In this, Gingrich joins a line of Republicans stretching back at least to Richard Nixon. From that president's trumpeting of "law and order" (i.e., "I will get these black demonstrators off the streets") to Ronald Reagan's denunciation of "welfare queens" (i.e., "I will stop these lazy black women from living high on your tax dollars") to George H.W. Bush's use of Willie Horton (i.e., "Elect me or this scary black man will get you"), the GOP long ago mastered the craft of using nonracial language to say racial things.
So Gingrich is working from a well-thumbed playbook when he hectors blacks about their work ethic and says they should demand paychecks and not be "satisfied" with food stamps. As if most blacks had ever done anything else. As if an unemployment rate that for some mysterious reason runs twice the national average does not make paychecks hard to come by. As if blacks were the only, or even the majority of, food-stamp recipients.
When challenged on this by debate moderator Juan Williams, Gingrich went after it like Babe Ruth after a hanging curve ball, delivering a strident defense of the need to teach poor kids the value of a paycheck. "Only the elites," he lectured, "despise earning money." It won him a standing ovation.
Let's be clear. To the degree Gingrich's argument is that stubborn, intergenerational poverty is often fed by habits and ways of life inimical to the building of wealth, he is exactly right. But those habits and ways afflict the white hollows of Appalachia as much as the black heart of urban America, and when Gingrich defines poverty solely as blackness, he is not critiquing poverty, but race.
The South Carolina audience sure got the message. They applauded because they understand he is saying: "Elect me and I will get these black people's hands out of your pocket." For, as much as Republicans decry the so-called politics of envy, they still seem right at home practicing the politics of racial resentment - and mass distraction.
In so doing, they tap a rich vein of stereotype and preconception about the supposed laziness of African American people.
One of my students shared this parable: A rich white man sits with a poor white man and poor black man at a table laden with cookies. The rich white man snatches all the cookies but one, then turns to the poor white man and says, "Watch out for that darky. I think he wants to take your cookie."
It works every time.
Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. E-mail him at lpitts@miamiherald.com.
