Yes, except 30 or 40 years ago, before Lexuses, there was another car that was the symbol of excess.
Right… poor innocent non-racists fall into these traps while clever racists know to avoid them.
Like racists always avoid the “some of my best friends are…” bit.
In this case, as others have already pointed out, poor innocent Reagan just happened to speak in Philadelphia MS and just happened to say he believes in states rights without intending to send any racially related message.
He just also happens to have innocently vetoed an anti-apartheid bill, innocently used a term like “strapping young buck” and innocently done a lot of other racist stuff.
In short, your observation is ridiculous on its face.
And those who couldn’t buy an Eldorado would go for its downmarket brother, the Buick Electra 225, the “Deuce and a Quarter”, remember?
I’m a white boy from a well-off suburb and even *we *knew about that stuff.
Sure, if the term was “Pimpmobile-driving welfare queen”, you’d be on to something. But for every “Pimpmobiled” Cadillac, how many were bought by old white people to drive to the golf course? A thousand? Five thousand?
“Cadillac-driving welfare queen”, though, seems far more primed to outrage the listener by the degree to which this welfare cheat is ripping them off. It moves the outrage from the abstract to the concrete: someone driving a particular brand of luxury car.
Compare the impact of these statements:
“Bob Jones used the funds from his frauds to live a lavish lifestyle.”
“Bob Jones jetted to the French Riviera, played tennis with Tom Cruise, and dined on caviar, using the money from his frauds.”
Which one angries up the blood the most?
[QUOTE=lance strongarm]
I’m laughing when I read this, because I thought everyone knew the insulting stereotype of the Cadillac-driving black guy. The “joke” was that blacks had fancy Cadillacs, but lived in shacks - they spent all their money on their cars and not their homes.
[/quote]
How is that evoked by “Cadillac-driving welfare queen”? Again, the intent was to marshal outrage at welfare fraud. You don’t do that by evoking images of people living in shacks and putting all their money into their car…heck, you can probably do that on welfare now, no fraud required.
Hence the phrase, “n****r rich.”
Doesn’t matter. Did the “welfare queen” part evoke images of old white people on the golf course? The word “pimpmobile” couldn’t be used because it would make the race-pandering undeniable, while “Cadillac” was still safe enough.
There’s more to the identity of this straw person being evoked than that, isn’t there? Urban, center-city, ghetto and nowadays thuggish were and are code words that were being evoked. It’s silly to deny that even a moderately-skilled politician wouldn’t be aware of that and use it.
True, and that’s part of the evidence *against *it being about “marshaling outrage at welfare fraud”, at least as perpetrated by the audience’s fellow white trash if not themselves. The dog whistle was blown and heard.
Yep. I have seen it happen.
Yep.
Do you need examples?
I didn’t say that, did I? Don’t put words in my mouth.
No it’s not. You just walked in here and falsely tried to apply it to one specific case (Reagan) when I didn’t.
I stand by my observation. I have seen it happen. I don’t know why you’d object - that makes you part of the problem.
Bingo.
It means they are getting welfare fraudulently. Or someone just added the Cadillac stereotype to the welfare thing, and voila! They needed a code word, after all.
But whatever - it’s racism, for god’s sake. It doesn’t have to make sense.
My overall point is that there was very much a stereotype that blacks drive Cadillacs. You heard it all the time. It even rhymed - black, Cadillac, shack. I can still hear it in my head, even though I haven’t heard it said out loud in decades. It was definitely a thing.
Absolutely!
So JFK was a raging racist? I had no idea.
Far more white people than black people in the US ate fried chicken and watermelon. Are you going to claim those weren’t used to stereotype too?
Stereotypically associating black people and Cadillacs was definitely a thing, and still is if you Google it.
I thought you spoke hyperbolically. No, not every single Democrat was racist before the 60s. But most were, and the vast majority of southern Democrats were racists before the 60s.
Most? I wouldn’t say that either. Alot? Maybe.
And I wouldn’t say the “vast majority” of southern dems were racist. Remember, the Democratic party was the only game in town, so everyone voted in the Democratic primary. They were all dems. And the blacks were Dems too - remember that’s why the racists left the party? And if most of the white Dems were racist, why didn’t pretty much every white voter in the South leave the party for the GOP?
