White Folk are DUMB!!!
Is it possible to be a reverse racist? I don't mean a black person hating a white person. I mean a (ostensibly) white person (like myself) just hating other white people (though I guess I can't REALLY be considered white since I'm Jewish...). Why? Because many of them are just so incredibly stupid. Take, for instance, the following:
Poll: Racial views steer some white Dems away from ObamaSeriously? I just don't get it. These are DEMOCRATS! These are the people who are supposed to be more understanding, more likely be beyond these idiotic prejudices. And yet, they sound almost as though they're members of the KKK! What the hell is wrong with these people?!
By RON FOURNIER and TREVOR TOMPSON, Associated Press WritersWASHINGTON (AP) — Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent," responsible for their own troubles.
Further, regardless of their feelings toward African-Americans in general, what has that got to do with Barack Obama? Why would Obama's race (who is half white AND half black, making him both or neither, but certainly not ONE or the other) make a difference in how one votes? I've never gotten the impression Obama is lazy OR violent. Quite the opposite, in fact. He's worked EXTREMELY hard to get where he is. He is NOT a violent person. He HATES war. He HATES the growing division this country faces and wants to make it, as he says, not the Blue States or the Red States but the UNITED STATES.
Further, it's not like African-Americans haven't faced racism. They STILL do. And civil rights laws have NOT been in effect for that long, especially compared to how long blacks had been slaves before the emancipation.
Wow. I expected better. One THIRD of Democrats believe this.
Well, on the other hand, it probably means WAY more Republicans (what, TWO thirds or more?) feel this way as well... And I'll bet most of one third of Democrats who feel this way live down South. There, even many Democrats are quite conservative.
Here's the rest of the article.
7 comments:
I really don't know what the big revelation is. We already know many people won't vote for Obama because he's black--though a substantial number of people will vote for him because he's black. It goes both ways.
To say it may cost him the election overlooks the fact that if the election were held today, he'd probably win, even with all the racists. So, really, racism is simply just another factor among many.
The only thing worth considering, which this study does not discuss, is the Bradley Effect, the phenomenon of people not admitting to pollsters they don't want to vote for a black guy. Still, there's very little if any evidence a Bradley Effect occurred during primary season. Moreover, voters have many conventional reasons they can give for not supporting Obama without sounding racist. I saw a good discussion here (the author is an Obama supporter):
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/on-race-based-voting.html
Historically, the Democrats are the party of white racists and the KKK. The majority of those folks switched parties during the civil rights era, but many hung around, especially in the South. They aren't necessarily conservative.
Oh, it's no revelation. It's just REALLY pissing me off. People are actually willing to give up the chance to have a GREAT president because they don't like the color of his skin. It's just ridiculous.
And it pisses me off even more when it's Jews who pull this crap. Of all people in the world, jews are the ones who should NOT be racist, but as I commented on DovBear about Lubavitchers, it seems to be the Jewish Chareidi (and Lubavitch) thing to do. My brother-in-law ACTUALLY yelled at me for "voting for the Schwartze!" It's disgusting and it's one of those things that makes me embarrassed to be a Jew. It's one of those things that has had me thinking seriously, of late, about reconsidering this whole Jewish thing. What makes Jews more "correct" than anyone else if so many of them have the same stupid prejucides as anyone else? So, some will say to me, "don't judge Judaism by the Jews." Well, if not by those who practice the religion, then by whom? Christians and Muslims?
It's also one of those things that SERIOUSLY has me reconsidering "Rabbinic" Judaism. I'm probably going to get on that track again once the elections are over...
People will vote based on all sorts of ridiculous reasons. That's one of the prices we pay for living in a democracy.
I'm long past the point of feeling outraged about racism. I have more of a cynical resignation to it. I don't think there's a single group that's free of it. Jews, despite their long involvement in civil rights, have plenty of racists among them. So do blacks, for that matter. So do whites, despite the claim by many of them to have "moved beyond" race.
One thing Judaism has going for it, though, is a long tradition of recognizing that Jews, even the most pious ones, can be seriously flawed.
Yeah, unless you're a chareidi who believes all "gedolim" (whatever that mean) and every one of Chazal, Amoraim, Geonim, Rishonim, Acharonim, etc, were completely infallible...
