Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [49]
The new breed of racists, however, refused to countenance this distinction. In subsequent years, they would continue to misrepresent any affirmative action policy as a “race quota.” The specter of race quotas is a powerful tool of persecution politics. At one time, universities used quotas to keep out undesirable minorities like Jews. By labeling any affirmative action policy a race quota, conservative leaders imply that such policies are designed to limit the number of undesirable white students.
Pat Buchanan was certainly dissatisfied by the 1978 Bakke decision. He attacked both Democrats and Republicans for practicing “preferential treatment” for minorities and called for a savior to come to the rescue of the white victims of reverse discrimination:
What the victims need is a voice, a presidential candidate unafraid of confronting the “constituency of consciences” and its echo chamber, the national press. Anybody want to bell the cat?30
The Great Communicator
Ronald Reagan swatted constituencies of consciences as if they were vaguely annoying liberal gnats. Reagan was no bigot. Growing up in Illinois, his family was uncommonly tolerant. In his youth, Reagan fetched black visitors who had been barred from the town’s hotel to stay in his parents’ home. Yet Reagan also resisted federal action against entrenched racism. He opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, calling the latter “humiliating to the South,” by which he presumably meant the part of the South that was permitted to vote.31
Reagan backed up his “principled” stands against federal civil rights policies by demonizing minorities and dismissing the very idea that white Americans might discriminate against them. For example, in 1964, white Californians were suffering from a new state law that prohibited landlords from denying people housing because of ethnicity, religion, sex, marital status, physical handicap, or familial status. So they did what Californians do best: they launched a ballot initiative. Proposition 14 prohibited the state from interfering with landlords’ “absolute discretion” to rent or refuse to rent to whomever they saw fit, i.e., blacks and Latinos. The president of the influential California Republican Assembly explained that denying people their inalienable right to discriminate against minorities was the first step on the slippery slope to socialist revolution, explaining:
The essence of freedom is the right to discriminate. Discrimination means free choice. In socialist countries, they always take away this right in order to complete their takeover.32
Reagan called the California Republican Assembly the “conscience of the Republican Party” (which is exactly right in my opinion).33 As for Proposition 14, Reagan didn’t see any victims worthy of legal protection. Black complaints of real-estate discrimination were simply “staged attempts to rent homes, when in truth there was no real intention of renting, only causing trouble.”34 The proposition passed, but the California Supreme Court tossed it out due to unconstitutionality in 1966. Later that year, Californians elected Reagan their governor.
Attacking downtrodden minorities soon became Reagan’s standard operating procedure. In his 1976 presidential campaign, the former Hollywood actor assembled a rollicking cast of colorful villains to graphically illustrate the scheming beneficiaries of government largess. The Welfare Queen with eighty names, thirty addresses, and twelve Social Security cards earned $150,000 and drove a Cadillac to pick up her welfare checks.ar35 The Strapping Young Buck purchased T-bone steaks with food stamps while outraged working people clutched their sad packages of ground beef.36 The Witch Girl lived off food stamps while studying for a degree in witchcraft.37 Perhaps the three amigos threw wild parties in one of the plush housing projects that Reagan denounced, where the apartments had “11-foot