How Racism Caused The Shutdown
Posted by Michelle Moquin on October 12th, 2013
Good morning!
Mike,TM: Super interesting read. And more than interesting, it is scary. But I am not surprised. at. all. I have no doubt that Anonz will show his mastery in dealing with this coup, if he hasn’t already. I don’t know what this world would do without Anonz to stop this fringe madness that seems to be the normal lately. President Obama is working on doing what is best for all in our country, and the ruthless repubs are doing whatever they can to stop him. The best and worst of forces are fighting. I HOPE Anonz is out for blood. This is just sickening.
Your comment also answered a few of my questions. I was watching the Rachel Maddow Show last night, and the segment was about the U.S. Nuclear Forces, and the top leaders who were ousted. It seems you know the real deal behind those resignations and firings. I look forward to you sharing more of your findings. Thanks for being here and helping to keep me and my readers informed on the latest. I HOPE you are doing well.
This inspires me to post this write from Think Progress, this morning:
How Racism Caused The Shutdown
BY ZACK BEAUCHAMP ON OCTOBER 9, 2013 AT 9:00 AM
This isn’t an article about how Republicans shut down the government because they hate that the President is black. This is an article about how racism caused the government to shut down and the U.S. to teeter on the brink of an unprecedented and catastrophic default.
I understand if you’re confused. A lot of people think the only way that racism “causes” anything is when one person intentionally discriminates against another because of their color of their skin. But that’s wrong. And understanding the history of the forces that produced the current crisis will lay plain the more subtle, but fundamental, ways in which race and racism formed the scaffolding that structures American politics — even as explicit battles over race receded from our daily politics.
The roots of the current crisis began with the New Deal — but not in the way you might think. They grew gradually, with two big bursts in the 1960s and the 1980s reflecting decades of more graduated change. And the tree that grew out of them, the Tea Party and a radically polarized Republican Party, bore the shutdown as its fruits.
How The New Deal Drove The Racists Out
In 1938, Sen. Josiah W. Bailey (D-NC) filibustered his own party’s bill. Well, part of his party — Northern Democrats, together with Northern Republicans, were pushing an federal anti-lynching bill. Bailey promised that Southern Democrats would teach “a lesson which no political party will ever again forget” to their Northern co-partisans if they “come down to North Carolina and try to impose your will upon us about the Negro:”
Just as when the Republicans in the [1860s] undertook to impose the national will upon us with respect to the Negro, we resented it and hated that party with a hatred that has outlasted generations; we hated it beyond measure; we hated it more than was right for us and more than was just; we hated it because of what it had done to us, because of the wrong it undertook to put upon us; and just as that same policy destroyed the hope of the Republican party in the South, that same policy adopted by the Democratic party will destroy the Democratic party in the South.
Bailey’s rage at the affront to white supremacy was born of surprise. Until 1932, the South had dominated the Democratic Party, which had consistently stood for the South’s key regional regional interest — keeping blacks in literal or figurative fetters — since before the Civil War.
But the Depression-caused backlash against Republican incumbents that swept New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt into the White House and a vast Democratic majority into Congress also made Southerners a minority in the party for the first time in its history. The South still controlled the most influential committee leadership votes in Congress, exercising a “Southern Veto” on race policy. The veto forced FDR to stay out of the anti-lynching fight (“If I come out for the anti-lynching bill, [the southerners] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing,” he lamented).
The veto also injected racism into the New Deal. Social Security was “established on a racially invidious, albeit officially race-neutral, basis by excluding from coverage agricultural and domestic workers, the categories that included nearly 90 percent of black workers at the time,” University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed Jr.wrote in The Nation. “Others, like the [Civilian Conservation Corps], operated on Jim Crow principles. Roosevelt’s housing policy put the weight of federal support behind creating and reproducing an overtly racially exclusive residential housing industry.”
Yet, Reed notes, the New Deal not only benefited blacks, but brought them to a position of power in the Democratic Party. “The Social Security exclusions were overturned, and black people did participate in the WPA, Federal Writers’ Project, CCC and other classic New Deal initiatives, as well as federal income relief,” he reminds us. “Black Americans’ emergence as a significant constituency in the Democratic electoral coalition helped to alter the party’s center of gravity and was one of the factors–as was black presence in the union movement–contributing to the success of the postwar civil rights insurgency.”
