Before I address that post, can you tell me what “racist” means to you? I’d like to make sure we’re talking about the same thing here.
I would answer the typical dictionary definition, but off the top of my head, I would deem something racist as being a negative thought, feeling, action, or communication expressed by a person or group of another person or group based solely or mostly on perceived racial and ethnic makeup. You’ve said several times that you count racism when its humans divided by shared traits and then ranked by superiority or treated differently. I don’t see how creating laws marking out specific types of people to be affected, or demonizing foreigners doesn’t fall into your definition
Alright then, I can now proceed:
It certainly helps, because the more you rely on your own interpretations and inferences, the further you get from anything factual, and into the realm of the subjective.
I don’t recall any races being demonized, perhaps you can elaborate.
Both parties have a history of division.
Both parties hold themselves up as the model for American society going forward.
As for “callous attitude toward minorities”…bear in mind how closely race and class are intertwined in America. Policies that you’d call insensitive and cruel to the poor might affect a higher rate of black or Hispanic folks than white or Asian…but they fall on poor whites and Asians nontheless, and spare non-poor blacks and Hispanics. Disparate impact isn’t, in and of itself, racism.
Any racist policies of the Republicans that don’t depend upon economic class to harm the allegedly targeted race?
Well, “individual members doing racist things in their own districts” speaks more to the “organization with racists in it” category than the “racist organization” one.
[QUOTE=YogSosoth]
And I believe that it is both, the GOP is both a racist organization and an organization with racists in it. My view isn’t predicated on your criteria of clear dividing lines between races but on policy, things they talk about, and the way they are exercising that power.
You may disagree, but part of being racist can be subtle, like supporting a policy that disproportionately affects a race.
[/quote]
This is crucial: doing so would be racist, only if the point of the policy was to have a negative impact on a race, for its own sake. For instance, a law that banned stock-car racing might disproportionately affect white people. That doesn’t make it a racist law, though, if that was an unavoidable side-effect of the law, rather than its purpose (perhaps the stock-cars are too loud, or pollute too much, or are intolerably unsafe).
Another fine example. The point of the voter ID laws (setting aside those who are genuinely concerned about voter fraud, who do exist but are immaterial to either your point or mine) is for Republicans to win elections, by trying to knock down participation by likely Democratic voters. It’s not to attack racial minorities for its own sake, and it doesn’t do that, as non-poor, non-elderly racial minorities have no more trouble getting ID than non-poor, non-elderly white people do.
Compare this to laws that directly attack racial minorities for being racial minorities (segregation laws, different voter registation standards for different races), or ones that are crafted to harass a minority for its own sake (like a ban on Muslim headscarves). Laws with a legitimate purpose that happen to have a disproportionate impact on different races aren’t automatically racist, or wrong. Heck, a tax hike on rich people is going to hit white people the hardest, is calling for a tax hike racist? Certainly not.
With the exception of immigration policy, those are all things done by Republicans, not Republican things, if you understand my meaning. If some Republican slaps a “don’t re-nig” bumper sticker on his car, that doesn’t turn use of racial slurs into Republican policy.
As for Republican immigration policy, which aspects of it are racist, exactly?
It is evident to me that much of the way they treat Obama and talk about him is due to his race, and not a generic Democrat they dislike. Comments on his foreigness, his religion, his “unamericaness”, are code words that point to him not being like white America.
Not a recent history. The Democrats have moved on from their past, renounced the Dixiecrat ways. The GOP has been embracing them, not only just letting them do what they want, but running towards the racists
Not specifically to race, but their anti-gay and anti-women attitude certainly cuts across economic lines often. Their anti-anything-other-than-Christianity is also classless for the most part, though I won’t doubt that because of entrenched discrimination, some of the people in other religions are poorer as a result. So not only are they racists, but bigots in other ways too. But like you said, race and economic class are tied together so it is more difficult to come up with an example for that. Plus, ever since they lost the battle for civil rights, conservatives have had decades to hide their more overt racist views and now try to do everything in code. Its not hard to see through it, however, but the fact that they don’t drop the N-word at every speech doesn’t make it hard to figure out what they mean.
And I would agree except that there are so many of them, and they are not sufficiently punished by the national organization, one that’s presumably not racist, to not see how they aren’t secretly supporting these idiots in their districts
Again, in principle I would agree with you, except for the reality of it. Voter ID may not be racially motivated, but when it does disproportionately harm certain races, then the non-racist will do something about it. The racist sees it as a happy coincidence, or his secret, evil plan come to fruition. Plus, in pretty much all of these policies that had been debated upon, a great deal many of them are illogical, scientifically unreasonable, unsupportable based on evidence, and utterly unnecessary. There is pretty much NO voter fraud except the ones perpetuated by Republicans. We don’t need any new laws on Voter IDs because there isn’t enough to matter. And when it does disproportionately affect certain races, then the correct response is to ignore it but to work to reduce it
That’s both true and false. It may not be outwardly targeting race, but when race is so intricately entwined with class, then attacking the class is almost as bad as attacking the race. Its just that right now, white Republicans see it as a sellable alternative, that they can trick people into thinking its not about race when it is, and if anyone dares to claim that, then they vehemently disagree and cry racism. And again, if this was the Democrats doing it, I believe they would at least try to find another solution instead of happily rubbing their hands together and cackling.
The simple reality is that we’re not at that time anymore than any public official can so easily attack a race and get away with it. I suppose that’s progress, but in that absence they’ve evolved other ways of attacking race indirectly. Welfare queens, illegal immigration, the Willie Horton ad, how the word “thug” is used, or even the actress speaking with an exaggerated Asian accent in the Debbie Stabenow commercial are all racist with race front and center, but they get to claim it wasn’t and some people actually believe it.
