Carter’s austerity worsened Black economic conditions, fueling scapegoating of Black politicians

Evidence

Gerald Ford used every bit of his presidential incumbent power to narrowly stave off Ronald Reagan’s challenge at the 1976 Republican National Convention. But Nixon’s pardoner and the steward of a poor economy lost to the “untainted” and unknown former Democratic governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Black hopes were high until the austere Carter administration, to boost the economy, started unprecedented cuts in social welfare, health care, and educational programs while increasing military spending. From the lowest Black poverty rate in US history in 1973, the decade ended with record unemployment rates, inflation, falling wages, rising Black poverty rates, and increasing inequality. At the local level, struggling activists and residents partially or totally blamed corporate-friendly Black politicians for the growing poverty. There was supposedly something wrong with Black politicians. Unsurprisingly, no one ever uncovered any evidence to substantiate this political racism of Black politicians. Black politicians and the Black elites they largely served were hardly different from the politicians and elites of other races, selling out to the highest bidders or sticking to their antiracist and/or racist principles. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1062

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s concern that well-meaning (Carter, ‘untainted’) centrists still drive policies that hurt Black people — an assimilationist-style blindness in a Democrat, reinforcing the discomfort that assimilationism is a racist position.