Setting aside the fact that Reagan never actually used the term “welfare queen”, but rather shared examples, mostly true ones, of welfare fraud, how does “Cadillac” cinch the association of “black person” when joined with “welfare queen”? Because there was a subculture of car customizers that sometimes used Cadillacs? That’s asking your audience to draw a lot of inferences.
[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
There’s more to the identity of this straw person being evoked than that, isn’t there? Urban, center-city, ghetto and nowadays thuggish were and are code words that were being evoked. It’s silly to deny that even a moderately-skilled politician wouldn’t be aware of that and use it.
[/quote]
Chicago, even the South Side, has a lot of white people too. “Ghetto” would be more indicative of race-baiting, “Chicago’s South Side”, not so much, especially when, again, the case Reagan was talking about was real, and happened in Chicago’s South Side.
[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
True, and that’s part of the evidence *against *it being about “marshaling outrage at welfare fraud”, at least as perpetrated by the audience’s fellow white trash if not themselves. The dog whistle was blown and heard.
[/QUOTE]
Or, a skilled politician exaggerated the extent and severity of a problem, pointed out how well he’d addressed this manufactured crisis in his home state, and reaped votes accordingly. Inventing crises is about 40% of what politicians do.
Read about the campaign coverage of Reagan’s use of these stories, and that’s the impression left: These welfare cheats are ripping you off! I solved this problem in California, I can solve it nationwide!
If a given listener got extra outrage by picturing the cheat as a black woman, instead of the white woman Reagan used an his exemplar, that’s on them. Do you really think that a story about a person stealing $150,000 a year from the taxpayers would be met by shrugs of indifference, unless they thought the person was black?
Convenient for your argument, that. Blowing all one’s welfare income on their car doesn’t require fraud, just bad judgment. Other than food stamps and Section 8, we’re talking about monthly checks, that can be spent on anything. Fraud would be collecting the money while concealing ineligibility (working someone off the books, for instance), or collecting under multiple aliases.
Any way to substantiate that?
Could be before my time. The only association I know between black folks and Cadillacs is rappers and athletics and the Escalade. All I did was ask for a cite, and post figures indicative that Cadillac buyers (a decade later, but it’s all I could find) were quite affluent, and thus likely mostly old and white.
Another good example.
I have seen young people look at blatantly racist caricatures of Obama with chicken and watermelon in hand and have no idea it was racist.
This is a good thing - they grew up without knowing ugly racist insults. But they are the most likely to be trapped by them, since they don’t know they’re playing with fire. They might post it to Facebook and say “isn’t this funny?” Nobody who knew it was racist, including some actual racists who want to hide their racism, would do that.
You’re reading waaaay too much into this. It was racism. It didn’t have to make sense.
I’m just saying Cadillac was once a racist symbol. I’m not saying Reagan used it that way.
It’s not my argument - it’s the racists’ argument! And racists are not known for rational thought. Go tell them that their crude stereotype was illogical. I’m just saying it existed.
Really? I heard it myself, over and over, growing up in the South in the 1970s. If you don’t trust me, let’s end this conversation.
Yes, it’s clearly before your time.
I’m curious - were you aware of the chicken and watermelon thing? Or has that faded with time too?
Most black voters could not vote in the South before the 60s because of oppressive laws. Any statistics from back then about black voting tell us pretty much nothing – just like criminal statistics back then in the South (with regards to black people).
Also, the Civil Rights movement literally changed a lot of hearts and minds. There were millions of white Americans that were racists before the movement, and not racist afterwards. Many of those remained Democrats. Though not enough to keep the South Democratic.
No, my point was that when blacks finally got the right to vote, they pretty much all voted in the Democratic primaries!
Clearly they weren’t racist. Clearly they were able to find candidates who weren’t racist too.
It’s a good thing you actually don’t know. Those who said it knew, because they knew those who heard it would know.
Reagan was referring to an entire subculture and his audience knew the reference as well as his scriptwriters - even if the only actual example anyone could come up with that matched his anecdote didn’t actually match at all. No, he wasn’t referring to only a single person, or even to a South Sider. Please note that he didn’t actually say the “welfare queen” in question was white, he left the audience to fill in the obvious blank.
It wasn’t primarily about welfare fraud, was it? The reference was to lazy, shiftless (you still hear that term, too) … inferior humans.
Once again, it wasn’t *about *fighting welfare fraud.
You had already rebutted your second sentence with your first. Yes, the stereotype still exists, and, shamefully, many young blacks who don’t know their past indulge in it, while calling each other the n-word and so forth as well.