Call it "Culturalism"
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talkpoliticsPaul Ryan, on the Bill Bennett Show: You know, your buddy Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard, those, those guys have written books on this, which is, we have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work. So there's a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.
The idea is not to allow it to be called "racism." "Culturalism" is the "correct" term.
Doesn't have the unpleasant implications of the "R" word, dontchaknow.
And that's how racism is being reintroduced into the mainstream. By invoking Bell Curve author Charles Murray. By sounding concerned. By coupling the words "inner city" with "culture" and talking about the human beings involved the way you talk about pigeons and pot-holes -- not as adults who might have something to say about their situation, but as problems to be solved, children to be "mentored." Because the poor, bless their confused little hearts, are lazy (or shiftless) and they need people like Paul Ryan and various church-based charities to oversee and "educate" them.
Joan Walsh and Paul Krugman have done excellent take-downs of, not only Paul Ryan's comments about the poor, but of attempts to disconnect them from racism-- including Charles Murray's mendacious response. But Walsh's most insightful comment involves the extent to which Ryan's Social Darwinism has leapt over the racial boundary. "Murray proves you can embrace noxious racial stereotypes about African-Americans, and also hold contempt for a lot of white men, and women," she observes.
In [Charles Murray's] awful book The Bell Curve, he relied on explicitly racist (and mostly discredited) scientists to argue that blacks and Latinos lagged behind whites and Asians in wealth and income because they had lower IQs, and the basis wasn’t centuries of oppression and deprivation but genetics. This time around Murray told his reviewers he was going to dodge the racial trap, and talk about white people. And again, he finds an IQ gap between the “cognitive elite” and lower-class whites that he says helps explain our winner-take-all society.
In short, Ryan and Murray are peddling the notion that the poor are inferior in much the same manner that Murray and his co-author claimed in The Bell Curve that people of African descent were inferior.
This is not an improvement.
*
The idea is not to allow it to be called "racism." "Culturalism" is the "correct" term.
Doesn't have the unpleasant implications of the "R" word, dontchaknow.
And that's how racism is being reintroduced into the mainstream. By invoking Bell Curve author Charles Murray. By sounding concerned. By coupling the words "inner city" with "culture" and talking about the human beings involved the way you talk about pigeons and pot-holes -- not as adults who might have something to say about their situation, but as problems to be solved, children to be "mentored." Because the poor, bless their confused little hearts, are lazy (or shiftless) and they need people like Paul Ryan and various church-based charities to oversee and "educate" them.
Joan Walsh and Paul Krugman have done excellent take-downs of, not only Paul Ryan's comments about the poor, but of attempts to disconnect them from racism-- including Charles Murray's mendacious response. But Walsh's most insightful comment involves the extent to which Ryan's Social Darwinism has leapt over the racial boundary. "Murray proves you can embrace noxious racial stereotypes about African-Americans, and also hold contempt for a lot of white men, and women," she observes.
In [Charles Murray's] awful book The Bell Curve, he relied on explicitly racist (and mostly discredited) scientists to argue that blacks and Latinos lagged behind whites and Asians in wealth and income because they had lower IQs, and the basis wasn’t centuries of oppression and deprivation but genetics. This time around Murray told his reviewers he was going to dodge the racial trap, and talk about white people. And again, he finds an IQ gap between the “cognitive elite” and lower-class whites that he says helps explain our winner-take-all society.
In short, Ryan and Murray are peddling the notion that the poor are inferior in much the same manner that Murray and his co-author claimed in The Bell Curve that people of African descent were inferior.
This is not an improvement.
*
