Bill Moyers & Company: Ronald Reagan The Race Manipulator

You know how my thoughts on Ronald Reagan. If you actually know my thoughts, you know I attribute our horrid state of race relations and our current income disparity squarely to his Jelly-Bean Oval Office container. He was not only the Father of Modern Day Conservatism (to be mentioned in most GOP political ads), he was the bringer of racial animus that has matastasized to what we see on a daily bases and through the day on Fox News (If you watch Fox News; hope yo don’t).  

Despite the fact Reagan was not racist, nor was his chief political adviser, they leveraged race as a carve-out to guarantee large dedicated social and geogrpahic voting regions. The did so by simply postulating and promulgating, “It is OK to be a bigot.”  

Racism always follows bigotry, just as other “isms” follow bigotry.

After declaring he would seek the GOP nomination in the coming general election in Philadelphia Mississippi, Reagan and Lee Atwater weaved an effective web of bigotry. I should remind you that Medgar Evers (KKK fighter and voters rights activist) was assassinated in the driveway of his home in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Atwater, chief political strategist, on development of the “Welfare Queen” Southern Strategy…..(While gloating after the Reagan White House win). 

A snippet (Atwater’s emphasis in italics, mine in bold):

[It’s a matter of] how abstract you handle the race thing. In other words, you start out … Now y’all aren’t quoting me on this … you start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. 

And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…. “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” 

http://youtu.be/X_8E3ENrKrQ

Bill Moyers & Company……and the seed was planted for the harvest we are reaping today.
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Ronald Reagan’s Racially Tinged Stump Speeches (via Moyers & Company)

In Dog Whistle Politics, author and legal scholar Ian Haney López describes how politicians use subtle, racially coded messages — “dog whistles” — to manipulate Americans in the voting booth. One early example, Haney López says, is a story…