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.