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   Memo: The way forward on health care reform in 2010.
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January 20, 2009
By: Race Since The 80s Matt Cooper has a really interesting post at TPMDC, on the difficulty of explaining to people who weren't around (or old enough) at the time just how different, and more troubled, race relations were like in the 80s and early 90s. He asks: "Why is America's racial atmosphere less poisonous than it was then?" And he offers a few answers: the drop in black crime and teen pregnancy, the disappearance of issues like school busing,the mainstreaming of hip-hop, Bill Clinton's ease with African-Americans and Bush's cabinet picks. Josh Marshall adds: "American mass culture found a more useful scary other: Arabs and Muslims. That's a key thing that isn't pretty but I think is also true." Since I seem to be around the same age as Cooper, I thought I'd offer a few more possibilities, which I've put below the fold. First, whatever welfare reform's impact on poverty, I think it's hard to overstate the political effects of removing welfare from the list of perennial campaign issues. Despite the fact that the majority of welfare recipients were white, debates about welfare always seemed to devolve into debates about such topics as whether inner-city blacks actually deserved to be helped at all, whether welfare perpetuated social pathologies in black communities, and other topics guaranteed to reinforce any suspicion anyone might have had that there was something wrong with a whole lot of black people, something that people in Washington seemed to think meant that we (and the subtext of these debates was "we") should fork over large sums of money to "them." I think that the simple fact that we are not talking about this all the time has helped a lot (though the fact that we are not talking much about poverty either is a very serious problem.) Second, I think that people, most especially white people, often imagined that the legacy of racism would be much easier to correct than it actually was -- as though as soon as legal obstacles to, say, voting were removed, everything would be OK, if not immediately then in a few years. They had, in other words, an unreasonable view of how long it takes to undo centuries of institutionalized injustice. By the mid-eighties, a lot of those legal obstacles had been removed -- but the problems hadn't all gone away! I think that the simple fact that time passes has helped here: the early eighties through mid-nineties were, I think, the time at which the discrepancy between people's unreasonable expectations and actual progress was likely to be sharpest. Since then, that progress has continued, and so the discrepancy has gotten smaller. More importantly, though, I think a lot of the credit has to go to affirmative action. Affirmative action obviously created political problems of its own. But the idea, I always thought, was that while it would obviously preferable not to have been racist in the first place, affirmative action was necessary in order to ensure that more than a few African-Americans (and others less relevant to this post) had the opportunity their talents should have entitled them to to get the jobs, training, and so forth that they needed to advance into the middle and professional classes. And this, it seemed to me, was important not only for fairness and equality of opportunity, but because the simple fact of its being normal for blacks to be in jobs and colleges and the like would help immeasurably. America is still much, much too segregated. But it is much less so than it was when I was growing up. -- In what follows, I'm going to talk primarily about people in relatively privileged settings, because that's what I know best. I believe that similar points can be made more generally, but for now I'll stick to what I know. When I was in high school, Boston was in the midst of its busing crisis, which means that its public schools were only then being desegregated, under court order and in the face of violent resistance. I cannot recall any black (or Hispanic, or Asian) students at the (private) school I went to for grades 1-6; there were a handful at the school I spent grades 7-12 in, but not many. When I was in college, there were very few minority students, and many of those I knew felt somewhat besieged and unsure of their welcome. This changed dramatically during the 80s and 90s: when I started teaching, the ethnic composition of my classes was vastly different than it had been when I was a student, and it is even more different today. The same is true in a lot of professions. This matters enormously, not just for the obvious reasons of basic fairness and justice, but because it means that many more whites are familiar with blacks than they used to be. -- Conservatives often point out the various idiotic things that people say and do in the name of not being racist. I think they're right about some of the idiocy -- the 70s and 80s, in particular, had a lot of earnest white people walking up to unsuspecting African Americans and saying things like: Hey, brother, I'm down with your struggle. They're also right about some of the idiotic excesses of political correctness: my personal favorite example was a brouhaha about a poster that some student group had put up advertising an event that involved (iirc) "a lazy afternoon relaxing and eating burritos", which supposedly implied that Mexicans were lazy. The late 