Hard evidence of the Northern Democrats’ radicalization on civil rights, outflanking the GOP, can be found by the early 1940s. UC-Berkeley’s Eric Schickler and coauthor Brian Feinstein built a database of state party platforms from 1920-1968 and examined their positions on African-American rights. They found that “the vast majority of nonsouthern state Democratic parties were clearly to the left of their GOP counterparts on civil rights policy by the mid-1940s to early 1950s.” African-Americans and other sympathetic New Deal Coalition constituencies, like Jews and union leaders, deserve the bulk of the credit — these new Northern Democrats made supporting civil rights a litmus test for elected Democratic officials. That explains why, from the Early New Deal forward, congressional Northern Democrats voted more like Northern Republicans than their Southern brethren on civil rights.
Schickler and Feinstein pair the shift on civil rights to the parties’ broader post-New Deal ideological shifts. New Deal liberalism’s vehement support for government intervention in the economy made Democrats more open to the sorts of intrusive economic regulations, like desegregating private businesses, that civil rights campaigners demanded. Meanwhile, “the GOP’s ties with chambers of commerce, manufacturers’ associations, real estate groups, farm lobbies, and other organizations opposed to the increased government oversight of private enterprise that would come with fair employment and other civil rights legislation encouraged the GOP’s drift toward racial conservatism.” As Speaker of the House Joe Martin (R-MA) told an assembly of black Republicans in 1947:
I’ll be frank with you: we are not going to pass a [non-discrimination in private business bill], but it has nothing to do with the Negro vote. We are supported by New England and Middle Western industrialists who would stop their contributions if we passed a law that would compel them to stop religious as well as racial discrimination in employment.
Republican economic libertarianism, together with its gradual embrace of traditionally Southern “states rights” arguments to as weapons in the war on the New Deal, set the stage for the eventual white flight from the Democratic Party.
And Southern Democrats, without whose votes the New Deal never could have happened, were willing to sacrifice their commitment to economic liberalism on the altar of white supremacy. Historian Ira Katznelson, whose 2013 work Fear Itself focuses on the role of Southern Democrats in the New Deal, analyzed Congressional votes from 1933 to 1950 to better understand the political alliances of the time. Katznelson and his coauthors focus on the votes of Southern Democrats on six issues: “planning, regulation, expansive fiscal policies, welfare state programs, a national labor market and union prerogatives, and civil rights.”
The Southerners, as Democrats, strongly supported the first four, but bucked the Northern wing of the party on the last two. But why labor in addition to civil rights? Katznelson et al. find a precipitous dropoff in Southern support for pro-labor laws during World War II, one of the two key reasons being that “wartime labor shortages and military conscription facilitated labor organizing and civil rights activism.” “Labor market and race relations rends and issues,” they found, had become “conjoined.” For Southern Democrats, racism trumped liberalism.
Hence the famous Dixiecrat revolt of 1948, when Strom Thurmond and likeminded Southerners temporarily seceded from the Democratic Party over Harry Truman and the Democratic platform’s support for civil rights. The tacit bargain that Katznelson documents during the Roosevelt Administration, in which the Northern Democrats would get their New Deal if the Southern Democrats got their white supremacy, became untenable.
But the Dixiecrats weren’t ready to migrate en masse to Party of Lincoln just yet. Something needed to happen to make the Republican Party shed its commitment to leading on civil rights wholesale. That “something” was the rise of the modern conservative movement.
‘The Great White Switch’
Earl Black and Merle Black are twin brothers. Both are political scientists at (respectively) Rice and Emory University. The twins, frequent coauthors, are widely considered to be the deans of the study of Southern politics.
In their book The Rise of the Southern Republicans, the Blacks pinpoint two key transition points for Southern whites when the trends we’ve already seen produced truly marked change. By the 1950s, the splits between Northern and Southern Democrats in Congress had become irreconcilable. The party’s leadership was “refusing to call party meetings” for fear of catastrophe.
The Southern Democrats had to form alliances with the more conservative wing of the Republican Party. In a reverse replay of the South’s deal with Roosevelt and Northern Democrats, the Blacks found, Southern Democrats helped Republicans fight Truman’s economic policy while Republicans protected the Southern right to filibuster, allowing them to retard progress on civil rights without alienating black voters by voting against any particular piece of civil rights legislation. This “Inner Club” of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans “informally set the limits on passable legislation.”
But it wasn’t until Barry Goldwater and the rise of the modern conservative movement that this marriage was formally consummated. Goldwater lost all but six states — Arizona, his home, and five Deep South states. It was the first time the GOP had prevailed at the presidential level in the South in the party’s history. Republicans have held the South since.
