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News and Views: Pat Buchanan; The Master of Coded Racism.
Pat Buchanan is gone for now as a presidential candidate, but his disguised racial rhetoric lives on.
Pick up your telephone and dial up the Michigan White Unity Hotline and you will get all the explicit racism that you want: "Are you fed up with the demands of lazy niggers? How about niggers winning beauty pageants and dating your children? Are you fed up with niggers being held up as heroes and role models for your children?" If you prefer, call up any one of the dozens of white supremacist home pages on the World Wide Web. On these sites the racism is not in code, it's in your face.
A second form of racism is coded racism. A person using coded racism attacks a racial group in such a way that you can take credit for racism with bigoted voters and at the same time hold on to other voters by denying that you ever made a racist charge. Prior to World War II, few blacks were registered to vote and acts of bigotry did not upset most white voters. There was little need for politicians to engage in the practice of coded racism. A racial bigot was free to speak his mind without fear of political damage. But after blacks began to vote in significant...