January 3, 2012
The
Republican presidential primary has covered significant ground. Against
a backdrop of Iowan cornfields, candidates have debated socialism,
capitalism, immigration and American exceptionalism, and have even
touched on the finer points of Shariah law and the Federalist Papers.
One thing you don’t hear about is America’s cities and the ongoing, and
growing, urban crisis.
There are some oblique references, like Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that
child labor laws be modified so that poor children can work as school
janitors. “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods,” mused
Gingrich, “have no habits of working and have nobody around them who
works … They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless
it’s illegal.”
Gingrich’s
comment is a surviving dog-whistle politics that include new state laws
to drug-test those on public assistance and the ongoing effort to
cut food stamps (and Gingrich did call Obama the “food stamp
president”). The specter of the black ghetto still scripts urban
dwellers as villains (often as thieves robbing the citizen either
directly, or as in this Rick
Santorum comment, indirectly: “I don’t want to make black people’s
lives better by giving them other people’s money”). But unlike the era
of Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, today cities are more ignored than
attacked. And this goes well beyond Iowa.
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