The Ghost of Ronald Reagan

AS PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN visibly aged in office, skin wrinkling and memory fading, his abundant hair remained deep black and glossy—a perennial topic of wonder to gossip columnists and shallow journalists. But late-night TV host Johnny Carson offered a novel explanation: “Reagan doesn’t dye his hair—he bleaches his face.”
Now, if there was anything Ronald Reagan didn’t need, it was whitenizing. The one-time New Deal Democrat and former Screen Actors Guild president had, by the mid-1960s, evolved into the most effective spokesman for white supremacy in postwar years. Through the skillful use of imagery, code words and political action, the Reagan administrations—in both California when he was governor and then in Washington—managed to thwart and even reverse Black aspirations and goals in the United States and in Africa.

Reagan struck a deep chord with whites who felt their position threatened, as well as with others who were simply fearful of Black anger. They wanted an escape from this new, changing America, and Reagan offered it to them. His most famous campaign TV commercial was “It’s Morning in America,” an idyll set in a peaceful, dewy, vaguely pre-integration neighborhood that implied the real America. The fact that such an America never existed made no difference.

Now, if there was anything Ronald Reagan didn’t need, it was whitenizing.

All this would be quaint history were it not for the fact that Reagan, who died in 2004, remains a living icon. Current Republicans can’t mention him often enough. In recent Republican presidential debates, Reagan’s name was reverently invoked 40 times as each candidate sought to claim his crown as leader of the right.

Reagan’s image and his policies remain the inspiration and the blueprint for conservatives today, including John McCain. Despite a genuine Blue Tide that started with the 2006 midterm election and an emboldened movement, every progressive politician and Democratic candidate has to deal with the ghost of Reagan. He initiated aggressive dismantling of both the New Deal–inspired social safety net and government support for racial justice. Congressional conservatives can be expected to continue that course.

The remarkable success of the Obama candidacy to date shows a widespread desire to break out of America’s 400-year racial trap, but the campaign has not been Reagan-free. As this issue of ColorLines went to production in September, political observers were noting that Obama’s run to the White House depended largely on the votes of the so-called Reagan Democrats. Those formerly reliable blue-collar Democratic voters, threatened by social change and Black gains, switched to Reagan in 1980 and continue to vote against their own economic and sociopolitical interests.

Reagan was and remains the embodiment of modern conservatism. Among other things, he managed to advance a strategy of racial containment—paralleling the international doctrine of communist containment—by couching it in social and economic language: welfare, school choice, privatization, personal freedom and responsibility, and, above all, crime. By cloaking these concepts in his benign personality, Reagan used these seemingly race-neutral principles to attack communities of color and the Black community in particular with devastating results. But this has been forgotten by many Americans as Reagan has become an icon for conservatives.

Conservatives have had such a monopoly on his image that few Americans today remember that while running for governor in California in 1966, Reagan promised to dismantle the Fair Housing Act, saying, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.”

And few remember the event that Sidney Blumenthal wrote about in The Guardian in 2003: “After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan traveled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: ‘I believe in states’ rights’.”