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Open thread Dec. 13, 2016

Dan Crawford | December 13, 2016 6:04 am

Tags: open thread Comments (2) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
2 Comments
  • Lord says:
    December 13, 2016 at 12:15 pm

    Celebrity Apprentice: Cabinet Edition, coming your way.

  • EMichael says:
    December 15, 2016 at 9:45 am

    Yep, the DP needs to find more(or any) black or brown Bernie Sanders. Cause these white racists are not dying fast enough.

    “What Obama and Axelrod said relates directly to an idea that Belcher lays out in detail in his new book, A Black Man in the White House. In it, he makes the case that Obama’s election triggered what he’s dubbed “America’s racial aversion crisis”: a panicked emotional response on the part of white Americans to an African-American president, which transformed into a powerful force in politics.

    Belcher uses numbers to support that claim. The book was inspired by a survey of voters between the 2008 general election and Obama’s reelection in 2012, tracking levels of “racial antagonism” — a term that basically means racism — along with political opinions.

    His conclusion, as he wrote in his book: “The changing cultural and racial demographics of the country had, indeed, finally allowed the nation to overcome a monumental electoral political barrier, but they did not ‘exorcize the racial ghost.’” That “racial ghost,” he writes, worked to “delegitimize the black man in the White House and stop him from effectively governing.”

    Belcher completed the book before the 2016 presidential election, but even then, he wrote that Donald Trump’s rise was another predictable result of white Americans’ preoccupation with racial group identity taking on a new, Obama-inspired, outsize role in voting choices — one that the president-elect was been happy to encourage.

    The following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation…..

    Jenée Desmond-Harris

    In the book, you use another term, “racial anxiety,” which you say is “the inevitability of no longer being in the majority that has some among the former majority so stressed out.” How does that tie into racial antagonism and to political attitudes?
    Cornell Belcher

    One of the things that I actually talk about in the book is how this really shouldn’t be a surprise when you have the dramatic [demographic] changes that are happening in this country, and for a segment of the electorate, Obama completely encapsulates those changes. He is not only the first person of color to hold the highest office in the land — he also did it while garnering only 38 percent of the white vote.

    So you have this vast majority not choosing a Barack Obama. In the history of country, political power has rested almost completely in the white majority, and we’re at point where that’s almost completely not true.

    What my research has shown and other research has shown is that people become more conservative or nationalistic with the increases in diversity — I think that’s exactly what my research has picked up on in the electorate, going back to the beginning of Obama’s presidency.

    In battleground states, particularly more diverse states, the percentage of white people voting Democrat decreases significantly as that population gets more diverse. So diversity is having an opposite impact that is harmful to Democrats.

    That’s why I argue to Democrats that you are going to lose more and more white votes, and unless there is a major party realignment, this is going to continue to be a phenomenon. As the Republican Party is seen more and more as the racial identification party for white people, you’re not gonna see us all of a sudden winning blue-collar white voters.”

    http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/12/12/13894546/obama-race-black-white-house-cornell-belcher-racism

    Last sentence is the key, and his book was written before the election.

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