Wisconsin’s Scott Walker has great pride in his efforts to destroy public unions, and like other Republicans, to limit the rights of American workers to collectively bargain and organize.
Reagan pursued similar policies as his administration(s) rolled back the rights of unionized labor and expanded the power of corporations. And in an act that must have inspired Walker, Reagan destroyed the air traffic controllers union in 1981.
Reagan and the Republican Party’s continued attacks on federal and private unions have a disproportionately negative impact on Black Americans. Because racism in the private labor market forced Black people to seek employment in large numbers with the federal government, efforts by conservative and others to shrink “big government” are de facto assaults on the economic livelihood of Black America.
Reagan was unapologetic in his disdain and hostility towards poor and working class Black and brown Americans.
In keeping with the Southern Strategy, Reagan would talk about Black “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” that were supposedly using food stamps and public assistance to live a life of luxury at the expense of hardworking white people. These obnoxious white racist fantasies of lazy, hyper-sexual, and greedy Black people can trace their origins to back to the antebellum South.
Decades later, white racist fantasies of lazy Black people still hold great power. The Republican Party’s candidates in 2016 use the racially coded language of “makers and takers,” their political party is engaging in a search for imagined and exaggerated welfare “fraud” by poor Black and brown people, and the social safety net is under assault by white conservatives who use white racial anxieties as a rationale to create a less humane and fair society.
Black and brown Americans have been subjected to vicious and thuggish police violence from before the founding of the country, through to the Age of Obama. The American criminal justice system is one of the primary tools for social control and institutionalized violence against non-whites and the poor. The Black Lives Matter Movement and other civil rights and activist groups are only making visible to White America what the masses of Black and brown people have always known: the police are engaged in legal murder and abuse of Black America as a matter of policy; the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, and so many others entombed in the Black necropolis in the Age of Obama are the result of a racist and classist system working precisely as designed…they are not aberrations.
Reagan, like Nixon before him, and conservatives today, used the language of “law and order,” images of Black people “rioting,” and the specious idea of “Black crime” to scare white people into supporting an unjust legal system, one that as author and legal scholar, Michelle Alexander, and others have extensively documented, disproportionately and unfairly punishes Black people as compared to whites.
At the conclusion of last week’s Republican primary debate, Mike Huckabee said that people should respect law enforcement. This was a not too subtle threat against Black America, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and an effort to win over white voters.
When Republican candidates say Reagan’s name 45 times, they are summoning this history and legacy. The sins of Reagan along the color line are the sins of the Republican Party. The sins of fathers do often become the sins of the son and daughter.
The ghost of Reagan continues to enchant the Republican Party. His power is very great in an era when the president of the United States happens to be a Black man and white conservatives have been driven to political insanity by that fact.