Goldwater, a Sun Belt Senator who believed in integration, seemed like an odd choice to inspire Southerners to leave LBJ, a Texan with a storied racist past. But that surface level-analysis entirely misses the role of the Goldwater-led conservative movement in the Southern imagination.
By the Johnson-Goldwater election, it had become clear that overt racism and segregationism was politically doomed. Brown v. Board of Education and LBJ’s support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act saw to that. As this scary recognition dawned on Southern whites, they began searching for a new vehicle through which to shield themselves and their communities from the consequences of integration. The young conservative movement’s ringing endorsement of a minimalist federal government did the trick — it provided an on-face racially neutral language by which Southerners could argue against federal action aimed at integrating lily-white schools and neighborhoods.
Kevin Kruse, a Princeton historian whose work focuses on the South and the conservative movement, finds deep roots in segregationist thought for this turn. “In their own minds, segregationists were instead fightingfor rights of their own,” Kruse suggests. These “rights” included “the ‘right’ to select their neighbors, their employees, and their children’s classmates, the ‘right’ to do as they pleased with their private property and personal businesses, and, perhaps, most important, the ‘right’ to remain free from what they saw as dangerous encroachments by the federal government.”
Kruse traces this language through white resistance to desegregation from the 40s through the 60s, using a detailed examination of “white flight” in Atlanta as a synecdoche. In the end, he finds, “the struggle over segregation thoroughly reshaped southern conservatism…segregationist resistance inspired the creation of new conservative causes, such as tuition vouchers, the tax revolt, and the privatization of public services.” The concomitant rise of the modern conservative movement and the civil rights movements’ victories conspired to make Southern whites into economic, and not just racial, conservatives.
Kruse’s theory isn’t based on mere anecdote. M. V. Hood, III, Quentin Kidd, and Irwin L. Morris’ book The Rational Southerner arrays a battery of statistical evidence correlating Southern whites’ Republican turn with black voter mobilization. The more politically active blacks became, their data suggest, the more whites flocked to conservative Republicans as a counter.
So from 1964 on, conservative white Southerners voted against Democrats at the presidential level. But the en masse formal switch in party identification until Reagan. “Reagan’s presidency,” Merle and Earl Black write, “was the turning point in the evolution of a competitive, two-party electorate in the South. The Reagan realignment of the 1980s dramatically expanded the number of Republicans and conservative independents in the region’s electorate.” The Blacks attribute this to a combination of Reagan’s winning political personality and (more persuasively) the relative prosperity of the 1980s. Not only were white conservatives ideologically inclined to support Reagan’s Republican Party, but they became wealthier on his watch.
Reagan-era conservatism also left behind the naked racism that had driven Southern Democrats out of the party, which the civil rights movement had rendered unacceptable. By 1983, even Strom Thurmond, the former Dixiecrat candidate for President, voted to make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. Reagan-era conservatism, while hardly above race-baiting, became far more about foreign policy hawkishness, Christian-right style social conservatism, and — most importantly for present purposes — free market economics.
The South’s conversion to movement conservatism led to local and Congressional Republican victories throughout Dixie. These culminated in the Gingrich Revolution in 1994, when hard-line Southern conservatives took charge of the Republican Congressional delegation, seemingly for good.
Sen. Bailey’s prediction had finally come true. The Democrats’ about-face on race cost them the South.
The Legacy Of The Democratic South’s Rebellion: The Tea Party
We all know what happens next. The Southern conservative takeover of the Republican Party pushes out moderates, cementing the party’s conservative spiral. This trend produces the Tea Party, whose leading contemporary avatar — Ted Cruz — engineers the 2013 shutdown and risk of catastrophic default.
So we can draw a tentatively straight line between the last 80 years of racial politics and this week’s political crisis. Aside from being an interesting point of history, what does that tell us?
First, that the shutdown crisis isn’t the product of passing Republican insanity or, as President Obama put it, a “fever” that needs to be broken. Rather, the sharp conservative turn of the Republican Party is the product of deep, long-running structural forces in American history. The Republican Party is the way that it is because of the base that it has evolved, and it would take a tectonic political shift — on the level of the Democrats becoming the party of civil rights — to change the party’s internal coalition. Radicalized conservatism will outlive the shutdown/debt ceiling fight.
