Ok, let’s do a quick check. This guy is president of the United States, right?
That guy, right there? I’m pretty sure he is. And, as I’m given to understand, he’s black, right? Let’s check again.
Yep, given the visual evidence and the corroborating reports (Morgan Freeman’s opinion notwithstanding), I feel pretty safe in saying that, yes, he is black. And president. He is the black president.
And yet, we have this:
When it Comes to Politics, Are We More Racist Than We Think?
…
Though many people believe that our first African-American president won the election thanks in part to increased turnout by African-American voters, Stephens-Davidowitz’s research shows that those votes only added about 1 percentage point to Obama’s totals. “In the general election, this effect was comparatively minor,” he concludes. But in areas with high racial search rates, the fact that Obama is African American worked against him, sometimes significantly.
“The results imply that, relative to the most racially tolerant areas in the United States, prejudice cost Obama between 3.1 percentage points and 5.0 percentage points of the national popular vote,” Stephens-Davidowitz points out in his study. “This implies racial animus gave Obama’s opponent roughly the equivalent of a home-state advantage country-wide.”
“Any votes Obama gained due to his race in the general election were not nearly enough to outweigh the cost of racial animus, meaning race was a large net negative for Obama,” he adds.
Lady, he won! He won the election! He is the president! The black president! And yet still we’re doing studies–and gleefully publicizing said studies–to prove how racist we are.
Even after a black man ascends to the highest office in the land, we’re determined to believe that we’re irredeemably racist.
There is no end to this. And it’s too easy to say that there’s no end to it because the people who make money off the racial grievance industry won’t let it die. Lots of people want to make money off of lots of crazy ideas, but they have to find a willing customer base that buys into the idea enough to fork over money for it.
The fact is, there’s a substantial number of people who want to believe, indeed are eager to believe, that we are all racists, no matter what. Why? What’s the benefit of thinking this about yourself and your fellow Americans?
Some Christian denominations embrace the Calvinist doctrine of “total depravity,” which contends that man is utterly corrupt and incapable of doing anything good of his own will. Even the things that he does that seem to be good are really evil because they’re done for the his own glory and not for God’s.
I think that in the secular religion that is progressive politics, racism serves as a stand-in for total depravity. It’s the unsolvable problem that can only be solved by the intervention of God.
Not only does this provide a ready explanation for the ills of society, it also serves as an excuse for the liberal god, the almighty government, to intervene and deliver salvation in the form of wealth redistribution, multicultural initiatives, and all kinds of other feel-good shibboleths.
So, it doesn’t matter how many black presidents we elect or if we amend the Constitution to replace the Supreme Court with the Wu-Tang Clan. The doctrine of Total Racism isn’t going anywhere. Religious beliefs like that are stubborn things.
Take the analysis one step backwards – characteristics that can only be associated with individuals and attributing them to groups is a “category error”.
He chose a common racial insult that starts with “N”
Haha. He probably indentified people searching for hip-hop/rap songs.
The initial assumption may or may not be correct, but the researcher has no evidence one way or the other. But, at any rate, we must find evidence and ways to “prove” we are racist. He obviously came of with his hypothesis that we are racist and then set out to find a way to prove his hypothesis correct rather than do an unbiased test of some sort.
Of course, all this overlooks the fact that blacks overwhelmingly vote along racial lines.
It seems to me that, assuming Stephens-Davidowitz’s analysis to be correct – that Obama gained about 1% from being black, and lost about 3.1 to 5% due to being black in those areas with the highest racial animus (with those areas being sufficiently numerous that when averaged with areas with less racial animus he still lost more than the 1% that he gained) – then the overwhelming majority of the population were *neither* favoring Obama because he was black *nor* disfavoring him because he was black. So, whether this particular study does or doesn’t hold up under peer review, it doesn’t amount to “we are all racist.” For that, we’d need a different study.
It doesn’t, though “overlook the fact that blacks overwhelmingly vote along racial lines”; it asserts otherwise (the 1% edge is smaller than what “blacks overwhelmingly vote along racial lines” ought to give him – though it’s possible that edge is so small because most black people were already voting for the Democrat). The black vote is being explicitly considered along with the white vote (and the study seems to be saying that among neither black people nor white people were most swayed by Obama’s race).
It focuses on “racial animus” toward Obama because he’s (half) black. And, how race was a large negative for Obama. No mention of the racial animus of blacks towards whites and how it effected McCain’s results.
Obama got 95% of the black vote in 2008. That sounds huge, until you remember that 90% of the black vote goes to whomever the Democrats run for President. When it comes to Democrats and the black vote, the important factor is more turnout than preventing vote loss to the Republican candidate.