Precisely for this reason, political opportunists in the US have long used the race card to discredit welfare and redistribution, from the Jim Crow system that segregated blacks in the South before 1964 to the infamous Reagan-era charge about black "welfare queens" who drive Cadillacs. Right wing white politicians, predisposed against taxes and redistribution, use the race issue to secure the votes of poor whites, who otherwise might vote differently on purely economic grounds.