Republican
presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have
burnished their conservative credentials through racially
coded invective evoking the dependency of the black �underclass�
on government handouts.� Late last year, Gingrich caused
a commotion when he referred to child labor laws as �truly
stupid.�� He mused that poor children could develop the
honest work ethic missing in their communities, and escape
poverty, by replacing unionized janitors in their schools,
and working as library and office assistants.� The comments
had little to do with race explicitly; yet, his casual
assumption that such children lack adult role models who
work, or earn money legally are circumstances commonly
attributed to the �underclass,� and made the target of
his remarks clear.� Gingrich stirred a toxic brew of anti-unionism,
thinly veiled racism exempting children of color from
protections against exploitation, and disdain for meaningfully
combating poverty.
As
if the race-inflected undertow was not strong enough,
Gingrich labeled Barack Obama �the food stamp president,�
and patronizingly offered to lecture members of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
on why the black community should �demand paychecks and
not be satisfied with food stamps.�� Not to be outdone,
Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, has gamely
continued this performance, castigating Obama for supplanting
a �merit-based society with an entitlement society.��
Without a trace of irony, he sidestepped his own deep
sense of entitlement to the White House as the scion of
a wealthy family.� And, lest we forget, earlier this season
former Republican candidate Herman Cain admonished the
unemployed that they had only themselves to blame for
their predicament.
Like
Cain, Gingrich and Romney have wielded �underclass� phraseology
to attack a broad array of the populace clamoring for
a more just social contract.� No matter who garners the
Republican nomination, the campaign message already has
crystallized: You may be jobless, and you may have lost
your savings and your home may be in foreclosure, but
the president�s policies benefit the �undeserving� poor,
who are culturally unlike you.� Summoning the imagery
of �underclass� debasement speaks to the GOP�s racial
politics, but it also demonstrates how popular ideas about
class, poverty, and government policy operate through
racial inference.� Their campaign rhetoric is proof that
the long career of the black �underclass� has to be addressed
in our prescriptions for change.����������
The
�underclass� entered popular usage in the 1970s to describe
a visible urban population afflicted by deepening conditions
of� �hardcore� unemployment.� It became, according to
Adolph Reed, Jr., �the central representation of poverty
in American society,� and was employed primarily to characterize
those fastened to the lowest rungs of the black working
class.� Functioning more as an ideological device than
a real sociological category, the �underclass� literally
colored public policy exchanges.� It was a vehicle for
shifting attention away from structural inequality to
the cultural pathology of the poor: The �underclass� existed
because of dysfunctional values, criminal deviance, and
reliance on government.� Accordingly, this was a problem
that social welfare expenditures could not fix; such expenditures,
in fact, only reinforced �underclass� dependence.� This
had the effect of vilifying the poorest strata of working-class
African Americans among middle-class whites and blacks
alike, stigmatizing them in the imagination of other sectors
of the working class, isolating them in public policy,
and justifying measures that have eroded social security
for all.
Conjuring
the �underclass� was a key component of the Reagan revolution
of the 1980s, and it fed a campaign against the legacies
of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society, especially
against government employees providing public services.�
It also prompted a liberal retreat from racial and economic
justice, as Democratic strategists distanced their party
nationally from close affiliation with the black working
poor.� The consequence has been what historian Julilly
Kohler-Hausmann calls a �punitive turn� in public policy
under a succession of Republican and Democratic presidents.�
The punishment, of course, has spared government subsidies
to wealthy individuals and corporations in the form of
tax cuts and deregulation.� For the so-called �underclass,�
decades of austerity have transformed many black working-class
communities into armed encampments, escalated mass incarceration,
and overseen cruel welfare �reform.�� This has paralleled
a general offensive against the wages, benefits, and collective
bargaining rights of broad swaths of working-class Americans
� as in the use of unpaid �workfare� employees to supplant
union labor.� The brutal federal indifference to black
suffering during the 2005 Hurricane Katrina crisis was
not just an embodiment of racism, but also a culmination
of a long-term assault on working people.�
Protests
by public workers in the Midwest, and �Occupy Wall Street�
movements on the East and West coasts have signaled a
working-class political renewal.� Understandably, its
trajectories are still unclear.� But the baggage of the
black �underclass,� which has been a crucial part of the
U.S. social welfare policy, has to be unpacked and put
away.
BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator Dr. Clarence Lang, PhD is an Associate
Professor of African and African American Studies at The
University of Kansas.� He is the author of Grassroots
at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle
in St. Louis, 1936-75 (Class : Culture)
(University of Michigan Press), and co-editor with
Robbie Lieberman of Anticommunism
and the African American Freedom Movement: "Another Side
of the Story" (Contemporary Black History)
(Palgrave).� Click here
to contact Dr. Lang.