Second, and more importantly, the battle over civil rights produced a rigidly homogenous and disproportionately Southern Republican party, fertile grounds for the sort of purity contest you see consuming the South today. There’s no zealot like a new convert, the saying goes, and the South’s new faith in across-the-board conservatism — kicked off by the alignment of economic libertarianism with segregationism — is one of the most significant causes of the ideological inflexibility that’s caused the shutdown.
That’s not to dismiss the continued relevance of race in the Southern psyche. There’s no chance that, when 52 percent of voting Americans are over 45, the country has just gotten over its deep racial hang-ups. Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ masterful “Fear of a Black President” if you don’t believe me.
Naturally, the South remains Ground Zero. One 2005 study thatmeasured racial animus found that Southern whites were “more racially conservative than whites elsewhere on every measure of racial attitudes ordinarily used in national surveys.” And Obamacare is a racially polarized issue. Brown University’s Michael Tesler found, in 2010, that there was an astonishing 20 point higher racial gap on health policy in 2009 than there was in the early 90s. In Tesler’s experiments, subjects’ responses to statements about health policy were “significantly more racialized” when the statement was attributed to President Obama than President Clinton.
So it’d be implausible, to put it mildly, to say that modern racism has nothing to do with the shutdown fight. That being said, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what its role is, and it’d be overly simplistic to reduce the whole shebang to racial animus. One of historical racism’s many political children — our right-polarized South — has to play an important role, one that’s independent of ongoing racial prejudice.
The basic idea goes something like this. Southern white flight from the Democratic Party, motivated as it was by the compatibility of purist economic libertarianism with de facto segregation, produced especially conservative Republicans. This hardline opposition to intervention in the marketplace survived the death of open segregationism, and as Southerners became more and more critical to the Party’s national fortunes, their brand of libertarianism gradually began to dictate the party’s ideological agenda. Primaries enforced the party line nationally, driving out moderate non-Southern Republicans and making the party’s representatives nationally fit the Southern-cast mold.
There’s certainly suggestive evidence to this point. Take a look at this chart of trends in House DW-NOMINATE scores — a measure of a legislator’s distance from the ideological mean of the time:
Notice how that sharp tick toward conservatism among Republicans starts around 1976, just when Southern whites were abandoning the Democratic Party in droves. At the same time, Southern Democrats start looking more and more like Northern Democrats (the story is basically the same in the Senate). It seems like Republicans became more conservative just as they were starting to become more Southern.
There’s more. “After the 1994 elections, white Southern Republicans accounted for sixty-two members of the 230-member House GOP majority,” Ari Berman writes in the most recent edition of The Nation. “Today, white Southern Republicans account for ninety-seven members out of the 233-member House GOP majority.” The percentage of Southerners in the GOP House caucus, Berman reports, has gone up in every election but one since 1976.
These Southerners also make up large percentages of the House’s most conservative blocs. Though Southerners make up a little over 30 percent of the U.S. population and 42 percent of House Republicans, a full 60 percent of the House Tea Party Caucus is Southern. Southerners comprise 50 percent of the Republican Study Committee, the House “cabal” so powerful in the past three years that, according to National Journal, ” the RSC’s embrace or rejection of any legislative effort has become the surest indicator of whether it will pass the chamber.” 19 of the 32 House Republicans the Atlantic deemed “most responsible” for the shutdown hail from the South.
Southern Congresspeople voted consistently more conservatively than their northern colleagues on the “fiscal cliff” deal that resolved the last debt ceiling standoff. Southern Republicans in more competitive districts, according to The New Republic’s Nate Cohn, voted more ideologically than Northern Republicans in safe GOP districts.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone: the South has been setting the Republican agenda since the 1994 Gingrich Revolution, both at the Congressional and the base level. Political scientist Niccol Rae conducteda series of interviews with House members in power from 1994-1998, finding that the “southern members of the Republican class of 1994 have acted as the ‘conscience’ or ‘keepers of the flame’ of this Republican revolution.” The enduring consequence, according to Rae, was finalizing the long-term demographic trends that were making the Southern bloc into “the dominant element, regionally, ideologically, and culturally in the congressional GOP.”
As the Southern faction became the face of the GOP in the mid-90s, the GOP’s electorate became a lot more conservative nationally. Panel data reviewed by Alan Abramowitz and Kyle Saunders found that, from 1992-1996, ideological conservatives joined the Republican Party in droves. That’s because Southern elites played a key “signalling” role; their prominent national conservatism signaled to conservatives around the country that the Republican Party was theirs.
