A race card from the right wing

A race card from the right wing
By Clarence Page
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
August 16, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0816pageaug16,0,7822008.column

I thought slavery reparations was a dead issue. Glenn Beck set me straight.

The radio talk-show host and Fox News Channel star says President Barack Obama's proposed health-care overhaul is really "stealth reparations," a form of racial payback in Beck's words.

I am not making this up. On his radio program last month and in a video floating around the Web, Beck argues that Obama's announced opposition to reparations is only a smoke screen for his "stealth" support of reparations.

How does Beck know? Through his own tortured logic, he takes Obama's argument for color-blind alternatives to color-conscious concepts like reparations and affirmative action and turns the argument on its head. He is happy that Obama opposes reparations, Beck says, but he dislikes Obama's reasons for opposing it.

Try to follow Beck's logic here. It's not easy.

When asked about reparations and affirmative action during his presidential campaign, Obama said he preferred programs that targeted poverty, education and other social problems based on need, not color. Beck correctly quotes Obama as saying programs like "universal health care ... will disproportionately affect people of color because they are disproportionately uninsured."

The same is true for programs aimed at improving education, housing and job opportunities. Obama's reasoning is hardly in dispute. Polls and the November election show that Obama's belief in helping those most in need, regardless of race, creed or color, is the sort of common-sense social policy that most Americans support across political party lines.

In fact, since low-income whites outnumber low-income blacks overall, even though a higher percentage of blacks are in poverty, more whites would receive help than would other Americans.

Yet, Beck insists Obama is pushing "universal health care, universal college, green jobs as stealth reparations." Why would Obama do that? Because, says Beck, "It's a much less obvious route to reparations."

Less obvious? You've got me there, Glenn. Your conspiracy theory makes about as much sense as the 98-pound boxer who hopes to beat Mike Tyson by tiring him out.

Yet, Beck is not alone in his twisted logic. Rush Limbaugh, the Big Kahuna of conservative radio talkers, declared in a June broadcast that Obama's "entire economic program is reparations," although Limbaugh did not explain why he thinks that way. The mere mention of the R-word is enough in Limbaugh's logic to condemn Obama's "wealth redistribution."

Do such not-so-subtle race cards have an effect? One example may be Richie Drake, a disabled sheet-rock installer in Bristol, Va. He was unemployed and his children were on Medicaid, yet he told a National Public Radio reporter last month that he wants no part of the Obama overhaul. "Minorities are going to get more attention than the whites and stuff like that," he said. "That's the way I take it from what the news was talking about."

Add to Drake's misimpressions the rising prominence of the "birthers," who insist against all evidence that Obama may not be a natural-born citizen. Add the "tea-party" protesters who appear to have re-emerged to help disrupt town hall health-care meetings.

Amid the headline-making mayhem, one can be forgiven for thinking Obama's lofty vision of a post-racial, post-partisan presidency in "not red state or blue state but the United States of America" seems to have gone the way of twice-a-day mail delivery.

Still, I am an optimist. Just beneath the noise of town hall protesters there's a real health-care debate going on. It's just hard to separate the folks who have legitimate questions from those refighting last year's presidential election campaign.

In the meantime, if there is any justice regarding the broadcast demagogues, it could be in the reported departure of about a dozen companies that have withdrawn their commercials from Beck's Fox News program. The mass exodus reportedly came after he said last month that Obama was a racist with a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture."

It is encouraging to see confirmation of my parents' warning: If you keep throwing mud, some of it is going to splash back on you.

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/pagespage

cpage@tribune.com