80s and early 90s were full of that stuff. Where I differed with conservatives who made those arguments was that I thought: well, this is what happens when people come to realize that there is something very wrong with their habitual ways of thinking about, and behaving towards, people they often don't really know at all, and try to figure out how to change their ways. It's especially likely in the case of racism, in which a lot of problems are likely to involve unconscious habits of mind and behavior. (You might think you're not a racist, but wouldn't a racist think that too?) In situations like that, people say and do stupid things. They second-guess their own motives, and they don't always get it right. They try to establish their anti-racist cred by constituting themselves as the Official Racism Police. They are in no position to distinguish blacks who have discovered the delightful possibilities of being able to make white people feel guilty about almost anything, and have decided to explore them, from blacks with genuine and serious complaints about their conduct. This is all to be expected. But it in no way implies that the attempt is not worth making, or that if we proceed with good will, we won't eventually do better. If you're white, and you believe that racism is wrong and that you should try to avoid it, and you don't know a lot of black people, I thought, then a certain amount of idiocy is in your future. It just is. And a whole lot of white people of my acquaintance really didn't know a lot of blacks. That was, of course, part of the problem. But the solution to it was not, I thought, to sneer at the whole effort. It was to do your best, observe carefully, think hard, be generous, and accept the fact that you just were going to do a number of things that would, in retrospect, make you absolutely cringe. The idiocy was temporary, and born of ignorance. With time, I thought, it would fade to normal human levels of awkwardness and cluelessness. I also thought -- and here I'm on shakier ground -- that many of the African-Americans I knew were also working out issues of their own about what it meant to be black in a world in which blacks were not forced into opposition to mainstream culture. There they were, attending schools that had, in recent memory, been all-white, accepting jobs that had not previously been open to blacks, becoming investment bankers and such. What was that about? What, under these novel circumstances, counted as the normal sort of getting along, and what counted as being co-opted? Was there some amount of assimilation into, say, the dominant social norms at one's law firm at which one crossed over from collegiality into a serious betrayal of one's identity? What did it mean to be a successful black doctor living in the Connecticut suburbs, and how did you do that without selling out or forgetting who you were? There were people who did this effortlessly and with enormous grace, but I think there were also, and understandably, people who flailed around a bit before figuring it out. I also think that the combination of such flailing and the white cluelessness I described earlier was worse than the sum of its parts. The general point, though, is: I think that things are very, very different now. A white kid who's now twenty would not have gone to a grade school with no black kids, as I did. She might have gone to a college where people of different ethnicities tended to eat at different tables, but the simple fact that the number of non-whites is vastly higher than it was would have to make interaction a lot more common, and thus no big deal. And black kids who go to Ivy league schools, or end up in investment banks, have many more role models to look to, and so have less need to invent ways of being who they are in those worlds entirely from scratch This was always, to me, one of the main points of affirmative action: that all this stuff would just become much more normal, and, slowly but surely, we'd find our way out of the idiotic flailing phase of race relations and into something less awkward and fraught. I think this has a lot to do with the thaw that Matt Cooper talks about, and it's a wonderful thing. We're not nearly there yet, but I think we're much closer than we were when I was young. —Hilzoy 12:37 AM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (29)Comments
I like this, but I'm going to throw a couple of other things in as well. First, the inclusion of black middle class people in pop culture had, I think, a big impact, and I'm talking about television primarily. The Cosby Show was incredibly popular when I was in my early teens, and I think it changed the view of a lot of people--they were a black family who wasn't poor or struggling (Good Times, What's Happening). They had middle to upper-middle class problems and concerns, and they weren't there as a comic foil for a white primary character. They weren't Arnold and Willis from Different Strokes, in other words. And most importantly, they weren't criminals, like practically every person of color on a cop show. Also, there was the rise of the Hispanic community as a major force outside of the border areas. They took the pressure off a bit--African-Americans weren't the only minority around anymore, so it became less of a dichotomy in terms of race. You got that a bit more in the pop culture as well. And thirdly, I think the generational shift was the big one. Older people who had grown up with segregation as the norm died off and were replaced