All of this is true, and well said.
But since LBJ has been mentioned, I am reminded that he was racist, and yet he also “fought hard to improve what most decent people knew to be a terrible social and political injustice in this country.” (Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights hero. But also a racist.)
Water is wet.
Which President prior to Reagan, other than maybe Carter do you think wasn’t racist and said racist things? Johnson? Kennedy? Truman? They all were racists. Wilson was a legitimate White Supremacist without exaggeration. Anyone pretending shock that Nixon was racist is full of shit. If you know anything about tricky Dick, you also know he was racist. I doubt Bush the Elder wasn’t racist, not sure, but unlikely. FDR, no question. Please ask the Japanese Americans at least.
Teddy far less than most, but still by today’s standards. Progressive for the time though.
I hope that if we really dig, it turns out Carter & Ford are clean of this, but I wouldn’t be shocked by a Elite southerner or WWII vet having said racist things at some point.
Oh, to be sure Reagan was racist, his campaign promoted the myth of the welfare queen, didn’t it?
I think there are two reasons that Reagan’s racism matters more:
One is the fact that, unlike Johnson, he advocated policies and politics that clearly harmed people of color, so unlike LBJ, he’s much less entitled to the benefit of the doubt. The same could be said of Teddy Roosevelt, who promoted imperialist policies that were consistent with the white supremacist view of the world at that time but who nevertheless took measures to integrate the federal workforce, compared to Woodrow Wilson he re-segregated the workforce and hosted a viewing of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation at the White House. We can criticize “both sides” for having prejudices, but let’s also acknowledge that “both sides” aren’t necessarily equal in their application of racism.
The other reason that Reagan’s racism matters is that there are people alive today who grew up with Reagan as their president, even as their governor. They felt the sting of his politics more directly than someone who presided over the nation’s affairs decades earlier. We’re still living with and trying to understand Reagan’s legacy in its totality, and this helps fill in some of the missing blanks. If we had learned that he’d had a heated argument with a black activist or lawmaker and privately referred to him as a “n----r” but had simultaneously supported anti-discrimination laws and been a political friend of the black community, we’d probably have different feelings about what his comments mean. But we have a whole body of evidence to work with showing that he was no friend to people of color. We just weren’t sure what level of antipathy we were dealing with, but these comments don’t make him look good at all, particularly considering that they had real-world impact.
The Ronald Reagan who vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986? The Ronald Reagan who rode the Southern Strategy into power? The Ronald Reagan who spoke of “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks”?
No, I am decidedly *not *surprised.
But it’s *exactly *that view that Reagan was espousing in this context - that (White) American foreign policy should hold sway over the desires of (Black) African countries on the China/Taiwan issue.
It’s pretty weak or flawed evidence, in my view. I hate to be in the position of seemingly defending Reagan, but what I’m really defending is the appropriate use of a highly loaded term like “white supremacist”. Even Churchill’s alleged white supremacy – which was in a very different time and with views more extreme than anything I’ve seen from Reagan – has been widely disputed – despite the fact the he said, in 1937, “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” Reagan was, at worst, a common run-of-the-mill racist and did not, to my knowledge, make such statements or hold such beliefs.
As for Reagan’s policies toward South Africa, I think he’s been unfairly maligned for that, too, mainly based on his veto of the House bill imposing sanctions on the apartheid regime of the time. But Reagan was in fact quite strongly anti-apartheid, it’s just that he was even more fervently anti-communist, and felt that economic sanctions would hurt poor South African blacks and make the nation vulnerable to communism at that point in history. But he enacted his own version of sanctions by curtailing military and diplomatic relations with the South African regime, sending William Clark to officially inform the apartheid Prime Minister of Reagan’s opposition to apartheid policies, and directly confronted the regime by appointing Edward Perkins as the first black ambassador to South Africa, which the apartheid PM there saw as infuriatingly provocative. Do those sound like the actions of a white supremacist?