Penn’s Matthew Levendusky, who literally wrote the book on conservatives “sorting” themselves into the Republican Party, says that “even when the data are consistent with a nationalization hypothesis, the South still played a crucial role in the sorting process because of the key role of Southern elites.” As conservative Southern elites took over the Republican Party, hyper-conservative Americans followed, becoming the GOP primary voters we know and love today.
So, to sum up: the South’s race-inspired conversion to radical conservatism made the GOP pure enough to threaten default over Obamacare in two distinct ways. First, Southern elected leaders are simply more conservative than other Republicans, and are making up a larger-and-larger percentage of total Republican seats in the House. Second, Southern elites send out signals that drive out moderate primary voters throughout the country, making even non-Southern Republicans more conservative.
In Dinotopia, a famous children’s book, the residents of a fictional dinosaur-human city use a water clock shaped like a helix. It’s a reflection of their novel concept of time. Instead of thinking of the passage of time as either linear or cyclical, they see it as a spiral: history forever repeats itself, but with new, unpredictable twists tossed in.
It’s a neat metaphor for the role of North-South conflict in the United States. The basic cleavage between North and South, began by slavery, has set the fault lines of American politics again and again. This time, the crisis isn’t as severe as the civil war, nor as divisive as the battle over civil rights. But make no mistake: today’s Republican radicalism, with all of its attendent terrifying brinksmanship, is the grandchild of the white South’s devastating defeats in the struggle over racial exclusion.
*****
Readers: Interesting huh? What are your thoughts? Blog me.
Happy Weekend everyone!
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October 12th, 2013 at 11:54 am
Wow, & whoa to both MikeTM’s info (and like Muscha I hope Anonz IS out for blood and gets it) and this article – this is a MUST SEND to all peeps who pretend racism is over bc Obama became president (& has been blocked at every turn by a bunch if jealous and less intelligent white dudes).
Usually you do a woman of the world thing on Saturday so j prepped this little joke fr that reason, ill give it anyway since it is apropo:
Why do men get their best ideas when theyre in bed with a woman?
Bc they’re plugged into a genius!
Budumbump ; )
I’m out of here, it’s gorgeous – but of course, it’s October in LA, my favorite time of year, starting my birthday celebrating early, too, bc Wednesdays aren’t the best time to partay!
Luv, Zen Lill
October 12th, 2013 at 11:55 am
Mischa* sorry dumb smartphone
October 13th, 2013 at 7:59 am
I have been saying all along this was just some racist bullshit act by a few wanna be masters of the human race. That article confirms it.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:09 am
I think blaming racism is too simplistic, but I do believe that the ideology that is at the helm of this shutdown stupidity has a foundation that is supported by racism. In that sense, I agree.
The Civil War never truly ended and the old disagreements were never settled, they just lay simmering under the surface showing up in new forms. Now, they are coming up to the surface and we get the SS,DD (same s__t, different day). Or, should I say different century?
Those old disagreements were built on, and are sustained by racism. No, the Civil War was not solely about slavery/racism but.. yeah, it kinda was. Just like the Iraq War was not about oil. Yeah, it kinda was. This shutdown is not because of racism. Yeah, it kinda is.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:11 am
There’s nothing more on the minds of many extremists on the right that they would rather do than to embarrass or destroy a sitting President-all because he’s not one of them-period! If that’s not racism-then I wouldn’t know what motivates these race haters and bigots.
Sure, if asked, everyone of them would rather lie than to have to admit they can’t stand to have a African American sitting in the Oval Office. Many conservatives and the like in the GOP would be the first to tell you it’s not about him personally rather, that he’s not legitimate, Kenyan born, a socialist, a food stamp president, etc.
But, it all comes back to, ‘really, he’s not really one of us.’
So, the GOP and it’s Kamikaze crazed driven t-bagger wing would prefer to drive us all into the brink rather than to cede to the many victories of Obama and his centerpiece legislation of Obamacare.
Pure and simple-the delusional GOP and their sycophants would rather face their constituents than to admit failure. They would have us believe-what they’re doing will only inconvenience some rather than causing more hardship on the many.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:12 am
Is the shutdown caused by racism? Sure it is. Since the flip with the signing of the Civil Rights Bill, the GOP (in the beginning anyway) has always shown their true colors. Not only against the poor, elderly, kids…but any skin tone other than white.
They are quick to point the finger at the Democrats, but how many people, other than white, are in the position of power within the Party? As for the poor, according to them the African American is lazy, worthless,and would rather live off the system than work.