with people who not only didn't see race the same way, but who were ashamed of it. Add in the incremental increase in interracial dating and marriage--Loving v. Virginia was decided in 1967, the year before I was born--and suddenly interracial relationships don't seem as odd as they did to my parents' generation. And my daughter sees it as even less odd than I did. But the big one, I think, is television. It's hard to overestimate how much of an effect that had on my generation, especially since we're talking about a time when most people, if they had tv, got four channels--the big three networks and PBS. You could change a lot of minds with a popular show. Posted by: Incertus (Brian) on January 20, 2009 at 1:01 AM | PERMALINKMy wife told me about a co-worker that complained about the idiocy perpetrated by "A" would always qualify his complaints with "...but it's not because he's black." My wife and her friend, being of a younger generation, would roll their eyes. They agreed "A" was a moron, and didn't see why the extra disclaimer was needed. He's an idiot! In any color! Duh. To go far afield, my wife similarly thinks "Battlestar Galactica" is a good "post modern" representation of gender, in the same way you're talking about race. The leader is a woman; but she's flawed and makes decisions that may or may not work out, she doesn't have to be perfect. She's a valid character, regardless of her gender. I kind of see a similar parallel with black relations today: You can have a compelling black character who doesn't have to be perfect. Bill Cosby was a "perfect" dad: wealthy, self-assured, always said the right thing. Nowadays, that isn't necessary. Barack Obama smokes? Big deal. We're free to love him or hate him or not give a damn about him. Posted by: anonymous guy on the internet on January 20, 2009 at 1:24 AM | PERMALINKIt's less an explanation than an observation, but the fact is that the presence of African-Americans in ANY context (like, I don't know, president-elect, for instance) is not jarring, even for Neanderthals, and twenty years ago that wasn't the case. And that, I think, is the long term salutary benefit of affirmative action. An interesting question. If I had to give the top three causes of improved race relations, it'd have to be time, integration and media, with all three being inter-related and having a positive effect on one another. First off, time. Many of my older relatives were/are outright racist, as much as I love them. I got to hear the "n" word growing up and still hear it on occasion. But my grandparents are sadly gone now and at our family gatherings, those older relatives who are blatantly racist are now outnumbered by the younger generation. But why is the younger generation far more comfortable with people of other race? Because of integration, promoted by affirmative action, better economic opportunities, etc. I grew up with black friends, I've had interracial relationships, many of my co-workers are of different races. For my older, racist relatives, they have never in their life had a black friend, never had a black person or other minority in their neighborhood growing up. Minorities are this scary "other" that they want nothing to do with. And there are still people my age who are racist. Heck, while looking at houses, my 19-year-old sister recently declared that my mother couldn't move to a certain neighborhood because it was a "black neighborhood." My mother was horrified that she had even considered the place and agreed to look elsewhere. That said, they both voted for Obama and a number of their neighbors in their current, upscale neighborhood are black (actually, it's two black families, one Hispanic, one Asian and one mixed just on their street alone). So while they still harbor prejudices, they're not afraid to have black neighbors, black friends, even in my sister's case, black boyfriends. That changes the tone and level of the racism. Finally, there's the media. Don't underestimate the power of shows like the Cosbys, actors like Will Smith and all the black presidents that kept popping up in the movies and on TV. Once different races were shown living and working together in the media, people could envision living and working with other races in the real world. I remember the first time I saw a black president in the movies, I was surprised. After that though, I grew de-sensitized to it. Anyways, that's my take on it. Posted by: FoxinSocks on January 20, 2009 at 1:48 AM | PERMALINKI know self-congratulation is the order of the day, but aren't you at all weirded out by the fact that when America finally got around to picking a black President, he turned out to be somebody who was brought up by whites while sequestered out in the ocean thousands of miles from any significant African-American community? Posted by: Steve Sailer on January 20, 2009 at 2:37 AM | PERMALINKI think there's a risk in getting carried away with any analysis of racial attitudes in which Obama is the focus or even a factor. Race aside, he was not a typical candidate, he did not run a typical campaign, and he was running against the most unpopular administration in living memory. I hope with all my heart that minorities take this as inspiration, and move forward with the attitude that they can do more than they thought was possible a year ago. I hope that whites who might have previously stood in their way no longer act as impediments. But on the individual level, the truth is, all of us still have a long, long way to go.
