The tax revolt used coded racism against poor black people as its base

Evidence

Tax revolt spread rapidly as a national movement. This was a delicious dish for the Republican Party to serve in the suburbs, since it focused (white) popular resentment on poor people, which in the national popular culture meant black people (Lo 1995; for a more sanguine assessment of Prop. 13, see Citrin 2009). Ever in search of a mass base for regressive redistribution of resources and curtailment of social expenditure, Republicans linked Prop. 13 and its successors to the new “political whiteness” that they had been practicing in California since the late 1940s (HoSang 2010). — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the vault’s racial-formation anchor and mirrors claims about dog-whistle politics and the Southern Strategy.