“We intend to make him a one term president” was their battle cry…and they couldn’t even get that right. They have blocked everything he’s tried to do, and then turn around and lay it on him and the Democrats.
Their supporters make no bones about their hatred for him and his family. Their signs speak volumes, and the party has yet to point anyone out. Personally, history will look back and will lay the blame where it belongs.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:14 am
There is no doubt, at all, that we have a serious racism problem in this US. Seems the largest racism problem is white supremacy, as usual. Now these journalists were talking about something very important. That the worst racism, and the hardest of the right wing are coming out of many districts in the South that are known to be conservative, and vote GOP/TP these days.
While we are stuck with the Southern states – and not everybody in those states is GOTP supporter, but most are – all we can do is try to outvote them, and ignore them as much as possible.
I often wonder why they even come to Congress. What good do they do? They don’t talk about ending wars, education, new technology, lowering the budget, and how well we’ve been doing that despite this economic mess, what good do they do?
They sit in the highest halls of power and whine about abortion, or immigration, or that there isn’t any teachings of JESUS (which none of them bothered to read) in our secular public schools.
Basically, the GOTP (which controls the South right now), is just the kind of group that will keep us down on our knees for a long, long time (we’ve been on them for five years now). No, they won’t be letting us up any time soon.
Good luck, folks.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:17 am
The reason we’ve been trying unsuccessfully since WWII to get universal health care is that white folk don’t want to help OTWs. Poor white folk would rather watch their own children suffer and die than see tax dollars spent on the health of OTWs.
And so we have an employer based system that makes no sense whatsoever, because those poor white people still can’t get jobs with health insurance. That is how idiotic their hatred is. They’d rather die than see OTWs benefit.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:17 am
I get the feeling that so many see helping people they consider less than desirable as equivalent to fostering the growth of ‘weeds’ rather than see help as needed for everyone having a wide-ranging beneficial effect.
If only they truly believed in “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
October 13th, 2013 at 8:38 am
12 Things That Make You Look Older
As you get older, wardrobe and style choices that worked when you were younger may no longer be serving you well. This goes for both men and women. Without knowing it, you may be looking older than you are.
This could cause others to treat you as older and potentially hold you back from employment opportunities and advancements. This also can make you feel like you are not up to your game or comfortable in your skin. When you are not style confident, you are less body confident, which makes you feel less life confident.
Helpful:
Seek out style mentors—people who look elegant and modern without chasing youth-oriented trends. Observe them carefully, and adapt elements of their style to your own. TV newscasters make good style mentors because they are required to look contemporary while also projecting dignity and authority.
Give yourself a good, hard look, and ask yourself whether you are looking older than your actual age with any of these common signals…
1. Sneakers for everyday wear.
Your feet should be comfortable, but sneakers outside the gym just look sloppy and careless. Young people get away with it—but there are more stylish options when you’re older. These include loafers or driving moccasins for men and low-heeled pumps with cushioned soles for women. Wedge-soled shoes are a comfortable alternative to high heels.
2. Baggy pants.
Although young men may look trendy in high-waisted, loose-fitting jeans, this style screams old on anyone else. For women, the rear end tends to flatten with age, causing pants to fit loosely in the rear. And front-pleated pants for women generally are unflattering and unstylish.
Better:
Spend the time to find pants that fit well—or figure a tailor into your wardrobe budget. Baggy is dowdy, but overly tight makes you look heavier. Well-fitting clothes make you look slimmer and younger.
3. Boring colors.
Skin tone gets duller with age, so the colors you wear should bring light to your face. If you are a woman who has worn black for years, it may be too harsh for you now. Brown makes men fade into the woodwork.
Better:
Stand in front of a mirror, and experiment with colors that you never thought you could wear—you may be surprised at what flatters you. Avoid neon brights, which make older skin look sallow, but be open to the rest of the color spectrum.
Try contemporary patterns and prints. For neutrals, gray and navy are softer alternatives to black for women, and any shade of blue is a good bet for men.
4. Boring glasses and jewelry.
Men and women should have some fun with glasses. It’s a great way to update your look and make it more modern. Tell your optician what you’re looking for, or bring a stylish friend with you.
As for jewelry for women, wearing a large piece of fab faux jewelry (earrings, necklace, ring) or multiple bracelets adds great style and youth to your look.
5. Turtlenecks.
You may think a turtleneck hides a sagging neck and chin, but it is more likely to draw attention to jowls.