Hilzoy, Many interesting things in this post. But one thing you should definitely take on board is this basic demographic fact: whites and blacks are MORE de facto segregated educationally today than they were in the 1970s. Gary Orfield has done a lot of the best work on this "resegregation" of American schools over the past 20 years. Check out Table 8 on page 23 of this: that table is for the South. But in every region of the country, as this report and many others describe, most blacks still go to schools that are majority-minority, with many attending schools that are nearly all black. And the most segregated group of all is whites (in terms of the proportion who go to schools that have disproportionately few members of other races.) There have been a lot of important cultural changes since the 1980s, as you say. But as far as segregation, while certainly some higher education institutions are now pretty integrated, many others are not, and schools are rapidly resegregating. Posted by: Joey on January 20, 2009 at 2:56 AM | PERMALINKA Japanese friend of mine observed that social changes like this seem to occur across generations less gradually than you'd predict from whatever other relevant circumstances had changed. He was thinking of the status of Koreans in Japan; when he married his Korean wife ~15 years ago, the parents on both sides were horrified, but anti-Korean bias among Japanese college students is now rare. The only obvious change in circumstances is the decline of a segregated system of Korean schools. Similarly, I'm in my 30's and when I was in high school, the thought of coming out of the closet was... well, there was no such thought, and there were no gay high school students, and if you were exceptionally brave then you might manage to come out by the time you graduated college. The shift in attitudes toward gays has been dramatic in a very short amount of time. In both cases, there are still discriminatory laws affecting the minority which wouldn't be on the books if people under 30 were running the show. It's easier to shape minds than to change them, I guess. Posted by: piminnowcheez on January 20, 2009 at 3:02 AM | PERMALINK"but aren't you at all weirded out by the fact that when America finally got around to picking a black President, he turned out to be somebody who was brought up by whites while sequestered out in the ocean thousands of miles from any significant African-American community?" On the one hand, that makes him perhaps an atypical example of achievement in that he is outside the broader specifically black American history. Which perhaps made him easier "acceptable" to some people than, say, someone like Jesse Jackson Jr, less "awkward" because there is no background of slavery/Jim Crow usw. in his personal history (which is why I think one of the reason reactions against MICHELLE Obama, were often so volatile). On the other hand, Obama had to contend with the additional burden of his Muslim connection, which, as Josh Marshall rightly says, is the new "other", and was used as an excuse to be prejudiced against him when people didn't outrightly admit to racism against blacks. Posted by: Candia on January 20, 2009 at 3:13 AM | PERMALINKIf we don't focus too much on the unique figure of Obama, how much have things really changed? How many black U.S. Senators are there? Just Roland Burris (D-Blagojevich) How many black U.S. governors are there? Just Deval Patrick (D-Axelrod) How many black Members of the House are there? 41, I believe, but almost all elected in districts gerrymandered to elect blacks. Posted by: Steve Sailer on January 20, 2009 at 3:23 AM | PERMALINKI also agree that affirmative action and integration has been an essential part of making this day possible. I wrote a piece on this November 4th reflecting on how the past few decades have changed America in this regard. And this is is what I noted: Every decade since MLK's days has built on top of the preceding one, and we've had time to let the magic of integration change our perspectives. Despite numerous challenges, delays and roadblocks to integration, Americans from all walks of life have learned to live with each other in our schools, our workplaces, our neighborhoods and our culture. We are no longer surprised to see qualified and well-respected African-Americans occupying positions of authority, responsibility and genuine celebrity in our communities, our companies and our government. Most Americans hold people like Bill Cosby, Oprah, Colin Powell, Tiger Woods, etc., as our heroes, exemplars and role models. We are well and truly changed for the better. There is nothing like working together for common goals to make people truly feel like we are brothers and sisters in this together. It is this same magic of getting to