Was Ronald Reagan racist?
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Politics, Intersectionality, Life, Race, Racism

His right-wing biographers rushed forward to assure that this was utterly out-of-character for their hero. It was a “a crude racist comment in a private conversation,” says biographer Steven Hayward, by way of dismissing the “monkey” business.

Actually, though, Nixon and Reagan were politicians on the job, talking national policy.

“It’s so out of the norm that I find it hard to believe,” says Paul Kengor in an article headlined: “A single mistake does not a racist make.”

His daughter, Patti Davis, stepped forward to defend him: “In fact, when I was growing up, bigotry and racism were addressed in my family by making it clear that these were toxic and sinister beliefs that should always be called out and shunned. I can’t tell you about the man who was on the phone with Richard Nixon that day in 1971. He’s not a man I knew.”

It’s like a moment of seeing a glitch in the Matrix, and you realize you’re living in an illusion. And it wasn’t a “mistake.” It was a lifetime.

To try and figure out if a president was racist or not is usually to try and figure out HOW racist.

JFK wasn’t too bad, though he did refuse to let Sammy Davis, Jr., perform at his inauguration. LBJ used the n-word every five seconds and leaves a colorful record of stories like telling his black chauffeur: “Just pretend you’re a goddamn piece of furniture.”

Reagan seemed mostly not-racist, and that’s been his reputation among right-wing people. It was carefully cultivated by himself. And it was always a prompt to look closer.

In a debate for his first campaign to become California’s governor, in 1967, he found himself accused of racism, and exclaimed: “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature!”

But then the same man jokes about Africans as “monkeys”?

“I’ve lived a long time,” he tells the National Council of Negro Women at the White House in July 1983, “but I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t believe that prejudice and bigotry were the worst of sins.”

In his 1980 presidential debate with Carter, Reagan says: “I happen to believe that we’ve made great progress from the days when I was young and when this country didn’t even know it had a racial problem.”

No doubt he, and his parents, didn’t care for open displays of racism.

But neither would they instigate conversations, investigations, or scenes. And when you get him in private, when he thinks he’s not overheard, you never know what he’ll say.

To look at his whole career of being supposedly so anti-racist, you see a lot of nothing. In his movie career he never had any black (or non-white) co-stars, and never did any “message” films. Then Bedtime for Bonzo, a film with Reagan starring as a psychologist who tries to teach manners to a chimpanzee, has odd insinuations. Johnny Carson would say it was “a favorite of old movie buffs and Democrats.”

For Carson (a Republican), that’s a joke about it being racist.

In his political career Reagan avoided talk of race whenever he could. “Reagan’s speeches tended to avoid race or to point out ways in which legislative efforts to expand civil rights were misguided if well-intentioned,” says historian Jeremy D. Mayer in a detailed essay on Reagan and race in Deconstructing Reagan (2007).

He adds: “Devoid of prejudice (or at least believing himself to be), he argued throughout his career that government efforts to ameliorate racial prejudice were at best far inferior to personal efforts to change hearts. In this way, Reagan was the first prophet of Republican color blindness on race.”

Could that have been a mask over a wish to do nothing on race? To keep everything as it was? The “monkey” comment to Nixon then begins to expose a long theater of being anti-racist, an actor’s game in which the mask was always slightly revealing.

In the “monkey” remark, Reagan is siding with Darwinism.

Let’s reflect on his September 1980 meeting with conservative Christian leaders, where he emphasized his belief in Creationism. If Reagan the Creationist was secretly thinking people of African descent were barely to the point of wearing shoes, I wonder how many “Christian” people were also secret Darwinists?

At least where black people were concerned.

Christians were overjoyed to get the White House back, and America again became God’s country. That would be a land in which the black underclass was the lowest level of hell. The inner city was regularly called a “jungle.” But this white establishment didn’t want violence. Reagan was the expert veneer.

If there’d been racial progress—Republican, after all, was Lincoln’s party—it seems to have ground to a halt, as Democrats picked up the anti-racist banner, pointing out the palpable racism that Reagan kept churning out.

In his 1976 presidential campaign he’d speak of the Chicago “welfare queen” with 80 names, 12 social security cards, driving a Cadillac and collecting government benefits from four non-existent dead husbands.

In his first inaugural address, he referred to the “strapping young buck” who’d buy T-bone steaks with food stamps.

And then there was Reagan killing off anti-racist fervor among conservatives. Mayer explains:

More than any other political figure, Reagan was responsible for the defeat of the forces of civil rights within the Republican Party. In 1964–1965, Republicans were more positive toward civil rights for blacks than was the average Democrat. By the time of the Reagan revolution, while most Republicans, unlike Reagan, accepted the broad achievements and worth of the civil rights movement, the civil rights wing of the Republican Party was largely dead . . .

Reagan would talk up racial harmony, but then it stopped. Mayer says: “No racial issue ever approached the core of Reagan’s agenda. For Reagan, racial issues were most prominent on the campaign trail, not in office.”

And when Reagan was gone? “The man from Dixon who believed that he was absolutely innocent of an iota of prejudice against blacks left behind a party that was almost incorrigibly white.”