Reagan did not refer to Taylor’s race. She was simply “a woman” “in Chicago.” Black ghettos and the social connotations that were constructed along with them enabled Reagan to imply Blackness with ease. The late Lee Atwater, a key Republican operative who worked on Reagan’s two successful presidential campaigns attested to Republican intentions. He became Reagan’s political director, then chairman of the Republican National Committee. In a much-quoted interview, Atwater spoke about how Republicans wooed white voters. He admitted, “Anyway you look at it, race is . . . on the back burner.” Atwater was a South Carolina protégé of arch segregationist Strom Thurmond and admirer of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” He explained: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’”5 In connecting this brand of explicit racist politics to the year 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was decided, Atwater implied that the aim was to exploit white outrage about the possibility of integration with Black people. He invoked the nuclear N-word perhaps as a metaphor, in the vein of George Wallace’s vow after losing a gubernatorial race that he would never be “out-niggered” again. When asked about his transition from racial moderate to segregation hardliner, Wallace once said, “You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.”6
“By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you,” Atwater continued, though he did not explain why overt supremacist politics began to backfire.7 George Wallace ran for president as an independent that year, opposing school integration and using law-and-order rhetoric. The Republican winner, Richard Nixon, also used law-and-order codes to appeal to Wallace supporters. After 1968, the language got more sophisticated. Atwater explained, “So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes . . . it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.”8
The “racial problem” meant Black people, the descendants who white people had been taught they were entitled to live apart from. Reagan may have been surprised at how simple it was to whistle and woo voters to an ideology of government shrinkage and tax cuts. Created during the Depression, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was initially marketed with wholesome images of coiffed blonds holding their fair children. They were the sympathetic mothers who deserved social supports in times of need.9 The program, known to the nation as “welfare,” would “Blacken” in the public’s imagination in the decades that hypersegregated ghettos and separate white space were constructed.10
On the campaign trail, Reagan painted a picture of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen who stole without remorse from taxpayers and got ahead of hardworking, impliedly white people who played by the rules. He also tried out other tropes. The food stamp program helped “some young fellow ahead of you to buy a T-bone steak” while “you were in line waiting to buy a hamburger,” he pandered on the campaign trail. In the South, Reagan had called that “young fellow” a “strapping young buck” before he decided to use a less overt dog whistle. But a government that helped unworthy, impliedly Black people get ahead of industrious, impliedly white people was the unmistakable message that Reagan pedaled to engender hostility to the entire project of government.11
Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, infamously launching his general election campaign in the Mississippi county where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Klan sixteen years before. “I believe in state’s rights,” he crowed to an adoring white crowd of thousands at the Neshoba County Fair. In the North, Reagan told ghetto myths about Linda Taylor, and many whites bought his lies. Macomb County, Michigan, just north of very Black Detroit, for example, went from being the most Democratic suburban county in the country in 1960, voting 63 percent for Kennedy that year, to voting 66 percent for Reagan in 1984. In focus groups, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg found racial resentment animated much of the switch:
Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives. [They see] the federal government “as a black domain where whites cannot expect reasonable treatment.” . . . There was widespread sentiment . . . that the Democratic party supported giveaway programs, that is, programs aimed primarily at minorities.”12
Legal scholar Ian Haney López explains in his book Dog Whistle Politics how Democratic and Republican politicians and presidents used veiled racial appeals to convince whites to support policies that benefited the superrich and opposed their own economic interests. In analyzing the effectiveness of Reagan’s dog-whistling, Haney López connected tropes about welfare recipients to white fear of integration with Blacks. He wrote:
When Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty, he extended the benefits of social welfare to nonwhites. In the process, this effort targeted segregation, for obviously poverty in nonwhite communities was deeply tied to racially closed workplaces, schools, and housing. As a result, welfare and integration became tightly linked, and hostility toward integration morphed into opposition to welfare. . . .
Reagan’s campaign against welfare helped make the case for tax cuts by successfully using social programs like welfare, and its implicit connection to integration, to convince voters that the real danger in their lives came from a looming, intrusive government.13
When Reagan ran in 1976, levels of segregation in northern and midwestern cities between whites and Blacks were near their highest levels in the twentieth century. A coded dog whistle can’t work unless the humans to which these messages are targeted are already primed to hear at that frequency. An established racial order gives racial meaning to supposedly neutral codes. Seven decades of ghetto building certainly helped to create hoary stereotypes of Blackness to tap into.
