Posted on 10/13/2008 9:33:58 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
One of the fallacies this election season is that if Barack Obama is paying an electoral price for his skin tone, it must be because of racists.
On the contrary, the evidence is that Mr. Obama is facing what scholars have dubbed "racism without racists."
The racism is difficult to measure, but a careful survey completed last month by Stanford University, with The Associated Press and Yahoo, suggested that Mr. Obama's support would be about 6 percentage points higher if he were white. That's significant but surmountable.
Most of the lost votes aren't those of dyed-in-the-wool racists. Such racists account for perhaps 10 percent of the electorate and, polling suggests, are mostly conservatives who would not vote for any Democratic presidential candidate.
Rather, most of the votes that Mr. Obama actually loses belong to well-meaning whites who believe in racial equality and have no objection to electing a black person as president -- yet who discriminate unconsciously.
"When we fixate on the racist individual, we're focused on the least interesting way that race works," said Phillip Goff, a social psychologist at UCLA who focuses his research on "racism without racists." "Most of the way race functions is without the need for racial animus."
For decades, experiments have shown that even many whites who earnestly believe in equal rights will recommend hiring a white job candidate more often than a person with identical credentials who is black. In the experiments, the applicant's folder sometimes presents the person as white, sometimes as black, but everything else is the same. The white person thinks that he or she is selecting on the basis of nonracial factors like experience.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
He wouldn't be a factor in this election, if he didn't have a racial distinction. He would've been another also ran. A younger Howard Dean.
Even Howard Dean had executive experience, though, as governor of Vermont. Senators Obama and Biden have a combined 0 years of executive experience, combined.
It’s ALL ABOUT THE MARXISM!!!!!
“But another lesson, a historical one, is that we can overcome unconscious bias. That’s what happened with the decline in prejudice against Catholics after the candidacy of John F. Kennedy in 1960.”
So the writer takes a whole page to describe numerous studies describing how “well meaning Whites” harbor prejudices that they don’t believe they have. Then he concludes that voting for Obama will help white people overcome their “unconscious bias”!!! Sly rascal that N. Dickhless Kristof. And about as subtle as a train wreck. The insult is reason enough to show up to vote for McCain.
This guy was a puke and a useful idiot back in the Reagan years. He’s as stupid as they come. (Well, except for Kathleen Parker)
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