Racism then and now

I have been traveling quite a bit lately which means I get to eat a lot of bad food and read long books, the bad food, not so great, the long book has been nixonland. According to the book Nixon was able to exploit racial tensions to convince whites it was OK for them to be racist and if they didn’t vote for him their pleasant suburbs would be over-run with dark people. Later Reagan used the same strategy when he argued that welfare moms were living the high life at the expense of hard working whites. Most recentely we keep hearing that undocumented workers are going to take all the jobs and sell drugs and murder all us good white folk; and if you believe Lou Dobbs the undocumented workers will give us Leprosy as well.
Certain yackers are still trying to exploit the racial divide the problem is their are not enough scared white people to make it work, and perhaps their are less scary brown people. The most recent attempt to get people scared of mexican immigrants probably fell somewhat flat because it is hard to be scared of the people who mow your lawn or work at the local McDonalds.