Update: Through the Instalanche, some other required reading from Dan Riehl.
Harold Meyerson is a liberal opinion writer for the Washington Post, and he seems to have plenty of stereotypes about minorities and an unrational vitriol toward the Republican Party. His newest piece, entitled “In modern GOP, the old South returns” inadvertantly exposes his own prejudices in an attempt to paint the Republican Party as a bunch of southern racists. Meyerson writes:
Consider the Romney campaign’s ads falsely attacking President Obama for gutting welfare reform. “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job,” proclaims one such commercial. “They just send you a welfare check.” Obama’s plan, as several media fact-checking monitors have noted, does nothing of the sort. The spot clearly seeks to resurrect the kind of resentment of African Americans that the GOP exploited back in the days when welfare was a major program. The Romney campaign has evidently concluded, since virtually its entire pool of potential voters is white, that it must rouse the sometime voters among them with such expedients — which explains why it is running more of these ads than any others.
So let me get this straight; Meyerson believes that talking about work-to-welfare is a racist dog whistle because, in his own mind, he links welfare to the African-American community. This says a lot more about his own stereotypes than it does about the Republican Party, and certainly the Republicans that I know.
When I think of welfare, and food stamps for that matter, an entirely different image comes to mind. I think of my time working at Kroger, where I watched a group of people, almost entirely white and southern themselves, misuse the EBT (food stamp) program to buy unnecessary and expensive products while ignoring the essentials.
What comes to mind when I think of government subsidized housing and the abuse of disability payments? I primarily think of some folks back in Northeast Ohio, in the predominantly white suburbs and rural areas north of Youngstown, Ohio. I don’t think of inter-city bums, as that hasn’t been my experience. I think of the families with two cars, cable television and kids with video game consoles that are getting government help.
I know people, some very close to me, who have received government assistance and truly needed it. Almost all of these people, however, worked or pursued work to empower themselves, their families and their children. When I think of the cheats, the abusers and the users it’s essentially always a run-down caucasian in my mind. If it’s different in Harold Meyerson’s mind, he might need to examine his own prejudices, not project them on others.
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Your experience with white welfare cheats reminds me of one of my childhood experiences. By way of background, I grew up in an area that was mostly white with smaller racial and ethnic minority communities — Puerto Rican, Chinese, Indian (Asian) — but few black people. The first black kids I knew as a child weren’t African-Americans; they were immigrants from Haiti. I didn’t actually know a black American (native born, as opposed to my Haitian neighbors who became citizens) until high school. A by-product of the paucity of black people in my life was that I seldom heard racist language or racial stereotypes about black people.
In my own family, my maternal grandparents were Italian (my grandfather was an immigrant, my grandmother the daughter of immigrants) and had a big family that would gather for frequent summer cookouts at their home. One thing we always had at those events was watermelon. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I first heard of the stereotype of watermelon-eating black people. I always thought watermelon, like homemade pasta and vegetable gardens, was an Italian-American thing.
My point is that children learn by their own experiences. They notice differences among people–hair color, skin color, height, weight–but take them for granted until someone mentions them in a negative way. People who habitually call attention to race and repeat racial epithets and racist stereotyping, even to accuse others of using them, ensure that those stereotypes persist for another generation. Maybe that’s their intention.
Clinton’s welfare reform helped millions of people move from dependency to independence. Obama’s reversal of those reforms will trap millions more in the culture of welfare. We are not allowed to consider the plight of these people, because Harold Myerson is a racist?
I worked at Wal-Mart as a cashier one summer during college, and my experience was completely similar to yours. The “Welfare Queens” were usually white, and anyone who was actually a minority on foodstamps usually was driving a beater and not buying cellphones or TVs unless their old one failed, then they bought the best possible deal they could (usually an off brand).
Also, disability is much more frequently abused by white people than any minorities. A co-worker of mine lost his legs below the knees in a car accident, and is in pain from that a lot of the time, as well as in pain because he works two jobs and is always moving around (he wears out wheelchair wheels and pads in about 6 months, and his insurance only covers 1 replacement of them a year). Of all the people that could be on welfare or disability that aren’t, he is the best example, and I see people where I work bring their lazy ass kids in to shame them into working harder by using him as an example of perseverance and work ethic.