Fifteen Kids and Three Baby Daddies: Of Welfare Queens and the Guilt of President Obama by (Black) Association

This is going to be a huge story in the Right-wing media. 

The 2012 presidential election is going to be very, very close. It is a given that Mitt Romney and the Tea Party GOP will use any means necessary to defeat Barack Obama--honorable or otherwise. In addition, they are much buoyed by the recent unemployment data which suggests a further stagnating economy and an extremely vulnerable incumbent: no President in the modern era has won reelection with unemployment figures as dismal as those offered up on Friday.

In these next few months I am going to be detailing the nuts and bolts of how Mitt Romney and the Tea Party GOP are going to use sophisticated appeals to white racial resentment in order to defeat the country's first President who happens not to be white. 

For example, as I suggest here, Mitt Romney's "Obama isn't working" slogan is one of the most nakedly racist campaign slogans which American politics has seen in many years. 

This is part of a broader strategy. The Republican primaries featured almost every degenerate and racist stereotype that can be used to slur black personhood and humanity: their strategy was so brazen that it even included a "black" candidate named Herman Cain who was a walking double-corked, race minstrel. 

The 2012 election will only see more of this Southern Strategy 2.0 redoubled for the Age of Obama.

To this point, the Tea Party GOP has successful deployed Ayn Rand conservatism, with its language of "surplus/unproductive" people and "job creating" citizens, to hoodwink the white authoritarian inclined populist classes into supporting policies which are against their immediate political and economic self-interest(s). 

Attitudes about the State, "big government," and taxes are closely tied to racial animus and hostility. These are dog whistles and code words for white conservatives which enable them to talk about "lazy" black and brown people. Without exception, these appeals are rarely, if ever, centered on how the white middle class is subsidized by the submerged state.

Consequently, the mouth-breathing Tea Party Populists who want lower taxes and a strong national defense (or alternatively, love Social Security and despise "big government") can valorize themselves as "real Americans" and the "guardians" of the national prosperity despite the internal inconsistency of their own political views.

As Martin Gilens and others have smartly detailed, beliefs about poverty are inexorably connected to stereotypes about race. In the white popular imagination, to be poor equals to be a person of color. Gender is part of this narrative as well. This is especially true in the Right-wing conservative imagination: women are to be controlled by men. Black and brown women especially so. 

Political narratives about poverty are also claims about morality, as well as the value of certain groups of people over others. Because conservatives are incapable of acknowledging the force and power of social structures in determining life chances, poor people are framed as being immoral, lazy, craven, decadent. and
They deserve their circumstances. As such, they should be "dispensed" with.

Stories such as the above about a black woman with more than a dozen children by numerous men are going to be increasingly common as the 2012 Presidential election approaches. 

Why? Stories about "professional victims" activate white racial resentment. Such feelings work to win over independent leaning whites and solidify conservatives in their hostility towards President Obama. Because political ideologies are part of a bundle of beliefs that are not cleanly separated, political attitudes which link black and brown folks together (in however tenuous a manner) with poverty and crime have great currency in American politics. 

This racial frame can be easily applied to other issues. It synergizes with the ghetto underclass meme and the Welfare Queen stereotype. Consequently, it also hurts President Obama on issues like healthcare reform and the economy. On the surface, these issues would appear to have little to do with matters of race. However, conservatives understand that if they can attach a black or brown face to any matter of public concern, this move could potentially undermine white public support for the President. 

Ultimately, it does not matter that health care reform should be a race neutral issue, or that poor whites outnumber poor people of color. Alternatively, that we can construct similar stories about wayward white baby daddies, fecund irresponsible white women with kids by multiple fathers with no resources or jobs, and who live on the public dole with hands out expecting Joe Q. Public to support their irresponsible habits, and said narratives are rarely circulated via the mass media.

Since the 1960s, the face of poverty in America has been African American. As such, "black" poverty and "black" degeneracy will be repeated themes in Romney's Ayn Rand-like campaign language of "productive citizens," "job creators," and "lazy" "parasites."

President Obama is guilty by (black) association. There is little, even allowing for a Bill Clinton Sistah Souljah moment, that Obama can do to remove such a vulnerability. Consequently, it is critical that this Right-wing con game be called out at every opportunity.