As most politically aware people know, Paul Ryan recently blamed inner city poverty on “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working”. It has been pointed out, entirely fairly, that this is a clear signal to the racists in his party that Paul Ryan is on their side.
It is not often that I disagree with Paul Krugman, not being an economist, but I disagree with this statement from this morning's column about Ryan's statement:
Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.
via the New York Times
This is a very common trope among the punditocracy. When a politician (almost always a Republican) says something racist, or designed to appeal to racists, the pundits may condemn the statement, but often add a caveat to the effect, as Krugman does here, that there is no evidence that the speaker “is personally a racist”.
We'll, I'm not an economist, but I am a lawyer, and I say there is evidence that Ryan is a racist.
Krugman appears to be saying that we don't know what is in Ryan's heart of hearts, and unless we did, we cannot know whether or not he is a racist. That may be true on some sort of theoretical level, but it's not true in real life.
We can't listen in on someone's thoughts, or know what is in his heart of hearts. Only the mythical God can do that. The only “evidence” available to us to judge whether a person is a racist is his or her words, and his or her actions. While it is quite true that a person may say one thing and believe another, it is nonetheless also true that a person's words are one of the only two classes of evidence that we have to make a judgment on this, or any, issue.
So, do we have evidence that Ryan is a “personally a racist”? Yes, we do, right from his mouth, for he endorsed what is by any measure a racist canard. Does this prove he is a racist, either by a preponderance of the evidence (the civil standard) or beyond a reasonable doubt (the criminal standard)? Well, if, in a court of law, the question of whether a person was a racist were before a judge or a jury, this statment, standing alone, might not carrry the day, but it would certainly be admissible as evidence against Ryan. If you verbalize agreement with racist statements (Ryan also endorsed the views of the racist Charles Murray), then there is evidence that you are a racist. At some point, the burden shifts. Has the burden shifted to Ryan to prove he is not a racist? I'd say that since this is just the latest in a series of coded statements, that it most certainly has.
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