Reply to Was Paul Ryan's remark inarticulate or racist?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Jamelle Bouie is excellent on this (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/12/what-paul-ryan-gets-wrong-about-inner-city-poverty.html):

"Our realities are shaped by a mutually reinforcing matrix of culture, civil society, law, and individual choice (among other things). If America has a “car culture,” it has as much to do with our rugged sense of individualism as it does with our sprawling geography, and a government that made highways an essential part of our transportation infrastructure. To look at our attachment to cars and proclaim “culture” is to miss most of the story....

The same goes for Ryan and poverty. Inner-city poverty didn’t just happen, it was built. It’s the job of a policymaker to understand the full scope of what that means, from the blueprints of past policies, to their implementation, to the forces that drove the issues to begin with. And in the case of urban poverty, the issue was racism."

Also, as someone who grew up amid the poor, uneducated white people of Appalachia, I'd like to see some attention to the "culture problem" there. Multi-generational poverty, domestic abuse, rampant drug abuse, terrible schools, high teenage birth rate, hopelessness--everything Paul Ryan and his type decry in urban black populations. So is that a "culture problem," Paul Ryan? Somehow I suspect he'd be quick to blame the loss of manufacturing jobs instead.[/quote]

Thanks for the link--Jamelle Bouie is usually worth a read.  And I think it's on the nose.  "Urban" and "inner city" have been racist dogwhistles for a long time now, and I don't doubt that Ryan meant "black people" when he said "inner city."  But even if it wasn't explicit racism, it's an oversimplification of a complex problem.  What jobs are available for these black men to get?  Does their education prepare them for these jobs?  Does he think the problem with the rural white poor is that they just don't want to work?  [/quote]

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