Lunchtime Must-Read: Ta-Nehisi Coates (2012): We Are All Welfare Queens Now

Ta-Nehisi Coates (2012): We Are All Welfare Queens Now: “Thinking some more on Mitt Romney’s high-handed claim…

…that one in two Americans will vote for Obama simply to better ensure their own sloth, I was reminded of Lee Atwater’s famous explanation of the Southern Strategy: ‘You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”…. So you say… forced busing, states’ rights…. You’re getting so abstract… talking about… economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites…. If it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other… a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”‘… I think what’s often missed in analyzing these tactics is how they, themselves, are evidence of progress and the liberal dream of equal citizenship before the law…. As tactics aimed at suppressing black citizenship become more abstract, they also have the side-effect of enveloping non-blacks…. At each interval the ostensible pariah grows, until one in two Americans are members of the pariah class…. When the party of white populism finds itself writing off half the country, we are really close.