know and appreciate gays within our communities that has helped make our society more tolerant and inclusive. It truly is Martin Luther King, Jr's dream - it is the content of one's character that tells who we are and how to value our contribution to this world. This to me is one of the most incredible things about this day. Posted by: Mary on January 20, 2009 at 3:23 AM | PERMALINKI'm older than Hilzoy and have been following social statistics since 1972, and I'm struck by how little things have changed since the early 1970s. Consider that Tom Bradley won five straight elections as mayor of LA, a city only about 15% black, starting in 1973. In 1982 he came within an inch of being elected governor of the largest state. That likely would have put him on the Democrat's 1984 national ticket as the VP diversity token instead of Geraldine Ferraro. Of course, Mondale still would have lost badly, but with Bradley (the classic "just happens to be black" mainstream politician) as a positive role model as the Veep candidate 24 years ago, it's possible that we would have seen a better integration of blacks into elective office. Posted by: Steve Sailer on January 20, 2009 at 3:25 AM | PERMALINKI would say that "illegal immigrants" and are the new other. Apparently you can shoot them in the ass, leave them bleeding in the desert, and get a presidential commutation. Posted by: asdf on January 20, 2009 at 3:31 AM | PERMALINKOr consider Jesse Jackson's career, which doesn't follow Hilzoy's theory. In the 1970s, Jesse was a widely popular figure, less controversial than he became in the 1980s, who went around giving speeches telling black kids not to take drugs. His image was more that of a Booker T. Washington black self-improvement preacher than a black v. white confrontationist. In the 1980s, however, he moved more into confronting whites over discrimination and developed his now familiar racket of shaking down guilty corporations for donations and contracts to black businessmen connected to him. Why the change? I suspect because Jesse discovered that he could make money at it. Posted by: Steve Sailer on January 20, 2009 at 3:32 AM | PERMALINKI'm surprised nobody mentioned propaganda in public schools. When I was going to school in the '80s and '90s, the civil rights struggle was mentioned frequently, its leaders lionized, it's goals of integration, justice, and equality were portrayed as self-evidently good. This kind of thing sinks in after awhile, even (I suspect) if the parents try to fight it.
Baby steps. It's probably inevitable that the first black president would have stronger than usual ties to white culture. This will probably be less of a problem for subsequent black presidential candidates. Posted by: Boronx on January 20, 2009 at 3:40 AM | PERMALINKI think race relations really have improved since the 1980s, for many reasons. Certainly the fact is that open, hostile racism was already socially unacceptable in much of the country by the 1980s. And this means the next generation didn't grow up hearing racist sentiments everywhere. It's a lot easier to propagate prejudice from one generation to the next openly than it is by subtle winks and nods. A generation died who had been raised during a time when the KKK was actually respected, and a far more tolerant generation took its place. Remember that in 1984 there were probably millions of active voters born in the nineteenth century, and they all remembered Civil War veterans in parades. Also, Cooper mentions the historic decline in violent crime. The statistically unfair but popularly pervasive image of the crime wave was black-on-white random street crime, and this has ebbed considerably as an issue. And of course the general demographic changes in America have been quite significant over twenty years. Finally, something that I believe moved America closer to black-white reconciliation was actually 9/11. This was not completely for pure reasons. Surely the sight of New Yorkers of all races rallying patriotically softened a few hearts, but another aspect was that there was a new, more urgent "evil other" to focus on. Consciously or not, I think a fair number of fairly conservative whites looked at blacks and started to see people who were fundamentally American and clearly on "our side." I'd be curious as to whether this is born out by the data, but my sense (and Cooper mentions this) is that housing is much less segregated than it used to be, and that this matters. Through the '80s, a lot of cities were like the Philadelphia of my youth: a tiny core of gleaming office buildings and white yuppies housed (with Fort-Knox-like security) in high-rises and renovated townhouses; surrounded by a vast crime- and poverty-ridden wasteland (or so it seemed to whites) of black neighborhoods