There appears to be a ten percent element on FR who are racist in my opinion. I've personally hit the abuse button for numerous racist posts and comments by these clods. These people should be kicked out and never allowed back on. Obviously they think this forum is for whites only. It's not, it's for all Americans who believe in the constitution.
I don’t think the racist element hits 10% but I do think a small real racist element is there. It’s not only the particularly nasty comments about things like Michelle Obama’s appearance but it can also be seen in the black on white crime threads and some threads about other things like education.
Free Republic was excellent at stopping this sort of thing in the past but two things changed. One was 9/11 and a lot of general anti-Arab and anti-Muslim “euphemisms” were given a pass because of the anger against Islamic radicals and the other was an attempt by white supremacist groups to use Free Republic as a recruiting ground (messages were found on their message boards to that effect) and while that was resisted, I think some have stuck around for the long haul. That, combined with a lot of other issues lead me to believe, in general, that race relations are getting worse, not better, because both sides are playing into each other’s stereotypes.
People need to remember that all it took was one idiot with a toy monkey with an Obama sticker on it at a Sarah Palin rally to make the media argue that her supporters were racist. I’ll go back to the crap in the soup analogy. It doesn’t matter if there is only a drop of it. If you put a drop of crap in the soup, it spoils the whole thing and nobody is going to want to eat it. Racism is like that on the right. Even if it’s a drop, it spoils everything it touches.
Again, all of this said, the abuse button works pretty well, the moderators and reasonable, and challenging the racism tends to help, too. So the takeaway message here is that the Freeper readers can also help police the site because the moderators can be everywhere.