Newt Gingrich’s casual slander of black children

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As Speaker of the House, Gingrich famously fined his caucus members any time they failed to call the estate tax a ‘death tax.’ He was so successful that he apparently persuaded many Americans that the estate tax, levied only on the richest Americans, was routinely assessed on the corpses of common folk.
After he was roundly and deservedly criticized, Gingrich claimed that he only meant to point out the need for a strong work ethic, a fundamental all-American virtue. But if he had meant that, he would have said that. Many public figures, including President Obama and comedian Bill Cosby, would surely agree.
Gingrich was up to something else — updating the Southern strategy of appealing to conservative white voters who cling to hoary old stereotypes and unfortunate misperceptions about the black poor. Gingrich’s audience likely associated the phrase “really poor children in really poor neighborhoods” with black urban ghettoes portrayed as havens of dysfunction, not with rural enclaves where white children struggle with a similar poverty.

Gingrich is no old-timey mossback, no Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms. His earliest campaigns for Congress were unsuccessful races against incumbent Jack Flynt, a Southern Democrat whose politics were more conservative than his.
From time to time, Gingrich has enunciated racially-enlightened policies that challenged Republican orthodoxy. In the 1980s, for example, he tried to persuade his GOP colleagues to support stricter sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid government, pointing out that the party’s image would suffer if it were known as the “party of apartheid.”
Gingrich also knows precisely where his support is coming from: Older Republican voters. As Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones put it, “Gingrich’s support is heavily concentrated among Republicans who are at least 50.”
Those are also the voters who are most uncomfortable with the rapid demographic change symbolized by the election of a black president, according to The Pew Research Center. In a study released in November, Pew noted that older white Americans are more likely to be racially intolerant than younger whites.
Denunciations of poor black children as lazy and inclined toward crime don’t run a high risk of offending that group.
If Gingrich were genuinely interested in offering poor children a roadmap to the American middle class, he might have started by acknowledging that globalization, among other forces, has exacerbated income inequality and made it more difficult for the poor to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, even if they work 12 to 14 hours a day. He might also have acknowledged that the dysfunction that too often attends impoverished households is not limited to those who live in public housing; it also strikes those who live in ramshackle trailer parks and shoddy little shacks in rural environments. Has Gingrich ever seen the movie, “Winter’s Bone,” a tale of white rural poverty worsened by the curse of methamphetamine addiction?
Gingrich knows that as well as anyone, but he also knows what sells on the campaign trail. And the slander of poor black children is a hot commodity.

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