It’s not all bigotry. George F. Will, in his Oct. 22 op-ed, “Our politics today echo 1968′s George Wallace,” noted that the mass basis of the Republican Party, since Richard M. Nixon’s “Southern strategy”, is tapping into voters disaffected by the Democratic Party’s support for civil rights.
Generally overlooked, going back to the pre-Civil War period, is that there are two types of racism: racism of exploitation and racism of competition. Racism of exploitation is all too clear in the case of slavery, but it continued during Jim Crow, in sharecropping and, most important, in the political power of excluding African American voters and appealing to the fears and prejudices of poorer White voters — as exemplified by Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the assassination of Medgar Evers.
Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s appeal to White voters, including in the nonsegregated North, which Mr. Will described, was the racism of competition. Apologists for slavery to this day claim that the Free Soil movement was racist, seeking to exclude African Americans, whether enslaved or free, from the Northern states because of fear of competition from African Americans bringing down wages and employment opportunities. More recently, Republicans have added opposition to competition from immigrants. The Republican Party, borrowing from Nixon and Ronald Reagan, overlaid this with resentment by working-class and lower-middle-class Whites to paying taxes to support welfare-type aid for minorities and immigrants — even though Whites are the largest single group using these benefits.
Only by understanding the economic basis of racial politics can we see beyond divisive charges of bigotry.
James Kelly, Ellicott City