Cigar
03-16-2014, 10:30 AM
How the Irish Became White? Paul Ryan's Ugly Public Embrace of Anti-Black Racism and Eugenics (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/14/1284799/-How-the-Irish-Became-White-Paul-Ryan-s-Ugly-Public-Embrace-of-Anti-Black-Racism-and-Eugenics)
Paul Ryan is the leader of the Republican Party’s “intellectual” wing. He has been described by the news media in fawning terms as a “policy wonk”, a “numbers guy”, and a “serious thinker”.
Consequently, Ryan's recent claim that "inner city" black men are lazy and have no work ethic is a revealing insight into the current state of movement conservatism and the former's supposed intellectual gifts.
There is no genius in Paul Ryan's claims: his arguments about lazy black people are a boilerplate post-civil Rights era Republican talking point.
To advance this claim, he leveraged Charles Murray's discredited research on the relationship between I.Q. and race. Ryan's intellectual slippage is not a new habit. In his anti-poverty tome, which purports (and fails) to discredit President Johnson's Great Society era programs, Paul Ryan misrepresented (http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/03/04/Economists-Say-Paul-Ryan-Misrepresented-Their-Research) and distorted (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/ryan-enlists-social-science-disaster-ensues.html) research findings (http://www.salon.com/2014/03/05/paul_ryans_every_distortion_fact_checking_his_anti _poverty_plan/).
He is intellectually dishonest (http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4095&utm_content=buffer03fca&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer); Ryan's claim to be a serious thinker on matters of public policy is a cheap, and not very convincing, parlor trick.
It is also a perfect fit for the post-fact universe and anti-intellectualism of the present day American conservative movement. Paul Ryan's recent observation about the laziness of black people is also providing an additional lesson in how the Republican Party has now fully merged conservatism and "symbolic racism".
Moreover, in a moment when Republicans have suggested that black and brown people’s children should become janitors to learn a “work ethic”, that Obama buys black people’s votes with food stamps, and that “real Americans”, i.e. white people, are losing “their country” to non-whites, Ryan’s argument is a rather flat channeling of the Southern Strategy and Reagan’s opines about “strapping black bucks” and "welfare queens" living in luxury as they leech off of white people.
There is an ugly hypocrisy at the heart of Paul Ryan’s efforts to chastise African-Americans (a group of people who quite literally built the United States and have never received compensation or reparations) for having “bad culture” and perhaps even defective genes.
Paul Ryan is an Irish-American. The same arguments that Ryan is making about the “bad culture” of African-Americans, and their supposed “laziness” and “idleness”, were made against his Irish ancestors by eugenicists and race scientists in the United States and Europe.
Even as late as the early decades of the 20th century, leading American eugenicists and race scientists such as Madison Grant—author of the infamous tract The Passing of the Great Race—were unsure (http://books.google.com/books?id=6nOS3FGidTcC&q=irish#v=snippet&q=madison%20grant&f=false) of the relationship between the Irish and "white civilization":
By the 1920s, some eugenicists seemed ready to admit the Irish or "Celts" to a racial status closer to Anglo-Saxons. But not all. In the Passing of the Great Race, a highly read and influential attack on "race mongrelization" the eugenicist Madison Grant waffled about where the Irish stood. Grant observed that a physical change had occurred among the Irish in America. The "Neanderthal physical characteristics of the native Irish--the great upper lip, bridgeless nose, beetling brow with low growing hair, and wild and savage aspect:--had largely disappeared. The Irish apeman of Nast's cartoons had evolved a more human form. Yet, with the Irish, in Grant's view, looks could be deceiving. When it came to intellectual and moral traits, "the mental and cultural traits of the aborigines have proved to be exceedingly persistent and appear in the unstable temperament and the lack of coordinating and reasoning power, so often found among the Irish."
... 1,2,3 ... Deny
Paul Ryan is the leader of the Republican Party’s “intellectual” wing. He has been described by the news media in fawning terms as a “policy wonk”, a “numbers guy”, and a “serious thinker”.
Consequently, Ryan's recent claim that "inner city" black men are lazy and have no work ethic is a revealing insight into the current state of movement conservatism and the former's supposed intellectual gifts.
There is no genius in Paul Ryan's claims: his arguments about lazy black people are a boilerplate post-civil Rights era Republican talking point.
To advance this claim, he leveraged Charles Murray's discredited research on the relationship between I.Q. and race. Ryan's intellectual slippage is not a new habit. In his anti-poverty tome, which purports (and fails) to discredit President Johnson's Great Society era programs, Paul Ryan misrepresented (http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/03/04/Economists-Say-Paul-Ryan-Misrepresented-Their-Research) and distorted (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/ryan-enlists-social-science-disaster-ensues.html) research findings (http://www.salon.com/2014/03/05/paul_ryans_every_distortion_fact_checking_his_anti _poverty_plan/).
He is intellectually dishonest (http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4095&utm_content=buffer03fca&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer); Ryan's claim to be a serious thinker on matters of public policy is a cheap, and not very convincing, parlor trick.
It is also a perfect fit for the post-fact universe and anti-intellectualism of the present day American conservative movement. Paul Ryan's recent observation about the laziness of black people is also providing an additional lesson in how the Republican Party has now fully merged conservatism and "symbolic racism".
Moreover, in a moment when Republicans have suggested that black and brown people’s children should become janitors to learn a “work ethic”, that Obama buys black people’s votes with food stamps, and that “real Americans”, i.e. white people, are losing “their country” to non-whites, Ryan’s argument is a rather flat channeling of the Southern Strategy and Reagan’s opines about “strapping black bucks” and "welfare queens" living in luxury as they leech off of white people.
There is an ugly hypocrisy at the heart of Paul Ryan’s efforts to chastise African-Americans (a group of people who quite literally built the United States and have never received compensation or reparations) for having “bad culture” and perhaps even defective genes.
Paul Ryan is an Irish-American. The same arguments that Ryan is making about the “bad culture” of African-Americans, and their supposed “laziness” and “idleness”, were made against his Irish ancestors by eugenicists and race scientists in the United States and Europe.
Even as late as the early decades of the 20th century, leading American eugenicists and race scientists such as Madison Grant—author of the infamous tract The Passing of the Great Race—were unsure (http://books.google.com/books?id=6nOS3FGidTcC&q=irish#v=snippet&q=madison%20grant&f=false) of the relationship between the Irish and "white civilization":
By the 1920s, some eugenicists seemed ready to admit the Irish or "Celts" to a racial status closer to Anglo-Saxons. But not all. In the Passing of the Great Race, a highly read and influential attack on "race mongrelization" the eugenicist Madison Grant waffled about where the Irish stood. Grant observed that a physical change had occurred among the Irish in America. The "Neanderthal physical characteristics of the native Irish--the great upper lip, bridgeless nose, beetling brow with low growing hair, and wild and savage aspect:--had largely disappeared. The Irish apeman of Nast's cartoons had evolved a more human form. Yet, with the Irish, in Grant's view, looks could be deceiving. When it came to intellectual and moral traits, "the mental and cultural traits of the aborigines have proved to be exceedingly persistent and appear in the unstable temperament and the lack of coordinating and reasoning power, so often found among the Irish."
... 1,2,3 ... Deny