[lbo-talk] Atwater on abstraction

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Nov 3 18:59:21 PST 2005


I just came across this on my researcher's girlfriend/wife's blog <http://bananarchist.blogspot.com/>. Bush Sr's strategist Lee Atwater, quoted by Bob Herbert in the NYT:


>You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N-word, n-word, n-word.' By 1968
>you can't say 'n-word' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff
>like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're
>getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes,
>and all these things you're talking about are totally economic
>things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than
>whites.
>
>And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that.
>But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded,
>that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.
>You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to
>cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a
>hell of a lot more abstract than 'N-word, n-word.'



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