Better:
A cowl neckline for women, or a loosely draped scarf. A scarf is the single best item to help a woman look thinner, taller, prettier and more chic. For a video on how to tie a scarf, go to NYCityWoman.com and type “Six Ways to Wear a Scarf” in the search box. For a man, an oblong scarf, looped, is a stylish European look that adds a welcome shot of color.
6. Stiff or one-tone hair.
An overly styled helmet of hair looks old-fashioned. Hair that’s a solid block of color looks unnatural and harsh.
Better:
Whether hair is short or shoulder-length, women need layers around the face for softness. As for color, opt for subtle highlights in front and a slightly darker tone toward the back.
Keep in mind that gray hair can be beautiful, modern and sexy. You need a plan to go gray, though, which means a flattering cut and using hair products that enhance the gray. Ask your stylist for recommendations.
Also, if your hair is a dull gray, consider getting silver highlights around your face to bring light and “energy” to your hair.
Men who dye their hair should allow a bit of gray at the temples—it looks more natural than monochrome hair. But avoid a comb-over or a toupee. A man who attempts to hide a receding hairline isn’t fooling anyone—he just looks insecure.
Better:
Treat your thinning hair as a badge of honor. Either keep it neatly trimmed or shave your head.
7. Missing (or bushy) eyebrows.
Women’s eyebrows tend to disappear with age. Men’s are more likely to grow wild.
Better:
Women should use eyebrow pencil, powder or both to fill in fading brows. Visit a high-end cosmetics counter, and ask the stylist to show you how. You may need to try several products to find out what works best.
Men, make sure that your barber or hair stylist trims your eyebrows regularly.
Also:
Women tend not to notice increased facial hair (especially stray hairs) on the chin and upper lip—a result of hormonal change. Pluck!
8. Deeply tanned skin.
Baby boomers grew up actively developing suntans using baby oil and sun reflectors. Now pale is the norm. A dark tan not only dates you, it increases your risk for skin cancer and worsens wrinkling.
Better:
Wear a hat and sunscreen to shield your skin from sun damage.
9. Less-than-white teeth.
Yellowing teeth add decades to your appearance. Everyone’s teeth get yellower with age, but with so many teeth-whitening products available, there is no excuse to live with off-color teeth.
Better:
Ask your dentist which whitening technique he/she recommends based on the condition of your teeth—over-the-counter whitening strips, bleaching in the dentist’s office or a custom bleaching kit you can use at home.
10. Women: Nude or beige hose.
Nude stockings on women look hopelessly out-of-date. Bare legs are the norm now for young women, but they are not a good option for older women who have dark veins.
Better:
In winter, wear dark stockings or opaque tights. In summer, use spray-on tanner for a light tan…or wear nude fishnet stockings or slacks or capris.
11. Poor-fitting bra.
Get a bra that fits. Most women don’t know that bra size changes as your body does. Giving your breasts a lift will make you look younger and trimmer.
12. Excess makeup.
Thick foundation, heavy eyeliner, bright blusher and red lipstick all add years to your face.
Better:
Use a moisturizing (not matte) foundation, and dab it only where needed to even out skin tone. To add color to cheeks, use a small amount of tinted moisturizer, bronzer or cream blush.
Use liquid eyeliner in soft shades such as deep blue or brown, and blend it well. For lips, choose soft pinks and mauves, depending on your skin tone.
Bottom line:
The idea is to have fun putting yourself together. That inner spark and personal style will show that you are getting better with age.
Source: Kim Johnson Gross, cocreator of the Chic Simple book series and author of What to Wear for the Rest of Your Life (Grand Central Life & Style) and Chic Simple Dress Smart: Men (Grand Central).
Based in New York City, she is a former Ford model and has been fashion editor at Town & Country and Esquire magazines and a columnist for More and InStyle. KimJohnsonGross.com
October 13th, 2013 at 8:39 am
Well, if you consider the rich against the poor racism, then I guess it is. The large stock brokers want the small stock holders to sell their stock so that the rich stock brokers can buy it cheap, which they have done.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:41 am
First of all, there were racists and there were Democrats and then there were Dixiecrats. Racists were the rich repukes. Northern Dems along with northern repukes were abolistionist.
Dixiecrats were hold over whigs who were the original racists who later became dems because after the wig party collapsed they didn’t want to become federalists. Who later became the northern repukes.
So please get your history correct.
Today, the repuke party of white priveledge and the tea ball licking baggers are the closeted racists are why there is such a problem.
