Politicians framed the LA rebellion as a values failure, not a poverty response

Evidence

To Vice President Dan Quayle, however, the rebels were not rebelling from economic poverty, but a “poverty of values.” The New Democrat Bill Clinton blamed both political parties for failing urban America before blasting the “savage behavior” of “lawless vandals” who “do not share our values,” whose “children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without families, without neighborhood, without church, without support.” On Clinton’s racist note, Columbia University researchers began a five-year research study of only Black and Latino boys in New York to search for a connection between genetics and bad parenting and violence. (They did not find any connection.) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1123

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s core project of placement — this is clean segregationist/assimilationist rhetoric (values/biology framing) that Kendi would classify as racist idea-formation after the policy event.
• SEED: The Columbia study (no connection found) is a vivid example for an essay on how racist research questions get funded by political panic.