There is a good piece in yesterday’s Washington Post by professor Gerard Alexandre of the University of Virginia. The article debunks the idea that conservatives are racist. Starts by tracing the endurance of the conservatives’ s bad reputation on racial issues to a few policy positions:

As Dan Carter, George Wallace’s biographer, put it, “The Wallace music played on” in “Barry Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon’s subtle manipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan’s genial demolition of affirmative action, in George Bush’s use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich’s demonization of welfare mothers.” More recently, it continues through inflammatory campaign ads (“Harold, call me!”), offensive tea party signs, Rand Paul’s unusual-because-explicit skepticism about the Civil Rights Act — all the way to calls to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants and to keep Muslim worship well away from the nation’s hallowed ground in Lower Manhattan. In this interpretation, core conservative principles — limited government, tax cuts, welfare reform and toughness on crime — actually have race at their heart.

Alexander then goes on to explain why these assumptions are badly flawed. First, he argues that the “GOP presidential majority and much of the party’s modern policy agenda were forged not in the racial heat of the 1960s South, but first in the 1950s and across the country.” also, he notes that Nixon’s accommodation to white Southerners was more symbolic than substantive. That’s why, in 1972-72, “a large number of white Southern voters preferred Wallace to Nixon. Only when the Alabaman was shot in May 1972 did Nixon inherit Wallace’s voters — not because of Nixon’s policies on race but despite them.” As for the end of Welfare programs, Alexander rightfully explains how many of the policies are hurting, rather than helping, minorities:

These policy positions remain central to the conservative domestic agenda, but calling them racist, the third assumption, presumes something very strange: that conservatives do not mean what they say about them. Welfare reform is deliberately anti-black (or anti-minority or anti-poor) only if conservatives secretly believe that welfare actually does help its beneficiaries and are being deceitful when they argue that long-term dependency devastates inner-city communities. Tax cuts are part of a racist agenda only if conservatives do not believe that lower taxes will enhance economic growth and social mobility for all. Conservative opposition to raising the minimum wage is anti-poor only if free-marketeers are feigning concern that increases will price less-skilled people out of the workforce (as when Milton Friedman called the minimum wage “one of the most . . . anti-black laws on the statute books”) and secretly agree with liberals that increases will benefit the working poor over the long term.

He concludes:

There is no doubt that the contemporary Republican electorate contains some out-and-out bigots, just as the Democratic electorate contains people who hate others on the basis of class. These very real prejudices occasionally erupt into public expression, whether in remarks about Jews over the years by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton or in shocking signs at tea party rallies.
But most conservatives have been less concerned with the “hardware” of people’s race or ethnicity and more concerned with the “software” of their values or culture. This is why the white Protestant core of the modern conservative movement has not merely integrated Catholic “ethnics” but also rallied behind the Irish American William F. Buckley and the Italian American Antonin Scalia. Jews, women and Hispanics have been similarly integrated into both its ranks and leadership; indeed, many white conservatives swoon when members of minority groups proudly share their values.

I am not totally convinced by his representation of the motives behind conservatives’ positions on the Arizona Law and the near-ground zero mosque. To be sure, on both these issues, some conservatives are exclusively driven by their dedication to law enforcement and by an assumption that “the insensitivity of [the mosque] architects to 9/11′s emotional legacy suggests their deeper distance from American sensibilities.” But what share of conservatives does this rational apply to?

That being said, I have tremendous respect for Alexander’s scholarship on this topic, while recognizing my ignorance, so I am willing to take his word for it.

The whole thing is here.