Reagan’s national ‘we’ implicitly constructed Americans as white

Evidence

Reagan’s remarks in the Rose Garden also subtly reaffirmed the idea of the American people as white. When he said, “we Americans recognized a grave injustice” and corrected it, who are the “we” here? After all, black people had recognized the injustice a long time before Dr. King showed up. And as governor of California, Reagan was on the front lines resisting the demands of the black freedom struggle. Was his “we” the “silent majority” of the southern strategy—those who felt overrun by the demands of the civil rights movement? — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 293

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the value gap operating in rhetorical form — the exclusion of Black America from the presumed national subject. — connects to: Reagan used racially coded language that racists understood without spelling out — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 148