Quote (Thor123422 @ Jan 20 2017 12:04pm)
Not out loud, not they'll definitely worm around it and use coded language. Is it coincidence that "inner city" only entered the republican dialogue after tr civil rights act? Or that the confederate flag as we know it today only gained popularity when southern schools were integrated? It's pretty easy to see as long as you aren't actively going out of your way to try to appear neutral.
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
— Lee Atwater, Republican Party strategist in an anonymous interview in 1981