ArcaMax

Alas, poor Paul Ryan. I take the House Budget chairman at his word that he did not intend to offend African Americans with his statements about how the culture of some men "in our inner cities in particular" does not value hard work.

After all, as some other fair-minded folks have pointed out, it is not as though Ryan said something that was new, untrue or -- in today's world -- distinctly right-wing.

We've heard similar statements sometimes delivered even more bluntly by Bill Cosby, President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, among others.

But unlike those spokesmen, we cannot forget, Ryan has the handicap of being both white and a conservative Republican. Perhaps his own culture failed to sufficiently value the double meanings that some words take on when they cross racial and partisan lines.

The Wisconsin Republican and 2012 vice presidential candidate's linguistic mini-scandal erupted on Bill Bennett's "Morning in America" radio show as Ryan previewed his legislative proposals for reforming America's poverty programs.

"We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular," he said, "of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with."

Was Ryan's use of "inner city" a veiled racial reference, pandering to white conservatives? The euphemistic "inner city" has edged out the less elegant "ghetto" to describe low-income urban neighborhoods -- although it sounds increasingly obsolete in today's age of gentrification.

Liberal critics in media and the Congressional Black Caucus erupted with accusations. Ryan later clarified that he had been "inarticulate" in the heat of a live radio interview. Please don't listen to what he said, he asks, only to what he meant.

Fair enough. It is too bad, in my view, that Ryan did not internalize more of the formidable cross-cultural people skills exhibited by his late political mentor, Rep. Jack Kemp. The conservative Buffalo Republican and 1996 GOP vice presidential candidate won widespread support in heavily Democratic black and Latino communities by promoting market-driven public-private partnerships for social remedies.

Critics of Ryan's remarks also cited his favorable reference to Charles Murray, co-author of "The Bell Curve," a controversial 1994 book about, among other matters, racial differences in intelligence. Like Ryan's remarks, Murray's book also says things that sound more sinister about black capabilities than what Murray claims he meant.

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