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| How you think the brother "working" the camera behind him liked that? |
Campaigning isn't the only thing Santorum is apparently doing the old fashioned way. Using stereotypes of blacks as a convenient shorthand to illustrate the ills of America as white voters see it is another way that Rick is demonstrating his old school campaign chops. At a campaign stop in Sioux City Iowa, a voter asks Santorum: "how do we get off this crazy train? We've got so much foreign influence in this country now," adding "where do we go from here?"
Santorum's answer perhaps started with foreign influence but rambled over to the subject of government creating dependency and he apparently reached into his campaign communication bag of tricks for the most easily relatable and easy to understand illustration of that issue he could think of on the fly: black people:
Notice how he basically defaulted to this stereotyped racially based meme in trying to communicate with a room full of white folks? Check the pause as he was trying to find an illustration of his point about dependency. He needed that illustration right then, something that would resonate with a room full of white people and where did his brain go in that moment? Black people.
With his numbers surging in Iowa, Santorum is perhaps poised to be the next of the Not Romney's to rise in the polls and get a more serious look. I was certainly willing to pay him some more attention, as I've got real respect for a guy who hits the ground and pounds the pavement like he's been doing in Iowa. But unless Santorum gives a far more insightful, honest answer to the question of why he defaulted to "blacks" as the best illustration for his point regarding dependency on government, he's effectively blown any serious future look from me irregardless of what he says. When asked directly about why he talked about blacks, he ducked and dodged.
I'm sorry, but his response is not gonna cut it with me. We'll see if any other media ask him to speak to the issue. I think it would be an interesting exercise to ask the other candidates to assess those remarks as well. No one is gonna do it, but I'm already certain that one or more of them would likely double down on it if they were asked.
Here's what he said:
"It just keeps expanding - I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don't sign up more people under the Medicaid program. They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That's what the bottom line is. I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families. The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling again."
There is a lot to object to in Santorum's statement;
Context: he's in Iowa, in a room full of white people, in a state in which about 3% of the population is black, using "blacks" to illustrate the problem of government dependency.
Implicit assumptions: To illustrate his point about government dependency, he plays to a stereotype that the majority of blacks are dependent on government welfare. He just says "blacks". He doesn't qualify it or limit it in anyway, presumably because he doesn't have to. Everyone in the room will immediately understand and agree with his implicit assumption that most blacks are on welfare.
This is a guy who's response to Howard Dean saying diversity was a strength of America was that talking about our diversity is divisive. Yet, here, he plays to racial resentment by implicitly suggesting that "blacks" are being given white people's money, money which the government took from hard working white people to give to lazy blacks. He wants to give us "blacks" the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for ourselves, I guess because all us shiftless lazy Negroes don't work to take care of ourselves. Those are the implicit assumptions behind his statement. Its offensive. Its untrue. We've been called lazy for hundreds of years. When we were forced to work for free as slaves in the fields on pain of death, they called us lazy. It was not true then. Its not true now.
His statements and the assumptions behind them are pretty offensive. "Blacks" are on welfare. All of us. Now of course, the out he and others will use to justify labeling blacks as welfare parasites, if he's even asked, is to say "what I was really referring to is that a larger percentage of blacks are on welfare relative to their share of the population compared to whites". Right? Wrong. What is welfare? I say welfare is any government financial assistance that is received but not earned, that taxes one group to support another group, meaning it's pay-as-you-go and not a contributory scheme where people's own savings pay their benefits and lastly Congress can alter benefits to reflect changing needs, economic conditions and politics. That being the case, welfare comes in many forms besides public assistance that goes to poor black people, like for example the subsidies we pay farmers NOT to farm or even better, Social Security, which is definitely welfare. Those programs are breaking the bank and even more interesting, the majority of those benefits go to people who are not the same color as me. But Santorum doesn't have a problem with welfare payments where the benefits go primarily to white people. If welfare and government dependence are really the big issues, lets talk about all of it; why do you get in a room with other white people, start talking about welfare and single out black recipients? How do you justify such divisive talk on the campaign trail, even as you claim to be all about our equality and our common citizenship? Its racebaiting, and what makes it really insidious and repugnant in this instance is the routine nature of it. That particular meme of black dependency on government is a standard staple of political discourse on the right, certainly within its more conservative wings, even though its not supported by the facts. Its a racial lie that has been perpetuated in just the way Santorum spreads it here.
Nobody in that room of good Iowa voters in there challenged that. Indeed, Santorum got applause for those remarks, so clearly there were a significant number of the voters in that room who completely agreed with those comments. Rick Santorum is a darling of the Tea Party, regarded as a consistent conservative after their own hearts. He's the darling of aTea Party that vehemently denies any allegation that it is racially biased in any way whatsoever. Well, here is an opportunity for the Tea Party to actually demonstrate its regard for African Americans as equal citizens worthy of the basic consideration of not being blanketly described as lazy, welfare parasites leeching the money of hard working white folks. Repudiate these statements of Santorum's. Publicly state that they are wrong and divisive. Demand that he apologize for them. I'm not gonna hold my breath. And if you're a Tea Party member and think these statements are okay, then I'm gonna tell you that you and the Tea Party do have racial bias when it comes to race if you buy into the stereotypes and assumptions implicit in Santorum's statements.
I'm betting that no one in the Tea Party movement will decry these statements or even criticize them in any but the most namby pamby of ways. I'm betting none of his fellow candidates will say squat about these comments or take the opportunity to hammer him with them in political attack ads (though well they should). On the contrary, to the extent anyone else in the party speaks to the comments, I'm betting they will either soft pedal their critique or more likely and worse, they will try to explain, using statistics, how blacks are heavily dependent on government welfare and that Santorum's comments are really accurate. But the facts are quite the opposite. Whites receive far more welfare benefits than blacks. Saying anything else is simply a divisive racially biased lie. Unless of course you're Rick Santorum on the campaign trail in Iowa looking to get nice white conservative voters on your team.