They just can’t get over that a black man became president.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:44 am
Michelle, I’m Arapahoe. How can 90% of American Indians support the Washington Red Skins exploiting them as mascots when the pollsters don’t even know where 5% of us live?
October 13th, 2013 at 8:46 am
Was Reagan a racist? Yep. He went to the Soviet Union and told the Russians that Americans were so generous that they “gave” American Indians reservations to live on!
Wow, some gift eh? In truth, Indian reservations are the last of these vast lands we American Indians once owned in North America where we were able to keep the white man from stealing us blind.
Reagan was not only a demagogue, he was out of touch with reality and his Alzheimer’s disease had nothing to do with it. The Tea Party Republicans are generally upholding his legacy of not quite knowing where reality is to be found.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:49 am
Make no mistake about it, they do hate America, despite their flag
pins, tri-cornered hats and Orwellian declarations of patriotism.
What they love is a fiction, the “Real America” of wistful memory and ardent
longing, a community of people who believe, behave and yes – look – just
like themselves.
What they hate is the reality of America, an enormous, complex place filled with the most diverse population in the history of the world, an America in which gay marriage is now legal, in which women are happily exercising the freedom to both celebrate and control their own sexuality, in which one out of eight citizens is an
immigrant, and in which millions more undocumented workers (many of them
speaking Spanish) perform the menial jobs that Americans no longer want
to do.
They hate an America in which the small towns and rural areas where they are primarily concentrated are depopulating, in which evangelical Christianity is shrinking in size and influence, and in which globalization has destroyed the economic security they once took for granted.
Most of all, they hate the America that has twice elected a black man to be President.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:49 am
The black guy in the WHITE house has had the teaBircher scum squirming for years!
It’s sad, but really fun to watch them squirm like maggots.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:50 am
Hmmmm, while all racism is idiotic, not all idiocy is racist. Tealiban anti-government idiots take a lot of the blame, racism aside
October 13th, 2013 at 8:51 am
BABE, The problem is that their “real” America never existed. It is a cobbled-together amalgam of old Westerns, dusty memories from civics class and fear.
October 13th, 2013 at 8:54 am
Conservatism in very simplified terms is Racist, Sexist, etc because it was incubated and nurtured from the start by White christian Men who decided to map out an entire political philosophy based on preserving what they held and still hold dear. The Women, Minorities, GLBT are part of this as well, though because Conservatism is rooted in certain elements…..the numbers of those groups is microscopic.
Conservatism is based on holding certain institutions as pillars….Authority is revered, strength is admired, weakness is despised and The poor are reviled. They adore Capitalism and the best Players in that system are people who will kill their neighbor if it means a leg up.
Their view of economics is that if you are unfit to play this cut throat game….you are a loser and their aim is to be as good as possible at playing ( skirting taxes, cutting corners, no concern for Workers, Laws, Regulations, or oversight).
The Conservative Social agenda is based on their belief of dominion of Humans…..believer vs non, white vs non white, strong vs weak, they absolutely hate abstract thought or Art and that is in line with fascistic authority worship that questions those that question.
What is interesting is that over time , there are changes that happen regardless of their obstinacy and so Conservatism is now joined by women who at one time were prized by these knuckle draggers as chattel now join as sanctimonious equals of the men, the few minorities involved with The Right are religious and buy into this pile of shit.
I have no doubt that the White Right Wing is Racist and they dress it up with all sorts of excess idiocy as well including insinuations that The Left are out to destroy The USA and that they hate America, they insinuate that The Poor are blocking their way to even more wealth, they babble about Marriage Equality and how The Left and The Deviants are causing ruination.
I have some late breaking News for these Motherfuckers……….they are causing the tearing , they are causing the chaos, they are blocking any sort of Progress……..by defending the Order.
If Conservatives had their way there would have been no end to slavery, no vote for women, their idea of a solution would be to ignore the poverty as they step on as many bodies as possible.
see
October 13th, 2013 at 8:55 am
Allie, Don’t forget the documentary “Happy Days”
October 13th, 2013 at 9:58 am
Loved the “plugged in” Zen Llll.
October 13th, 2013 at 10:00 am
I’ve traveled through a thousand universes past galaxies untold
I’ve touched planets and moons to remember
The stars are my sister and they inspire me
I’ve embraced the emerald blue earth and left part of me there
Now I go beyond
I seek the one who is the Light and the Life.
October 13th, 2013 at 10:53 am
Beautiful Anonymous 22.
May you find what you are seeking.
PrP