"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 busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger'."
- Republican Strategist Lee Atwater, 1981
"In the end, the Nixon adminstration recognized and legitimated the category of white ethnic but in rhetoric rather than policy. Instead, his policies and rhetoric directed ethnicity down the narrow channel of the politics of resentment. Rather than bringing ethnics into the civil rights coalition by including them in affirmative action programs, Nixon officials capitalized on white ethnics' animosity over the 'special treatment' of blacks."
- Thomas J. Sugrue, John D. Skrentny, "The White Ethnic Strategy." Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s
"The overwhelming majority of (tea party) supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites (my italics) — compared with 11 percent of the general public ."
- "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated" The New York Times, April 14, 2010
