vote-winning strategy for the GOP than making white people resent brown people. the GOP already has the white vote by a huge margin and it’s growing. The Democrats aren’t making any serious attempts to win the white vote back, assuming they won’t need it. So fine, we’ll beat the Democrats with success. Make more rich minorities, make more rich Republican minorities.
Democrats cannot remain viable as a political party without a high poverty rate. So let’s reduce poverty and thereby drive a stake into the heart of the party of dependence.
This certainly does not have anything to do with whether what he said was racist or not. Many slave-owners probably thought they were “helping” their slaves.
LOL. If the Republicans wanted to make minorities richer, I would think they’d have different policies. And the Republicans might have a majority of the white vote, but the margin is far, far closer than the margin Democrats have for various minorities.
Complete and utter (and unsupported) nonsense. Just foolishness with no basis whatsoever. Limbaughesque, in both its idiocy and its complete disconnect with the real world. Where on earth did you come up with such an enormous pile of shit?
Good to hear it. Too bad all you have as an agenda is to cut taxes on the rich, though. Gonna take a little more than that.
For most of us, fighting poverty is considered a good end in itself. Party affiliation is not a consideration except as a result of who’s working to fix problems and who’s opposing that. No wonder you’re confused.
I’m confused that Democrats haven’t made progress in fixing poverty. You’d almost think they had an incentive to keep people dependent.
Well, we know they have such an incentive because Democrats lose voters making over $50,000 consistently. And their margins among those making $30,000+ are not enough to make up for it. So they need voters in poverty to win. Low poverty, Democrats can’t win elections.
They aren’t evil, they just respond logically to incentives. Increasing opportunity is harder than just handing out money, and it’s easy to rationalize handing out money when it directly buys you voters.
Now maybe I’d believe Democrats were truly altruistic on poverty if they didn’t attack poor people who vote Republican or regard them as hypocrites for accepting public assistance and then voting Republican. You’d almost think Democrats were angry that some voters don’t stay bought.
