alibatya

[alibatya]

Ronald Reagan’s States Rights Speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi:

Reagan articulates the rampant unemployment and inflation problem in the United States of America is because of the bureaucratic system in place. He uses how he reformed welfare in California. Saying that when he did this, he saw how the people on welfare just wanted to have jobs and be in society like everyone else.

Reagan sees bureaucracy as the measure which has trapped people economically, bureaucracy does this out of a need to function as a bureaucracy itself. This causes him to come to the point where he says these kinds of programs should be turned back to the state and local communities with tax sources to fund them.

Reagan believes in states’ rights. He believes people should do as much as they can for themselves as both individuals and communities. He sees an imbalance that was never intended by the Constitution where the federal government has certain powers that it shouldn’t. His goal is a return to giving those powers back to the states.

[alibatya]

Welfare as we know it was originally called Aid to Dependent Children. It allotted money to poor families who had absent fathers for whatever reason. Throughout multiple states, particularly Southern, black women were denied access to welfare programs. The big theme is this racist belief of who did and didn’t deserve aid. In the 1960s, many black people had moved to the North and West where welfare wasn’t as close to them however they were still treated with aversion by local officials. Black women simultaneously were advocating for better treatment and increased benefits. These hostile feelings transition into the Linda Taylor case.

Linda Taylor became a symbol for politicians who wanted to remove welfare programs, one of those politicians being the Californian Governor Ronald Reagan. The Chicago Tribune reported she was quite well off with her having multiple cars and even being able to take vacations to places like Hawaii, but she manipulated the system to get welfare checks and food stamps. She did this by using at least 27 aliases, dozens of addresses, and three Social Security cards.

Reagan used this story often in his speeches on his 1976 campaign trail, exaggerating the degree to which Taylor operated every time by continually making the amount of money she had stolen higher than he previously had. Newspapers began to call her the “Welfare Queen” which became a stereotype that would permeate American politics. Linda Taylor’s story was of course sensationalized. There were far worse activities she was possibly engaging in comparison to welfare fraud, she scammed everyone she met, she posed as a nurse one time, and she was a serial kidnapper. Also while she had become this anti-black stereotype, her own racial identity was unknown; she changed races often as part of her swindling.

Reagan never adds these details to the story he tells since it would emphasize how she was an outlier, not the norm for people in welfare programs. Reagan loses the race but gains a voter base. During his next presidential campaign trail, he still employs the same tactics by talking about Linda Taylor as the Welfare Queen.

When elected Reagan implemented a budget cut to welfare programs which cut spending back by 5.7%, translating to 44 billion dollars. These cuts will disproportionately target the poor, this will target black people who are more likely to be in poverty than their white counterparts. A large percentage of black people will also lose their jobs since the social welfare programs acted as a means to support them in employment as well.

[alibatya]

States’ Rights is an ideology that dictates the right of individual states to oppose the federal government when they think the federal government is encroaching upon them. Thomas Jefferson based it on Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s social contract theory. The idea made it so the country was formed through a union between the United States and the states themselves. Arguments over federal vs state persisted throughout the decades, the most staggering development was in the 1859s and 1860s.

After the Mexican War, the United States had amassed more land in California, Utah, parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming. The hope was for the United States to integrate them without disturbing the balance between slave and free states. The question became if slavery would also be implemented in these new territories. The solution was the Compromise of the 1950s. What this meant was California became a free state, the slave trade was discontinued in Washington, a Fugitive Slave Act was passed, and popular sovereignty was executed to have the people in the other territories vote on slavery.

This agreement did not prevent conflict. The Fugitive Slave Act made it an obligation of free states to work with slave states to ensure the return of the slaves who were in free states’ territory. Another reason was the Scott vs. Sandford Supreme Court trial whereby the ruling was slavery could not be limited to the territories. The irony was the usage of federal law for Southern interests when the notion of states’ rights didn’t serve them. Divided widened further as their sections of North and South cultivated different means of economic production. In the North, there was an industrial revolution whereas in the South it was about slavery for cotton picking.

Southern democrats were fearful of federal opposition to slavery, their response would be states’ rights. Ultimately, this conflict then later between the North and South was always about slavery. Again the contradictions of supposed champions of states’ rights appear through Southern democrats fearing how popular sovereignty could result in voting against slavery which would limit its spread thus hurting them financially. The tension between these groups resulted in a Civil War occurring.

The Civil War started through the Southerners using states’ rights as a way to make Northerners seem like the aggressors, tyrants controlled by slaves who now wanted to enslave the South by impeding on their laws, and in general creating this image of these helpless white people victims. The Civil War ended with the Southerner's defeat at the hands of the Northerners. The aftermath was the myth of the“Lost Cause”, a persistent belief about how the war was about states’ rights and secession.

[alibatya]

Ronald Reagan’s beliefs and practices are deeply rooted in anti-blackness. The Speech in Mississippi, Philadelphia where he cites his past on welfare policy while seemingly not racist on the surface, reveals itself to be once you have the full context of what he has been saying about welfare. Reagan has said welfare is an unnecessary government expenditure for a while now, often using a racist caricature which funnily enough may not even be a black woman and if she was a black woman it would still be an outlier given that Linda Taylor was potentially just a bad person in general. The actions he took when in office systemically hurt black people since many were impoverished so without it exacerbated issues by making many jobless.

This is where Reagan’s states’ rights rhetoric comes from, states’ rights. States’ rights was a dog whistle term used by right-wingers to justify slavery, the connotations of such a phrase still carry on to Reagan using it to target welfare since to him and his supporters black people shouldn’t have this right. Similar to the Southern democrats and slave owners, Reagan and his administration view black people as a commodity for financial exploitation. In the Southern democrat's case, it was explicitly for financial gain through using their bodies to build up profits. In the case of Reagan and his administration, they used black people as figures to champion anti-black stereotypes so they could allocate money elsewhere for their benefit.

States’ rights and Lost Cause ideology make me recall the YouTube video we watched in a class of the white southerners and his “brother” a black man whom he had known his entire because of the impacts slavery still had on their dynamic. The white man was the dominant figure in their relationship going as far as threatening to kill the black man over something he had said to the reporters. He looked at the Civil War with nostalgia, he had a book about it on his shelf which he was proud of. When asked what the war was about I think he believed it wasn’t about slavery. I believe he said something along the lines of states’ rights or something adjacent to it. What we see from all this is this perpetual lack of regard for black people as a result of the federal and state trying to erase them. Not just in economic ways, but also as people as we see in subtle ways here where a remark can mean a threat to a person’s life.