Noted “historian” Newt Gingrich has amplified his ideas about janitorial work in schools, first espoused a few days back when he suggested that the paid (unionized, it goes without saying) janitors should be fired and replaced by students.
Now, he suggests
“I come around to this question,” he said. “You have a very poor neighborhood. You have kids who are required under law to go to school. They have no money. They have no habit of work. What if you paid them part-time in the afternoon to sit at the clerical office and greet people when they come in? What if you paid them to work as the assistant librarian?”
Anybody else hear the dog-whistle to the racist components of the Republican party here? No longer is the bogeyman the “strapping young buck” of Ronald Reagan’s 1976 speech. Nope, now it’s the idle hands of those ghetto children which need to be put to work cleaning toilets.
The man talks in multi-syllabic words, but the meaning is clear for those who are willing to see it. Gingrich is a product of the Republican Southern Strategy and can’t hide from it.
And as a former librarian I am grossly insulted by the suggestion that an untrained child should be “paid … to work as the assistant librarian”! Anybody with the title “Assistant Librarian” normally has to have a Master’s degree. Gingrich appears to have totally lost track of the fact that children in a poor neighborhood go to school (you think?) to LEARN SOMETHING that might help them do better. Not clean goddamn toilets!