Reagan differed from race-coding predecessors Wallace and Nixon, however. He was the first US president to deploy ghetto mythology to alter both the welfare state and the US tax structure. President Reagan invoked tropes of welfare dependency as he promoted cuts to programs for the poor.14 In 1981, he successfully championed a federalism package that utilized nine block grants to consolidate seventy-seven categorical programs, terminated sixty-two additional programs, and included a multiyear cut of $130 billion in domestic initiatives—a 25 percent reduction in funding.15 The Reagan administration also promulgated new rules that denied cash assistance and Medicaid (healthcare for poor people) to millions of working families and cut their food assistance. People who wanted to work and did work could no longer qualify for assistance even if their income did not exceed official poverty levels. The savings from these cuts and the federalism package helped pay for Reagan’s tax revolution.16
Reagan moved aggressively in 1981 to cut taxes for the richest one percent of taxpayers, reducing the top marginal tax rate from 70 to 28 percent. In the 1980s, this amounted to about $1 trillion in tax relief, and the antigovernment orthodoxy Reagan set in motion conferred another $1 trillion each following decade.17 Tying dramatic tax cuts to dramatic spending reductions in services to help pay for them became a way for voters to express hostility to a government that was allegedly helping Black people and hurting white people. Stories told about descendants were central to the Reagan revolution. His arsenal of coded messages included attacks on affirmative action, “forced busing,” and hostility to civil rights. Wedge issues worked to move many white Democrats from the coalition that had supported the New Deal and Great Society programs to the Republican, tax-cutting column.18
The “ghetto” became “the inner city” in public discourse and while that designation was more forgiving in its connotations, the Reagan administration’s rhetorical and actual assault on antipoverty policies erased the history of government constructing and maintaining poor Black space from public memory, even as it continued that
legacy. Civil rights cases against segregation in schools or housing that traditionally had been filed by the Justice Department virtually disappeared in Reagan’s first term.19 The Reagan administration largely ceased enforcing fair housing law and acquiesced in public and private discrimination to contain descendants.20
Instead of mitigating the harms of state-sponsored segregation, Reagan used the culprit of personal behavior and family breakdown to jettison or downgrade urban policies.21 His cuts to HUD were particularly egregious. From 1980 to 1988, federal spending for housing shrank from about $28 billion to $10 billion.22
Reagan deployed ghetto mythology on another front. In the same campaign speeches in which he weaponized the “welfare queen,” he used the word “predator” to talk about crime. The criminal Reagan conjured was “a staring face—a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time: the face of the human predator.”23
President Reagan announced his War on Drugs in 1982. As Michelle Alexander notes in her groundbreaking book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Reagan’s war increased military and law enforcement funding to fight drugs more than tenfold while dramatically cutting spending for drug treatment, prevention, and education.24 To justify and build public support for a drug war, the Reagan administration sponsored a media campaign that sensationalized crack use in inner-city neighborhoods and private media outlets embraced this narrative. Alexander wrote:
Thousands of stories about the crack crisis flooded the airwaves and newsstands, and the stories had a clear racial subtext. The articles typically featured black “crack whores,” “crack babies,” and “gangbangers,” reinforcing already prevalent racial stereotypes of black women as irresponsible, selfish “welfare queens,” and black men as “predators”—part of an inferior and criminal subculture.25
Other scholars have pointed out that state and local actors, including cities controlled by Black Americans, also massively incarcerated, in response to violent crime as well as drugs.26 But they do not contest that the federal drug war was propelled by and itself perpetuated pervasive stereotypes of inner-city residents. The footage associated with crack, like the news coverage of urban uprisings of the sixties, reseeded ghetto images into the American psyche. Many institutional actors and individuals, of all political persuasions and races, at all levels of government, participated in the demonization of descendants and this, in turn, justified punitive forms of policing.27
US penal policy changed dramatically in the decades following the civil rights revolution. In 1986, the House of Representatives proposed a fifty-to-one disparity in sentences between Black-associated crack and white-associated cocaine powder, and the Senate doubled the disparity to one-hundred-to-one with no deliberation as to why the doubling down was necessary.28 As with Johnson’s War on Crime, government continued to retreat from humane policies that might help descendants overcome ghetto isolation and to militarize law enforcement in their neighborhoods.29
Ghetto myths begat punitive policies at all levels of government, and incarceration grew like kudzu. The American inmate population ballooned by 700 percent above what it was in 1970, to 2.3 million incarcerated persons, with no correlation to growth in population or crime. With only 5 percent of the global population, the US houses nearly a quarter of the world’s prison population.30 Alexander argued that this new system of social control of Black people was constructed in response to white resentment of civil rights gains and to the economic dislocation that poor Blacks were experiencing in deindustrializing cities. Republicans and Democrats competed with each other to exploit white attitudes about Black folk. Mass incarceration and attendant bans on ex-offenders from voting or receiving federal housing, student loans, and other assistance constituted a new Jim Crow, she argued.31
The drug war also deepened certain processes of American caste: predation in Black hoods, denigration of Black people, and masking of capitalist plunder. In previous eras, slumlords and block-busting speculators benefited from fear-inducing ghetto mythology. In the new era of mass incarceration, companies extracted wealth from a mushrooming prison industrial complex. For-profit companies, backed by private equity investors, dominate the market for correctional services. With rampant privatization of correctional services, there are about four thousand companies that receive revenues from the roughly $80 billion spent annually in America for prisons.32
The peculiar Black-subordinating institutions of the ghetto and mass incarceration were supremely damaging to the families and individuals ensnared by them. And the myths constructed and propagated to justify these institutions also inflict harm independent of the institutions. As Bryan Stevenson, the acclaimed public interest lawyer, has argued, the ideology of supremacy may have been more harmful than the institutions it justified because the ideology endures.33 Ghetto myths performed a political function—justifying policies that criminalized being poor, cut antipoverty spending, and encouraged segregation and tax cuts that exacerbated income and wealth inequality.34 What is less obvious is the connection of modern ghetto mythology to our nation’s original sin. Slavery launched an endless war over narrative, and anti-Black mythology has been central to American politics for centuries.
