Posted on July 14, 2010

A Vote for Doing Away With Race-Based Politics

Courtland Milloy, Washington Post, July 14, 2010

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{snip} A Washington Post/ABC News poll released Tuesday showed that President Obama’s approval ratings have reached “a new low among whites, at 40 percent, with his positive marks dipping under 50 percent for the first time among white college-educated women.”

Does race have anything to do with it? You betcha.

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To hear whites tell it, what really bothers them is a growing federal government that they fear will intervene in their lives–unless there’s an oil spill along the Gulf Coast, of course, in which case their complaint is too little intervention. Budget deficits are a worry, too, unless it’s George Bush running up the red ink.

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Whites, for instance, are overwhelmingly in favor of Arizona’s immigration law, according to most polls. And virtually none of the surveys has shown any concern for the rights of nonwhite Hispanics who would be subject to racial profiling and illegal search and seizures. These are the same people who like to wave copies of the U.S. Constitution and claim Obama is curtailing their freedoms.

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Amazing, really, how people from German, Irish, English, Italian, Polish, French, Welsh, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian and Russian backgrounds can land on American shores and coalesce around a racial category concocted solely to exploit others.

Enter the pitiful “tea party” movement–made up largely of well-educated and well-heeled whites. How desperately they cling to privileges that accrue from their skin color, going so far as to proclaim themselves victims of reverse discrimination.

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As for those who would claim that blacks relish their racial designation as much as whites do theirs, just remember that if white people didn’t insist on being white, there would be no such thing as race.

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