Reagan built welfare-fraud narratives to tap white backlash, not reflect reality

Evidence

IRONICALLY, IT WAS a former Hollywood star who came to embody Rocky Balboa in real life; and at the same time, to embody the racist backlash to Black Power in politics. This real-life Rocky decided to challenge incumbent Gerald Ford for the presidential seat on the Republican ticket in 1976. Reagan fought down all those empowerment movements fomenting in his home state of California and across the nation. Hardly any other Republican politician could match his law-and-order credentials, and hardly any other Republican politician was more despised by antiracists. When Reagan had first campaigned for governor of California in 1966, he had pledged “to send the welfare bums back to work.” By 1976, he had advanced his fictional welfare problem enough to attract Nixon’s undercover racists to his candidacy, gaining their support in cutting the social programs that helped the poor. On the presidential campaign trail, Reagan shared the story of Chicago’s Linda Taylor, a Black woman charged with welfare fraud. “Her tax-free cash income is over 150,000," Reagan liked to say. Actually, Taylor had been charged with defrauding the state of 8,000, an exceptional amount for something that rarely happened. But truth did not matter to the Reagan campaign as much as feeding the White backlash to Black Power. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1061

Categorization

• XREF: Classic Kendi causal inversion: the self-interested policy coalition (cutting social programs, courting Nixon’s racists) produces the racist ‘welfare queen’ narrative after the fact — precisely the ignorance→hate→discrimination reversal the reader is testing. The Linda Taylor exaggeration (8,000 vs. claimed 150,000) is the mechanism in miniature. — connects to: Desensitizing noir realism served to naturalize the corrupt Reagan-era order — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 28; Reagan used racially coded language that racists understood without spelling out — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 148
• QUESTION: Worth testing: does the welfare-queen myth fit Kendi’s claim that racist policies precede racist ideas, or did preexisting racist tropes about Black laziness make the narrative legible first? Taylor’s actual fraud occurred, so ideas and policy here appear entangled.