{"id":44088,"date":"2012-01-23T12:14:35","date_gmt":"2012-01-23T17:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=44088"},"modified":"2012-01-23T16:06:16","modified_gmt":"2012-01-23T21:06:16","slug":"newt-racism-the-racially-coded-language-of-presidential-candidates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/01\/23\/newt-racism-the-racially-coded-language-of-presidential-candidates\/","title":{"rendered":"Newt Racism: The Racially Coded Language of Presidential Candidates"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Since outright hatred and discrimination of people because of their race is no longer socially acceptable in our post Civil-Rights era, many argue racism no longer exists.\u00a0 But sociologists suggest that racism simply changed, becoming more implicit and indirect.<\/p>\n

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva<\/a> argues that the new racism entails individuals saying and doing things that perpetuate racial stereotypes and inequalities, but they do so in such a way that the offender is able to deny being explicitly racist.\u00a0 One of the many types of new racist strategies Bonilla-Silva highlights is the use of racially charged code speak<\/em>, or using indirect racial rhetoric and semantic moves to express an ideology that serves to reinforce white dominance over minorities.<\/p>\n

The Daily Show<\/em>\u2019s Larry Wilmore illustrates the code speak implicit in presidential candidate Newt Gingrich\u2019s suggestion that we combat poverty by hiring poor children to clean the restrooms at their schools.\u00a0 In the clip below, Wilmore notes that \u201cit\u2019s 2011, and you can\u2019t just call Black people lazy,\u201d and then points out Gingrich\u2019s racial code speak.\u00a0 He notes Gingrich\u2019s statement about \u201cneighborhoods where they may not have that experience [of working]\u201d is \u201ccode for inner-city, which is code for urban, which is code for Black.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Gingrich\u2019s statement about poor children having \u201cno habit of showing up [to work] on Monday\u201d is \u201ccode for shiftless, which is code for lazy, which is code for black.\u201d Wilmore then plays more of Gingrich\u2019s speech where the presidential candidate cites statistics about Black unemployment, thereby making his implicit racial assumptions explicit:<\/p>\n

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\nThe clip also points out how racial ideology engages very different explanations for the causes of poverty depending on the race of those affected.\u00a0 Wilmore notes, \u201cwhen Black people are poor it\u2019s their fault because they are lazy and on welfare, but down in poor Appalachia it\u2019s not your fault; it\u2019s China\u2019s fault, or India\u2019s fault, or all the money we\u2019re spending on Black people on welfare.\u201d<\/p>\n

When John Stewart asks why this is important, Wilmore points out how the causes of poverty \u201cmatter to the solutions,\u201d thereby pointing out Gingrich\u2019s implicit prejudices of nonwhite inferiority with his proposal that Black poverty could be eliminated by hiring children to clean toilets (and Gingrich reaffirmed his support for this idea at a GOP primary debate<\/a> last week, to wild crowd applause). Similarly, Rick Santorum is now defending himself<\/a> after saying, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money<\/a>,\u201d ignoring the fact that most recipients of government aid are White and the vast majority of Blacks are employed and do pay taxes to support the social safety net citizens of all races use. In both cases, the message is clear: African Americans are deficient, with no work ethic, and the solution to poverty is entirely at the individual level, with no need for larger structural changes.<\/p>\n

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Jason Eastman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Coastal Carolina University<\/a> who researches how culture and identity influence social inequalities.<\/p>\n

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our\u00a0Guidelines for Guest Bloggers<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since outright hatred and discrimination of people because of their race is no longer socially acceptable in our post Civil-Rights era, many argue racism no longer exists.\u00a0 But sociologists suggest that racism simply changed, becoming more implicit and indirect. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that the new racism entails individuals saying and doing things that perpetuate racial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1851,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,23384,85,8121,285,1760],"class_list":["post-44088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-politics","tag-election-2012","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1851"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44088"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44338,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44088\/revisions\/44338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}