Quote:
Originally Posted by Senusret I
The issue of race is so complex to begin with that even if Obama lost (and seriously, it's still anyone's race) there'd be no way to prove it was due to racism/prejudice among Democrats or not.
I don't think most voters are are thoughtful about their vote as the people of GC generally are. Do I generally think of white people as racist republicans? Not really, but I do view most republicans as at least a little bit racist. 
Sorry. |
I suppose it may seem like it makes sense to since Republicans often seem to want to limit the ways that many people think racism can be addressed or redressed. But I think it may have a lot less to actually do with race, in their minds anyway, than it has to do with their perception of appropriate role of government.
And I will further speculate that many Republican strongholds are places where the historic impact of racism is less visible to the people living there today. If you grew up in a relatively affluent suburb after the schools were legally desegregated and what you experienced directly was students of all races having essentially equal opportunity (at least from your perspective), families of various races and ethnicities prospering equally, etc, it may be more difficult to understand why racism still regarded as such a central issue. It may be more of a blindness than an actually hostility.
But even if you see it, you may not think that it can be effectively addressed with government action. And you might be kind of disgusted by what some efforts to help have meant in terms of political reality. (Atlanta City government under Bill Campbell may have used minority contracting in a corrupt way, for example. Sure, white people have also been guilty of corruption in big city government, but that doesn't make bad government any more satisfying for people who aren't corrupt.)
I wasn't thinking of the racism of Democrats particularly. I was just astonished to discover that the white vote wasn't split more frequently in favor of the Democrats. I don't think it really has much to do with racial policy from the white perspective. While Affirmative Action can still fire people up, I don't know that race generally is a single issue that drives many people to the polls on behalf of particular Republican candidates.