But a month later, Ryan still chafes at the assertions that he is a bigot. While he is accustomed to being labeled a granny-killer for his proposal to overhaul Social Security, this was the first time in his career he had been stamped with the scarlet-letter “R.”
“I thought I had been called every name in the book until now,” he says, smiling morbidly. “I know who I am and I know who I’m not. And Barbara does too. She does.” He adds, “If we’re going to get to fixing this problem, we need to allow a good conversation to happen without, you know, throwing baseless charges at people.”
When I ask him if he can understand how some people might have honestly interpreted his comment as a racial dog whistle, he thinks about it.
“Dog whistle… I’d never even heard the phrase before, to be honest with you,” he says. The admission isn’t meant as a dodge, or an excuse. He hails from a state where “diversity” means white people swapping genealogical trivia about their Polish and Norwegian ancestry — his hometown of Janesville, Wis., is 91.7% Caucasian, according to the 2010 census — and he is coming to terms with the fact that he is not equipped with the vocabulary of a liberal arts professor. The fallout from his gaffe has been a “learning experience,” he says, one that he predicts conservatives will have to go through many more times if they are serious about building inroads to the urban poor.
“We have to be cognizant of how people hear things,” he says. “For instance, when I think of ‘inner city,’ I think of everyone. I don’t just think of one race. It doesn’t even occur to me that it could come across as a racial statement, but that’s not the case, apparently… What I learned is that there’s a whole language and history that people are very sensitive to, understandably so. We just have to better understand. You know, we’ll be a little clumsy, but it’s with the right intentions behind it.”
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