that still hadn't recovered from the '60s riots; surrounded by white working class neighborhoods in chronic fear of the black areas next door; surrounded by the green and leafy white middle- and upper-class suburbs. Since then the different zones have bled into one another, and the stark racial divides have been blurred, thanks to immigration, the renewed popularity of downtown living, and black upward mobility. The falling crime rate (esp the waning of the crack epidemic) has been part of it too, though I agree that black-on-white crime was always much less pervasive than most whites thought it was. So there's been a lifting of the sense of siege that a lot of whites in urban & suburban neighborhoods felt throughout the '70s and '80s. Of course, generational and cultural shifts contributed too. Posted by: Basilisc on January 20, 2009 at 5:11 AM | PERMALINKeconomics and demographics are the two significant variables, imho. wealthier communities (at least in massachusetts) are much less racially diverse than those that are less well off. when you're poor, you lose your right to object to much about anything. Posted by: karen marie on January 20, 2009 at 6:24 AM | PERMALINKI'm 48. My thought is all the old racist are dead or almost dead and most the bigots are to tired to keep flailing at the rest of us getting along. Add this astute observation by my 11 year old as we walked on The Mall yesterday, me explaining to her why this election is historically important and she said "He's just a man, dad, he's just a man." Wise words to remember, the kids are transcending. Posted by: Jeff In Ohio on January 20, 2009 at 7:21 AM | PERMALINKI'm in my early 50s. I went to a 97% white high school, and a 95% white college. The difference is that I never was taught racism at home. I was taught to look at character, not color or faith. That was the message that MLK had for us all. And when I had children, my children went to schools that were more integrated than mine, had more friends of color and faith than I did, and never even thought to tell me if their friends were black before they brought them home--color didn't matter to them. It was how they were raised at home and how the local culture encouraged them to be. I live in a large city on the east coast, and meeting and working with people of color is not an issue here. But I know that there are pockets of the country where there is no color--and it is there that suspicion and racism still thrive. I like to think that it is ignorance that perpetrates it. And I am not so naive as to believe that there are not people who thrive on the hate. But I pray they are being more and more marginalized as this country continues its march to accept that all men are created equal. Posted by: cyrki on January 20, 2009 at 8:05 AM | PERMALINKCombining a few points, hopefully in a way that isn't redundant, I'd like to give "white guilt" a badge of honor. My parents (out of my earshot) wrung their hands a little when I was engaged an ex-girlfriend, a black woman. I had NO idea they'd have any problem with it. They knew their concerns were irrational, and wrong for that reason, so they were very careful to shut their mouths. I'm not sure how open-minded I am, but I do know that my kids certainly seem oblivious to color. The other factors mentioned in previous comments and the essay have produced an environemnt of 2 half-Latino, one Latino, one black, two white, and one I-have-no-idea playmates. My kids no doubt won't find this integration remarkable enough to notice what race their kids' playmates are, nor how different and heart-lifting it is. Maybe this ability to still see color is a small blessing for us. We can celebrate this deliberate triumph of our parents and ourselves. We simply chose to reject racism and it worked. In spades. We elected a black man president. OMG. How the heck did THAT happen? Cool. Posted by: toowearyforoutrage on January 20, 2009 at 8:31 AM | PERMALINKI got hammered for commenting on Cooper's thread that this election is a huge step forward. Apparently some like translate "huge step forward" as "ok, we no longer have a racial divide!" Which of course we do. But that doesn't diminish the significance of this step, and here's why: It's the first time the American people, as a whole, have of their own accord decided NOT to allow race to be the overriding determining factor. Every other step towards equality that we've taken - from civil rights to integration to school desegregation (which Steve Sailer correctly points out did not "hold" over the long run) to affirmative action - every single one of those actions was imposed upon the American public by legislative actions and judicial rulings, not by people taking it upon themselves to do the fair and right thing. To be