Regardless of how carefully the attacks are worded, the coded language, the intent is clear and needs to cease.
Rep. Barbara Lee Responds To Bill O'Reilly's 'Race Hustler' Attack
Last week, Congresswoman Lee took her colleague Paul Ryan to task for what she rightly termed a “thinly veiled racial attack” on African-American men.
In response, conservative blowhard Bill O’Reilly went on the warpath, using his Fox News television program on two successive days to call Congresswoman Lee a “race hustler.”
The first time he even referred to her as "a notorious race hustler." Even for Fox News and Bill O'Reilly, this is disgraceful and crosses a line.
We need to make sure that Congresswoman Lee knows we stand with her when she speaks truth to power and holds Republicans accountable for their despicable and racially loaded rhetoric.
Let’s be clear about something.
This isn’t about the mere fact that Bill O’Reilly called Congresswoman Lee a name or said something mean about her on television. Congresswoman Lee has almost certainly heard far worse and in any event has responded with great grace and dignity to the attacks from Bill O’Reilly.
What this is about, however, is why Bill O’Reilly attacked her -- and why it's so important that we stand behind her.
Congresswoman Lee pierced the polite fiction that Paul Ryan said something innocuous or that he didn't know what he was saying, and cast light upon an incredibly ugly tactic long used by Republican politicians and pundits.
These Republicans often play to the worst fears and racial prejudices of white voters, but they don't want to admit that's what they’re doing.
So they use a system of code words whose subtext is clear to their intended audience, but which provides them a thin veneer of plausible deniability when they're challenged on it.
That's what happened here. Paul Ryan said:
“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
This is a play right out of the “Southern Strategy” playbook, which relied on racial code words like “law and order” and “welfare queens” (more recently, calling President Obama a “food stamp president”) in an explicit attempt to win the white vote by stoking racial anxieties, prejudices and animus toward African Americans.
Republicans can’t deny their unseemly past. Not one but two chairs of the Republican National Committee apologized for the decades-long Southern Strategy. And with the Tea Party ascendant, we’re seeing a new norm in Washington DC that includes a growing acceptance of racially charged rhetoric.
That’s why what Congresswoman Lee did was so important –- and why O’Reilly went after her so hard.
Congresswoman Lee rightly called Paul Ryan on his completely unacceptable language in stark terms. She said:
“My colleague Congressman Ryan’s comments about ‘inner city’ poverty are a thinly veiled racial attack and cannot be tolerated. Let’s be clear, when Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says, ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black.’”
By both diagnosing and calling attention to what Paul Ryan was doing in this way, Congresswoman Lee was at once holding the line on acceptable political discourse and holding her colleague accountable for crossing it.
But instead of addressing the substance of Rep. Lee’s remarks, O’Reilly outrageously dismissed her as a “notorious race hustler.”
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