…and Hitler built the autobahns…
Naah, Reagan was an evil man, and we shouldn’t honour the achievements of evil men.
I think this difference of opinion stems from a difference in our understanding of what constitutes a white supremacist. What you describe doesn’t necessarily conflict with these beliefs, IMO. It’s almost a mundane and expected thing, in my view, if a wealthy white older American man in the 1970s is a white supremacist. That was the “default” – not a pro-extermination view, but a “yes, it’s good that white men are generally in charge of America, because white men are generally better at leading and deciding than others” kind of view. Which qualifies as white supremacist, IMO.
I wouldn’t defend it any more than I would defend the founding fathers owning slaves.
As a general rule though I tend to give people a grace period of 5 to 10 years (from the present) on anything they say. Not based on standards of the past, but possibility of self reform. I believe in redemption and will give him the benefit of the doubt that if, somehow, he was alive today, he would apologize for and disavow those statements.
Black African countries were far from unanimous on the issue – in fact they were split roughly half and half. A different and more charitable interpretation of the same thing is that Reagan – along with most conservatives of the time and today – greatly disliked the influence that small, poor, underdeveloped countries had in the UN, where in the General Assembly each such country was a peer of the US with an equal vote. What put the vote on the China/Taiwan issue over the top with the required two-thirds majority was not the (non-existent) unanimity of the African vote, but the vote of most of the civilized world.
It wasn’t the House Diplomats Reagan was railing against. Just the Field ones. He wasn’t complaining about any of the *developed *countries to Nixon either. Why might that be?
Uh, no, you don’t agree with that first thing, since it’s not what I said. I’m all about the “plain meaning.”
Well, that’s not entirely true. Obviously a white supremacist isn’t talking about the color white.
You just made that up. That’s not the definition of “white supremacy” used anywhere. Go look up some definitions, and you’ll see that what I’ve said is broadly in keeping with definitions of “white supremacy.” While you’ll find some sites that talk about something more in keeping with what you’ve said, they tend to list that as a secondary or tertiary definition.
Whining about how a person uses a primary definition for a term instead of a secondary definition is always petty bullshit. When you do it to distract from some nasty bigotry, it looks a little less petty but a lot more suspicious. Check your shit here.
And that’s precisely why quotes like this are important: to show that your “charitable” interpretation is bullshit. When someone is calling black Africans “monkeys,” you don’t need to stretch to figure out why that person opposes putting sanctions on racist white Africans.
Are you disputing any of the facts I cited? Like Reagan’s Executive Order 12352 (1985) imposing sanctions on South Africa, or the appointment of Edward Perkins as the first black ambassador to South Africa in 1986? Some of the things you’re citing there seem to overlook the balance Reagan was trying to achieve between what he saw as the threat of communism in SA vs. supporting the apartheid regime, and others are just citing the unprincipled actions of the GOP, who were racist hypocrites then much as they are today.
I actually did look up some definitions.
I’m seeing two key ideas: (1) inherent superiority, and (2) dominance/control. So I’m willing to accept those as the defining elements of white supremicism.
Well, I “made it up” in the sense that they are my own words, however it fits with how it’s generally described. The definition you seem to prefer as “plain meaning” is incomplete, in that by itself it’s synonymous with plain racism, whereas “white supremacy” has much deeper and more insidious nuances. From Wikipedia, bolding mine on the important bits:
White supremacy or white supremacism is the racist belief that white people are superior to people of other races and therefore should be dominant over them.
… The term is also typically used to describe a political ideology that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical, or institutional domination by white people.
Since one can be racist without believing in the Nazi “master race” concept and the subjugation of minorities (by violent means if necessary), there is a very substantial difference between white supremacy (which to me has always had strong political overtones) and everyday racism, which may just be the bigoted belief that a black neighbor is not as desirable as a white one.
Nope. Are you disputing any facts in the articles* I* cited?
In case no one has commented on this yet, no, I don’t remember LBJ saying it.
But I do remember Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz saying it.