sure, we wouldn't have arrived here, at this point in time, without being pushed into those earlier concessions to fairness legislatively and judicially. Those sops to fair play did over time change the culture - those of us under 45 never attended a segregated school, and those of us 45 - 60 weren't adults with our notions about how the world works set in stone by the time of the civil rights movement. And tellingly, in both of those age groups, Obama got half or over half of the vote. It was only with the old-timers, people who were already adults under segregation and Jim Crow, that he lost. So no, we aren't there yet - but this is nonetheless HUGE because it indicates that the balance has shifted quite a bit over the last 20 years. Many, perhaps most of us, no longer require the force of law to make us see beyond skin color. That's big, really big. Posted by: Jennifer on January 20, 2009 at 10:08 AM | PERMALINKaren't you at all weirded out by the fact that when America finally got around to picking a black President, he turned out to be somebody who was brought up by whites while sequestered out in the ocean thousands of miles from any significant African-American community? Posted by: Steve Sailer Not black enough for you, is he? Posted by: kc on January 20, 2009 at 10:37 AM | PERMALINKThe potential is always there and increasing. A population of 90% white, 10% black was stable; but when there are two or more ethnic groups that are strong enough to compete for power, often there is conflict, and future US demographics are predicted to be majority minority. Also, tolerance is largely a luxury of wealth, and the US is in economic decline, perhaps freefall. For ex., if a Chinese businessman has 10 job openings and three applicants, he will hire all three regardless of race; but if he has only one job opening and two thousand applicants, he is likely to favor a Chinese applicant if available. The less there is, the more people fight over it, and this is just immutable human nature. Some troubling signs are that black voters voted 95% for Obama. You can't logically separate race preference from racial discrimination. If only 15% of blacks had voted for Hillary, she would have been the candidate. Hispanics for the most part are more loyal to la raza than to eeuu, as revealed by the support for illegal migration, and an unseemly ambition for power (if you read Spanish papers), including a belief among Hispanic racists like Luis Gutierrez and other pols that they are strong enough to target white pols who believe in rule of law in immigration. I'm too old for this stuff to affect me, but I can't say I share in a belief in diversity. Diversity is what you have in Lebanon, Rwanda, Iraq, and so forth. Posted by: Luther on January 20, 2009 at 11:46 AM | PERMALINKDon't forget marriage between partners of different races (and here I include all races) which is more frequent and more visible today. Posted by: reidmc on January 20, 2009 at 1:00 PM | PERMALINKbut aren't you at all weirded out by the fact that when America finally got around to picking a black President, he turned out to be somebody who was brought up by whites while sequestered out in the ocean thousands of miles from any significant African-American community? That attitude annoys me. You're basically saying that Obama isn't a real African American, which isn't any different than the Republican argument that he wasn't a real American at all. Would a West Coast black candidate have been acceptable to you, or a kid from New York, or would he have to be a child of the segregationist South? The fact is that Obama is "black enough" to anyone who cared enough to vote for or against him on that basis. Shorter Sailer: "Not southern enough, not Christian enough, not *my* kind of Christian enough, not Republican enough, not the "right parentage enough", not Northern European enough, not melanin-challenged enough... Oh hell, lemme just say it: NOT GEORGE BUSH ENOUGH" Posted by: anonymous on January 20, 2009 at 2:30 PM | PERMALINKOne word: crime. The 'crime bust' removed the deep abiding American white fear of black criminals. Or minimised it to a level where it could no longer bring the votes. Contrast Willy Horton in 1988 to now- -that ad, of a paroled black prisoner raping and killing a white woman, changed the outcome of a presidential election. Just as Richard Nixon ruthlessly milked fear of crime as a way of saying 'race' without saying 'race', so too did Ronald Reagan. Crime scored in the top 2 or 3 issues of every election, I believe, from 1972 to 1992. But by the late 1990s in America, it just wouldn't stick. If America no longer fears the young black male on its doorstep, then it was prepared to elect one as president. 
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