There was an excellent interview on CNN last night by Don Lemon. He interviewed Tim Wise, the author of "White Like Me", on racism and how it relates to welfare and health care legislation and the attitudes of conservative white citizens. The discussion related to the behavior of people at the "town hall" meetings. The interview was on 8/16/09.

Here is a video of the Tim Wise interview.
Whenever we talk about spending on support for people who are the "have nots", there is hostility for social welfare spending that has a racist component.
I could not find it on you tube, but it is available as a CNN video and is posted on this blog:
http://thisweekwithbarackobama.blogspot.com/

Tim Wise wrote this online today, as he of course has been getting responses from that interview last night:

"...Indeed several of the e-mails made this same argument about opposing "government dependence," all the while oblivious, it appears, to the way in which that concept has become so color-coded in the white imagination over the past several decades. In fact, this is a point I had made on the program: that according to a significant body of social science research (among the most prominent, Martin Gilens's brilliant book, Why Americans Hate Welfare), most whites perceive social program spending aimed at helping the have-nots (be they income have-nots, housing have-nots, or health care-have nots) as being about giving something to those people, who are, of course, conceived of in black and brown terms, and taking from "hard-working" white folks in order to do it. So if the notion of government dependence itself has been racialized--and the evidence says it has been--to say that it is only this dependence you oppose, and that racism has nothing to do with it is to either lie or engage in self-deception of a most unfortunate and unbecoming variety.." Tim Wise


Alice