Charedim do not literally believe their leaders are infallible. Their basic argument is that whatever faults Gedolim may have pale in comparison to ours, and therefore we are likely to make fewer mistakes if we put our trust in them. Presumably, they still teach the story of Moses and the rock. In fact, virtually all the major figures of the Tanach had noticeable faults. And Charedim certainly recognize the fallibility of the Jewish masses, a recurring theme in the Tanach. (The novelist Israel Zangwill once quipped that the Prophets were the world's first anti-Semites, because they were so critical of the Jewish people.)
K: “Historically, the Democrats are the party of white racists and the KKK. The majority of those folks switched parties during the civil rights era, but many hung around, especially in the South. They aren't necessarily conservative.”
CYM: Thanks, Kylopod. I was trying to pinpoint when the parties’ platforms “switched” (for Barak’s post from today about needing a new mascot. Republican represented “mainstream” America for the better part of 100 years. They were the party of Lincoln, and thus outlawed slavery (which ticked off the Southern whites). Black Republicans were voted into state assembly seats during Reconstruction but the representatives were barely literate (and were accused of being put there by a “fixed” election).
Imagine that…Republicans fixing elections to put illiterate people into high office. They wouldn’t do that today. Nah! (The last sentence was said in a note of sarcasm, if you couldn’t tell.)
AKO: “And it pisses me off even more when it's Jews who pull this crap. Of all people in the world, jews are the ones who should NOT be racist…”
CYM: “We seem to have an odd trait in human nature. We tend to pick on people not so much for having it ‘worse’ than we have it, but for expressing those very things that may embarrass us about ourselves. A couple weeks ago, I gave you a few comparisons of charedi society and American Black ‘ghetto’ society: strong mother presence, absentee father (sitting in kollel so long that your kid thinks you live there counts as being absent), older children acting as de-facto parents for the younger siblings, disproportionate children classified as ‘learning disabled’, children not being prepared for ‘real world’ and turning to ‘alternative means’ of supporting oneself. [A friend of mine was disgusted recently by a meshulach sending a TEN YEAR OLD BOY out to collect for him. Imagine that…teaching kids that BEGGING is a worthwhile skill!] Back to my point…Jews actually have more in common with Blacks than we like to admit.”
AKO : ”Yeah, unless you're a chareidi who believes all "gedolim" (whatever that mean) and every one of Chazal, Amoraim, Geonim, Rishonim, Acharonim, etc, were completely infallible...”
K: “Charedim do not literally believe their leaders are infallible. Their basic argument is that whatever faults Gedolim may have pale in comparison to ours, and therefore we are likely to make fewer mistakes if we put our trust in them.”
CYM: “My problem is not when one uses the life of a gadol as a role model for conducting their own lives. My problem is when people seemed to have lost so much self-confidence that they are not able to make basic life decisions without consulting their rav! I see it at work with my students: the limudei kodesh teacher expects the kids to fill in the worksheets and machberot EXACTLY as she tells them to. But then, the limudei chol teacher is wondering why she feels like pounding her head against the desk by the end of the day when the students are looking to you for the answers so they can fill it in.”
I was trying to pinpoint when the parties’ platforms “switched”
That's the topic of a book I just read, Lewis Gould's Grand Old Party. Here are some of the points I got from it:
(1) Even though the Republican philosophy of government changed drastically, certain characteristics remained the same. For one thing, they always had a close relationship with big business. Also, their tendency to view Democrats as traitors is a holdover from the days of the Confederacy. (This last point is muddied by the fact that Republicans were viewed as traitors during the administrations of Wilson and FDR.)
(2) Even in the nineteenth century, Democrats were beginning to embrace ethnic minorities, particularly immigrants from Ireland and Europe, groups that had some cultural tension with the Protestant moralism and nationalism of the Republicans.
(3) Gould writes that the departure of the progressive Teddy Roosevelt from the Republican Party was a seminal event in solidifying the party's conservative philosophy.
(4) The other Roosevelt's presidency represented the beginning of the Democratic Party's embrace of welfare capitalism. It also was when blacks began migrating to the Democrats. The New Deal coalition included both blacks and Southern whites; the latter wouldn't begin to become agitated by the party until Truman's administration.
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