This potentially valuable thread – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=356492 – quickly and regrettably got hijacked into pointless semantic quibbles about what is or is not “racism.” Let’s start over. For purposes of this thread, “racism” is to be defined broadly as any kind of racial bias, emotional or ideological. In those terms, are white Republicans (I mean voters, not just party leaders) today more likely than white Democrats are to have anti-black racist feelings?
I don’t know the answer. However, there is such a thing as pitty racism that I have encountered with several different types of liberals. In short, it is the belief that certain kinds of people just can’t do better so it is up to society to support and help them. The opposite of that is certain strains of libertarian thought that all groups can rise to the occasion if they have to.
Of course they are, and they are significantly more likely to do so than Democratic voters, most especially in the South. This is a logical outcome of the famous Republican Southern Strategy, to appeal to racist voters in the South who were pissed off at the Democrats for passing the Civil Rights legislation. What had once been the “Solid South” for the Dems has become the “Solid South” for the Pubbies, with the vast majority of southern states going for the Pubbies in election after election, after the Civil Rights legislation.
Hey, you can’t argue with success.
In this thread, let’s please try to stay on-topic and avoid any hijacks like the above, so it doesn’t go the way of the other thread.
The Civil Rights Act was passed 42 years ago. I don’t think it’s fair to lump modern southerners or modern southern Republicans as “racist” today just because their grandparents were in the 60s.
Quite a few people who were of voting age in the 60s are still around, and it’s not at all outlandish to think that many of them passed their racist values on to their kids.
Why does bias have to be of the “anti-” variety? You said any type of bias, right?
This is ridiculous. Not only have you mischaracterized the other thread, but now you have broadened racism to mean everything that is and everything that isn’t. By your standards, the Kennedy family is racist for having married exclusively white people. For that matter, so is the King family. It is astounding that you would protest pinning down a definition of the very topic you want to discuss. All that does is make it easier to talk nonsense.
This thread has already degenerated into another mess.
Obviously we need an even narrower focus, so how about "Does the current Republican party leadership promote anti-black racism more than Democratic party leadership?
If we keep definitions narrow enough I’m sure we can get those GOPers dead to rights.
But I have also prescribed a very narrow subset of that for discussion in this thread: Anti-black racism among white Republicans and Democrats.
Democrats are more likely to be in favor of Affirmative Action programs that give preferential treatment to Blacks. Since they resist switching to AA programs based solely on socio-economic status, they must think that Blacks are somehow inferior. Therefore there is more anti-Black bias among Democrats than among Republicans.
Your conclusion does not follow from your hypothesis. It’s entirely possible to be in favor of Affirmative Action programs for blacks out of a belief that society is currently biased against them, and switching AA to be based solely on socio-economic status would do nothing to alleviate this social basis.
How do you know it would “do nothing”? Or, more improtantly, how do you know that it wouldn’t do just as much as race-based AA programs? In fact, one might argue that race-based AA programs promote social bias.
I think affirmative action is the most anti-black racist public policy that exists today, and Democrats tend to support it more then Republicans. So I think there’s more anti-black racism among the Democrats then the Republicans, at least at an official level.
You may recall me posting in support of affirmative action in the past. I’ve changed my mind.
Now that actually sounds like an interesting discussion. What changed your mind?
Opponents of Affirmative Action commonly portray it as a “black program”, even though white women have benefited from it more than any other group. How often do we hear people calling AA a sexist program? It seems to me we’d be hearing that particular outcry a lot more often since a white man has a greater chance of “losing out” to a white woman than he does a black person.
I have to say that the tendency of AA detractors to point their fingers at black people rather the group most likely to benefit from the program smells a lot like like anti-black bias to me.
Allan Bloom.
The argument that turned me off of affirmative action is that it’s ultimately harmful to blacks because it perpetuates the perception of them as being dumber then whites. By lowering academic standards for blacks, blacks are put forth into the workforce that actually are less well educated and intelligent then whites. Someone comparing a black college graduate and a white college graduate could, with some knowledge of their backgrounds, reasonably infer that the white graduate is smarter because the white graduate had to meet higher standards.
Instead of lowering standards for blacks–which ultimately is what affirmative action is–I think we should address racial inequality by increasing the quality of their primary education. This would also help the poor non-blacks attending the same schools, so it would be a boost to social inequality as well, and it wouldn’t be racist.
More likely we’re just responding in a perfectly reasonable and rational way to the open contempt and hatred that many liberals like you show for us.
What part of my post showed contempt and/or hatred? It seemed to me to be a fairly straightforward bit of logic and history.
I grew up in an area of the country that was solidly Democratic in its voting patterns - the Mon Valley south of Pittsburgh. Most Democratic voters there were working class whites, often union members.
Racial relations there weren’t terribly progressive, I can assure you.
Now, I can confidently state that a liberal is less likely to be racist by virtue of being a liberal. However, not all Democratic voters vote that way because they are liberals - indeed, most don’t.
For that reason, racism can quite easily be found in the Democratic ranks. Whether it is more prevalent there on a national scale, I cannot say for certain. I can confidently state, however, that my local Republican organization in Northern Virginia is a model of tolerance and diversity compared to the Democratic Party in Washington County, Pennsylvania.