"And one perfect example – a perfect example – of how special interests and the powerful have pitted white working class Americans against brown and black working Americans in order to just screw over all working class Americans is Reaganism in the '80s when you started talking about 'welfare queens,'" Ocasio-Cortez said during an interview at the conference. "So you think about this image, 'welfare queens,' and what he [Reagan] was really trying to talk about was – he was painting this photo, he's like painting this really resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing that were sucks on our country, right? And it's the whole tragedy of these comments type thinking where it's like because these one specific group of people that you were already kind of subconsciously prime to resent, you give them a different reason, that's not explicit racism, but still rooted in racist caricature, it gives people a logical, a "logical" reason to say, 'Oh, yeah, no. Toss out the whole safety net.'"