And that is your reasoning and you are free to it. But to me, enough Republicans do these things that it taints the party as a whole, especially when party leadership participates and encourages this instead of slapping it down.
Well once upon a time, a Republican can advocate for amnesty and not let it harm him among the faithful, but now that time has passed. I applaud Democrats for trying to find a working solution to the over 12 million undocumented immigrants we have in this country, and feel its racist when many GOP not only lumps in those children brought here by their parents when they were babies as criminals, but do nothing to try to help them, and think that mass deportation is a way to solve the problem. If that’s not racist, then it is short-sighted, stupid, and will exacerbate the problem
That again? OK, let me make this clear on behalf of the Puppy-Stomping American Community: Drop it. Back off. We know where to find you. And we know where to find your puppies.
Nitpick: That expression actually uses “prove” in the sense of “test,” not “confirm.” Exceptions never prove the rule in the sense of confirming it, quite the reverse, they show the rule is either completely wrong or requires modification.
Well, put it this way: I think we all know that immigration politics within the GOP and on the right in general would be very different if, all other factors including poverty, illegal border-crossing, etc., being equal, the immigration-pressure were coming from Canada instead of Mexico. And the Minutemen would not exist.
I don’t know that at all. Consider the hostility that white European immigrants (Irish, Poles, Russians, Jews, and so on) were greeted with by white Americans in the recent past. Clearly, nativism exists without the need for racial differences.
Low-skilled working-class people will always feel threatened by poor immigrants willing to work for less, law-and-order people will always be morally offended by widescale law-breaking, and national-security people will always panic at the thought of an unsecured border.
I don’t think demonization can be done via code words.
There are divisions other than racial ones. Again, I was unclear.
So, no strictly racial policies. I’m not defending the party as not being anti-gay, though it’s beginning the early stages of shifting. Being allegedly anti-women is its own can of worms I’d rather not open.
If you state that Republican policies are generally less generous to the poor (with some exceptions, eg, Section 8 really was better than public housing), and the poor are disproportionately black and Hispanic, I wouldn’t argue. It doesn’t follow that their policies are less generous to the poor because the poor are disproportionately black and Hispanic. Bear in mind that fully half of the people below the poverty line in the U.S. are white. We have plenty here in Kentucky.
There’s Jim Russell, dropped from the party when his anti-miscegenation writings came to light.
Or Don Yelton, forced to resign after making some racist remarks.
The non-racist won’t do anything about it if the entire point was to discourage votes for the other party, rather than stop voter fraud or harm non-white people. You’re attributing to racism what’s more easily explained by trying to swing a few elections here and there. You think if the GOP could find a way to make it harder for, say, actors, university professors, or some other heavily-Democratic group to vote, they wouldn’t unless the group was also disproportionately black or Hispanic? You’ve giving them both too much and too little credit.
Attacking the poor isn’t racism, though. It may or may not be almost as bad, that’s irrelevant, it simply is not racism.
No solution is needed, because it’s not a problem. It’s about swinging elections, and maybe some element of manufacturing a problem so you can then solve it and score points with the voters. If the Democrats were ginning up a shady plan to swing elections, they’d be happily rubbing their hands together and cackling too. They aren’t in a position right now to need to do that, though. They have been before.
That belies your “The Republican Party can be called racist” claim, does it not? If the party that represents almost half the voting adults is racist, why couldn’t it get away with attacking a race?
I’d say your brush here to simply too broad. You’re blending classism, xenophobia (an anti-China ad doesn’t automatically double as an anti-ethnic-Chinese ad), completely non-political matters like the connotations of “thug”, and an ad that attacked a prison furlough program that did, indeed, let a man escape to commit rape and armed robbery.
To say they participate and encourage it, you’d need to show me where the RNC paid for and distributed the bumper stickers.
They do slap it down from their officials…but from the voters? It’d be a more moraly pure stance to urge party members to refrain from using ethnic slurs and so on, but politics, particularly the coalition politics of the U.S., are not a morally pure business.
There are counter-arguments to amnesty, though, and they aren’t racist ones: it incentivizes more illegal immigration. Amnesty that isn’t coupled with a massive reform of immigration policy is a bad idea, and calling opposition to amnesty a prima facie case for racism is just demonizing the opposition.
That’s my real beef with your stance: by being willing to stand by inferences and your reading of “code words” instead of actual policy, by blending classism, racism, and xenophobia together, and by assuming that policy disagreements are motivated by truth and justice on your side and bitter racism on the other side, it’s highly destructive to dialogue and compromise. It makes politics a holy war - why compromise, when God is on our side? becomes why compromise, or even entertain the notion of honest disagreement, when they are just a bunch of racists? It’s really no different from saying the Democratic party can be called socialist, or that they are trying to destroy America. It’s noise, not signal.
It is that. I’m for open borders, myself.
Of course demonization can be done via code words. The practice is an old one. See dog whistle politics.
If YogSosoth meant that Republicans were demonizing other races purely to each other, I didn’t get that impression. I’m sure he’ll let me know.
Purely to what each other?
Even if a GOP politician isn’t overtly racist/homophobic/xenophobic/sexist, there’s still a high possibility that they are. They can appeal to their bigot constituents by saying very vague things that could easily be interpreted as endorsement of their fascist wet dreams.
I’ll frame it. You said the GOP “have demonized other races”. Did you mean they did so in code words intended for other GOP members’ consumption, or in plaintext intended for a wide audience? Or, a third thing. If possible, an example of this demonization would be helpful.
So what about black Republicans? Do they hate themselves?