Opinion Paul Ryan’s White Hood

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

What notorious racist said the following? “Fewer young black and Latino men participate in the labor force compared to young white men. And all of this translates into higher unemployment rates and poverty rates as adults.”

“In troubled neighborhoods all across this country—many of them heavily African American—too few of our citizens have role models to guide them.”


“We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households…. We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.”

“We know young black men are twice as likely as young white men to be ‘disconnected’—not in school, not working.”

As you might guess, Paul Ryan said none of these things. Barack Obama did—in heartfelt speeches at a Chicago church in 2008, at Morehouse College in 2013 and at the White House a few weeks ago.

In his instantly notorious interview with radio talk show host Bill Bennett, Ryan discussed fatherlessness and the importance of role models to passing along an example of hard work. “We have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities, in particular,” he said, “of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”

For this offense, Ryan was awarded an honorary white hood by the liberal commentariat. But the broad sentiments are indistinguishable from those of Obama in the statements quoted above—all emphasizing a breakdown of work and the consequences of fatherlessness and social isolation—except Obama’s comments were more explicitly racial.

When Barack Obama says such things, which are undeniably correct, he is a brave truth-teller; when Paul Ryan says them, he is making an odious play for racist votes.

Many of the denunciations of Ryan have simply reflected the left’s well-developed reflex for wanton accusations of racism. But Ryan is so obviously not a bigot that liberal pundits have had to deploy a slightly different argument—that the structural racism of the Republican Party is so deep and pervasive that even a possibly well-meaning politician like Ryan can’t escape its gravitational pull.

Brian Beutler of Salon thinks if Ryan’s comment was intended innocently it is even more damning because “it suggests he, and most likely many other conservatives, has fully internalized a framing of social politics that was deliberately crafted to appeal to white racists.”

Writing in Politico Magazine, Ian Haney Lopez of U.C. Berkeley says, “Suppose we stipulate that Ryan is no bigot. So what? The question is not one of animus on Ryan’s part, but of whether—as a tactical matter—he sought to garner support by indirectly stimulating racial passions.”

Paul Krugman is also in the lack-of-bigotry-is-no-defense camp: “Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time.”

This is all so extravagantly overwrought and strained that it’s hard to know where to begin.

If Ryan was secretly appealing to the subtle racism of Bill Bennett’s radio audience, he stepped on his message immediately. In the next sentence, he said that reversing this social breakdown in our cities is the responsibility of all of us.

“Everybody’s got to get involved,” Ryan said. “You need to get involved yourself – whether through a good mentor program or some religious charity, whatever it is, to make a difference, and that’s how we help resuscitate our culture.” (Note the possessive pronoun: our culture.)

This wasn’t a “dog whistle” to the civic-minded, it was an explicit call to arms to help out in “troubled neighborhoods” (to use Obama’s evidently more palatable formulation). That almost none of Ryan’s attackers had the decency to mention this part of his answer tells you everything you need to know about their credibility.

More evidence of Ryan’s alleged racist dog whistle was his mention of Charles Murray. Murray’s book, The Bell Curve, will forever be controversial for its treatment of race and IQ, but Murray’s latest work, Coming Apart, is about the social and economic struggles of the white working class. Notably, Ryan mentioned in the same breath as Murray the Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam, whose recent work has also focused on class divisions and social isolation.

These are the scholarly name-checks of someone who is thinking about the unraveling of civil society, not how to cozy up to old fans of George Wallace.

Ryan’s critics have a particular hatred for the word “culture,” as if it’s a concept that right-wingers came up with at Heritage Foundation retreat to justify nefarious doings rather than one that is central to understanding how the world works.

In the New York Times several years ago, the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson wrote a column pushing back against the “deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles.” It rejects, he writes, “any explanation that invokes a group’s cultural attributes—its distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members.”

He argued that the economic boom of the 1990s “made it impossible to ignore the effects of culture.” The economy created millions of jobs yet “jobless black youths simply did not turn up to take them. Instead, the opportunity was seized in large part by immigrants—including many blacks—mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean.” Patterson blamed it on “the cool-pose culture” of many young black men.

Fortunately, the highly respected Orlando Patterson is not the Republican chairman of a House committee, or he could never show himself in polite society again.

As for Paul Ryan, he is such a callous dog-whistler that he has been on a tour of urban neighborhoods with the anti-poverty activist Bob Woodson as he formulates a new conservative agenda on poverty.

Ryan wants to reform welfare programs to incentive work and encourage institutions of civil society to fight social breakdown. His antagonists want to pour more money into all the same welfare programs that have failed to address the root causes of poverty for decades. Their ad hominem attack on Ryan signals how desperate they are to rule out of bounds any alternative to the failing status quo.

After his Bennett interview caused a firestorm, Ryan issued a minor clarification saying that he was “inarticulate,” in a good-faith gesture to his critics. He would have been entirely justified in telling them simply to go to hell.