Finally, Patricia Williams said it best in a Guardian article in September when she reminded us of the unguarded words of Lee Atwater, former chair of the Republican Party, who explained the strategy of abstraction this way, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced bussing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now
you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. … ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the bussing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger’.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/19/tea-party-language-civil-rights
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