GHETTO MYTHS AS A LEGACY OF WHITE SUPREMACY
In his masterful, definitive history of racist ideas in America, Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi shows that racism progressed and morphed across centuries even as anti-racist people offered anti-racist ideas and resistance in every era. Kendi identifies tropes propagated about poor Blacks in poor neighborhoods, beginning in the 1960s—essentially the ghetto myths presented in this chapter—as part of this multicentury continuum.35 I agree and explain here the operational connection of ghetto myths to previous eras of supremacist mythology.
Powerful classes tend to explain and accept the unearned benefits that flow from social hierarchies, a habit that is universal in human history. Most societies construct a pecking order. Founding fathers, and it is nearly always fathers, construct origin stories or what scholars call “hierarchy-enhancing myths” that encourage stereotyping. National mythology promotes patterns of behavior that constitute culture. National culture, in turn, reifies hierarchical institutions, like slavery and segregation. Once created, such institutions tend to endure over generations. Those who benefit tend to defend discrimination as they defend their preferred institution. There are hierarchy-attenuating myths and practices, like abolitionism, civil rights, and human rights. But once a hierarchical structure is in place, it is much easier to maintain inequality than attenuate it.36
Thomas Jefferson authored the beautiful words of the Declaration of Independence, and those self-evident truths of universal human equality are central to our American origin story. He also wrote words in Notes on the State of Virginia that traded in white supremacy, speculating aloud about the alleged inferiority of Africans, effectively apologizing for, if not justifying, slavery.37 Racial essentialism, ascribing character traits to particular phenotypes, was a new phenomenon in the late eighteenth century. German philosopher Immanuel Kant, like Jefferson, compared so-called races to each other. Kant ascribed to the Negro “a silly natural aptitude,” and consequentially, “no real culture.” He asserted that Black people were devoid of an essential human character, the ability to make independent judgments. The Negro culture, according to Kant, was that of slaves who “allow themselves to be trained.”38 Kant also denigrated Indigenous people, describing them as having only a “half-extinguished life power,” and as a group that has “still not fully acclimated.”39 While Kant later disavowed slavery and colonialism, in a world where ostensibly enlightened white elites and their nations benefited from slavery and conquest, the ideas needed to justify these institutions flourished, especially in America, with “such quantities of land to waste as we please,” as Jefferson wrote.40
Jefferson’s struggle between self-evident truths and convenient, slavery-supporting mythology of Black inferiority, was America’s stru
ggle. Future generations of Americans were inculcated in white supremacy as preferred follow-on institutions to slavery were created and justified.41 New institutions required new myths to justify them. Poor white men in the Jim Crow South could overlook how they, too, were disenfranchised by poll taxes or regressively taxed and often economically exploited by their bosses. The common man’s fanfare was “Dixie” and other siren songs that propagated stereotypes first uttered by his economic superiors: inferior, nigger, rapist, thug.
Division and supremacy were central to American culture, forever and always benefiting a small class of elites. With the distance of time and culpability, it is easy to see and acknowledge the role of racial myths in propping up institutions like slavery and the old Jim Crow that we now profess to abhor. But can we acknowledge how modern stereotypes—”thug,” “ghetto”—supplanted “rapist” or “nigger” to perform a similar political function in post-civil rights America?
Ghetto mythology is the latest iteration of anti-Black stereotyping that distracts white voters from capitalist plunder. As sociologist and social anthropologist Loïc Wacquant argues in Urban Outcasts, since the 1970s, “the tale of the ‘underclass’ masks and thus absolves regressive choices made by the federal and local authorities (irrespective of party affiliation).”42 Underclass was a term popularized by William Julius Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged. Wacquant, who studied under Wilson, argued that this ultimately derogatory label was forced on poor Blacks by “specialists in symbolic production—journalists, politicians, academics and government experts—for purposes of controlling and disciplining.”43 That even progressive Black intellectuals like Cornel West used the term “underclass” attested “to the degree to which the ghetto [became] an alien object.”44 The rhetoric of the “underclass” was a testament to classism on the part of all non-descendants.
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