There is a lazy racism that takes place in the United States in periods of plenty, but especially in periods of difficulty. The poster above is from postbellum America, almost certainly during the term of President Andrew Johnson (1865-1869), at war with the so-called “Radical” Republicans in Congress.
Redlining started in the 1930s or earlier and continued in post-World War II America, when many black veterans couldn’t take full advantage of the GI Bill.
A recent example, as laid out by Renée Graham in the Boston Globe (paywall likely) in early November 2025, about how FOTUS’s “government shutdown is fueling anti-Black propaganda.”
The subhead: “Under the boot of an administration that would rather foment racism than end its manufactured crisis, the authoritarian president is willing to let millions of real people — regardless of race — starve.”
Early in the shutdown, “social media was suddenly inundated with AI slop, videos generated by artificial intelligence, depicting Black people complaining about the loss of federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.
“Of course, the short clips on TikTok and Instagram evoked the ‘welfare queen’ stereotypes that Ronald Reagan first conjured nearly 50 years ago during his first race-baiting run for president in 1976.”
“A Fox News contributor… showed a slew of AI slop… introduced by saying that the clips would show ‘exactly why the welfare system needs to be completely overhauled because the entitlement in these videos … is certifiably insane.'”
The influencer “either didn’t know — or didn’t care — that some of the videos… are phony… The clips served their intended purpose of villainizing Black people, particularly Black women, as lazy, greedy, duplicitous, and a burden to hard-working and honest (white) Americans.” The misogynoir is strong.
“Them”
Then there’s this story from the same time period about “a viral chart [that] claimed to show the majority of the nation’s food stamp recipients are non-white and noncitizens.
“The chart, titled Food Stamps by Ethnicity, listed 36 groups of people and said it showed the “percentage of US households receiving SNAP benefits.”
However, according to “the most recent USDA data available, from 2023, white people are the largest racial group receiving SNAP benefits, at 35.4 percent. African Americans are next, making up 25.7 percent of recipients, then Hispanic people at 15.6 percent, Asian people at 3.9 percent, Native Americans at 1.3 percent, and multiracial people at 1 percent. The race of 17 percent of participants is unknown.”
“The same report found that 89.4 percent of SNAP recipients were U.S.-born citizens, meaning less than 11 percent of SNAP participants were foreign-born. Of the latter figure, 6.2 percent were naturalised citizens, 1.1 percent were refugees, and 3.3 percent were other noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents and other eligible noncitizens.”
In periods of stress, blaming the “other” for the difficulties seems to be the fallback position.
Power
Read Black History Has the Power to Ignite Movements. That’s Why the Right Fears It. “In a perverse kind of trickle-down racism, his attack on Black Lives Matter became a permission structure for increased on-the-ground bigotry. White influencers proudly wore blackface for Halloween. Politico exposed a Young Republicans’ chat where they gleefully traded racist comments.
“Black comedian W. Kamau Bell has painted a portrait of a right-wing shift in standup performances in which anti-trans jokes and anti-Black slurs have become commonplace. This is not a series of isolated events: FBI statistics on anti-Black hate crime, consistently the most common form of hate crime, spiked during his two terms.”
At the end of 2025, 
The Kennedy Center Honors 2025 took place on Sunday, December 7. As people who follow the blog may know, I almost always watch the program when it’s broadcast on CBS; this year it’s scheduled for Tuesday, December 23. This year, though, is…