Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [50]
They don’t call Reagan “the Great Communicator” for nothing. His welfare stories were much more effective at catalyzing working-class resentment than Nixon’s wonkish reform proposals. Reagan gave the pampered schemers faces—black faces. Of course, he didn’t say they were black. He didn’t have to. He played on stereotypes of welfare recipients and their tastes in automobiles, and he used loaded language like “strapping young buck.”
In theory, a “young buck” may refer to any energetic young man, but in certain parts of the United States—the parts where Reagan just happened to use the term—it had acquired a particular connotation due to its use at slave auctions. One former slave described his memory of a slave auction as follows:
They have white gloves there, and one of the bidders takes a pair of gloves and rubs his fingers over a man’s teeth, and he says to the overseer, “You call this buck twenty years old? Why there’s cut worms in his teeth. He’s forty years old, if he’s a day.” So they knock this buck down for a thousand dollars. They calls the men “bucks” and the women “wenches.”39
“Buck” continued to be used as a racial slur well into the twentieth century. As late as 1965, the imperial wizard of the KKK justified the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo on the grounds that she shouldn’t have been “sitting on the front seat with a young buck nigra.”40
At the same time that Reagan was demonizing black welfare recipients, he also attacked the affirmative action programs. In his stump presidential campaign speeches, Reagan denounced “special privileges” and labeled affirmative action policies “racial quotas,” saying, “You do not alter the evil character of racial quotas simply by changing the color of the beneficiary.”41 Calling affirmative action “evil” was too subtle for Senator Orrin Hatch’s tastes. He presented it as an “an assault upon America, conceived in lies and fostered with an irresponsibility so extreme as to verge upon the malign. If the government officials and politicians who presided over its genesis had injected heroin into the bloodstream of the nation, they could not have done more potential damage to our children and our children’s children.”42
If you were a hard-working white American who resented having to pay taxes, the prospect of your hard-earned money going to T-bone-eating young bucks and Cadillac-driving welfare queens might make you angry. The prospect of lazy blacks getting special treatment that gave them unfair advantages might make you even angrier. You’d have nothing against black people, of course, but you might feel that you and your fellow white people were getting a raw deal from the government, that you were “suckers.” It might make you vote for the man who promised to help you.
Reagan won in a landslide, sweeping the still-Democratic South despite Carter’s Southern roots. (Against Ford, Carter had won every Southern state except Virginia. Against Reagan, he won only his native Georgia.) After that, the South never looked back. With only a couple of exceptions during the Clinton and Obama elections, the Southern states have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980.
In 1981, Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian college, sought Reagan’s help with the IRS. Despite Jesse Helm’s successful crusade against secular humanism, the IRS still prohibited tax exemptions to institutions with openly discriminatory language on their books. Bob Jones University had begun admitting married blacks in 1971, but it still officially prohibited interracial dating on the grounds that “God intended segregation of the races and that the Scriptures forbid interracial marriage,” so the IRS continued to deny tax exemption.43 Answering the call of the university’s president, Bob Jones III, Reagan ordered the IRS to reestablish its tax exemption. A media uproar ensued; Reagan retracted his