From the transcript of Tuesday’s CNN primary coverage:
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, we have been looking at some of the exit polls from Kentucky, in particular the issue of race. Voters who said that race was important in making their decision or is the factor in making their decision.
DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: It is more disquieting news I think for Barack Obama as he looks for the general election.
COOPER: One in five I think.
GERGEN: It was about 21 percent that race was a factor. Nine out of ten of those voted for Hillary Clinton.
COOPER: And that is people that would admit it to a complete strangers taking these exit polls theoretically it would be even larger those who would not admit it.
GERGEN: And from her point of view, over a quarter of the people who voted for her today in Kentucky were people who said race was a factor in their decision. And it really means — I mean, she’s been talking about sexism in this race and she has complained about some in the last 24 hours.
You know race is really playing an increasing issue. And it also raises the question in my judgment of whether she shouldn’t say, you know, if you want to vote against him because he’s black, I don’t want your vote. I don’t want to win that way. This has no place in this primary.
COOPER: Do you see her saying that?
GERGEN: Well, she has been a champion — she’s been a champion of civil rights for a long, long time. She and her husband both have I think well-earned reputations in the civil rights front. She’s never had redneck votes before in her life.
I see no reason why she couldn’t take the high road here in the closing days of his campaign and try to take this on and take on the Reverend Wright issue to say, “Look, I campaigned with this fellow for 15 months. I know a lot of you people don’t think he shares your values that somehow Barack thinks like Reverend Wright. Not true. I know him. I have been with him. And race should come out of this.”
I think she could do a lot by taking a high road.
COOPER: Reverend Wright also showed up in these exit polls.
GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, in the state of Kentucky, 54 percent of the voters said Barack Obama shares the views of Reverend Wright. That’s something we saw also in West Virginia.
And does Barack Obama share your values? 53 percent of the voters in Kentucky said, “No, he doesn’t.” This is some of the repair work that he’s got to do in terms of the voters that Hillary Clinton is getting.
JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Hillary Clinton ought to keep in mind, I think, the long view here. She’s got many more years in public life ahead of her. Taking the high road at this point, saying I don’t want racists to vote for me, saying that this is about something bigger than just strategizing the last few races. I think that would stand her in very good stead.
BORGER: Very late for that. What in Montana and South Dakota?
TOOBIN: I mean, she might as well say it, because I think it would make a difference. This race has been so polarized along the issues of race and, frankly, I think most people blame her for that than they blame Obama. And to leave, if she’s in fact leaving on the high road, would do a world of good.
GERGEN: She could do it on Reverend Wright. She could still take that on before she leaves this race.
Here’s video.
For a while now the pundits have been expressing concerns that the White vote is going 60-40 or even 70-30 for Clinton. They generally don’t think the black vote going 80-20 or 90-10 for Obama is more noteworthy, and it certainly isn’t ever something they criticize. If anything they tell us this is perfectly understandable.
As the primary wears on the Clinton camp is getting desperate. The Obama camp is getting frustrated. Both view Whites, especially “working class” Whites, with distaste.
On Tuesday all was good and right in Oregon, where the “more highty-educated” Whites voted in large numbers for Obama. There was however a problem in Kentucky. There poor, under-educated, “working class” Whites had failed to act as the pundits desired:
GERGEN: It was about 21 percent that race was a factor. Nine out of ten of those voted for Hillary Clinton.
David Gergen and Jeffrey Toobin translated this into a call for Clinton to disown the “redneck” vote, to distance herself from “racists”.
Note the conclusion they’re juming to: if race is a factor for you, and you are White, and you vote for Clinton, then you are a racist.
This vicious anti-White meme has been hailed and echoed in the liberal blogosphere. See for example Clinton wins Kentucky, race chasm proven again, or David Gergen Speaks Truth – Denounce Racist Vote, or Visionary moments in punditry: David Gergen and Jeffrey Toobin call on Hillary Clinton to stop courting racists.
Anti-racists pride themselves on being hyper-sensitive to and hyper-critical of any whiff of demonization or hate. But in this case they seem more than willing to set those concerns aside. They seem not at all skeptical or objective or sympathetic when nasty things are said about Whites. In fact they seem absolutely gleeful and eager to add their own bile.
Pandagon, for instance, thought this was worth highlighting:
Kentucky has one of the country’s highest proportions of people who are not college graduates.
If you read the CNN transcript you can see this echoes what the “more-educated” Blitzer and King were talking about just before Gergen burbled out his hate. The assumption is that “smart” people vote for Obama. Because like, duh, anything else is just racist.
Momocrat thought this nasty slander was worth repeating:
On our chat last night, a Kentucky voter joined in during the last hour to say that in rural parts of her state, people are literally being told that Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. And people believe it! And the MSM pundits wonder why Obama didn’t spend much time in West Virginia and Kentucky?
Hmmmm. Or maybe Obama didn’t do well because he didn’t spend much time there. Maybe?
Bang the Drum says stop the world:
Please blog this, tweet this, and digg this. Let’s get some legs under what really was an historic moment in TV.
Time to crap on Whites! Get some legs under this! It’s historic!
Or is it just mind-numbingly normal?
All sarcasm aside, there’s a far more substantial problem here. What the anti-racists are doing is demonstrating their own hypocritical hate. They do so not only by being willfully blind to reasonable explanations Whites have to poll and vote as they did, but also by so thoroughly misinterpreting the statistics. They are eager to see only the “racism” they want to see.
I realize I have to explain this in more detail. This is because the media, our schools, and the liberal anti-racists who run them have done a very thorough job of brainwashing everyone that White = racist, and racist = bad. Please be patient and read on. I’ll spell it out as clearly as I can, especially for the benefit of the outraged anti-racist liberals who may drop by.
– – –
My first thought on hearing so many Whites had told pollsters that race was a factor for them was, gee, that’s awfully honest. Whites don’t expect applause for speaking frankly about race. In fact, they expect exactly the opposite. The topic is a minefield. Consider for example how the recent comments of Geraldine Ferraro and Bill Clinton have been greeted.
My second thought was, well of course race is a factor for White voters. There were those revelations about Obama spending 20 years associating with Reverend Wright, a man who has spouted all sorts of black-centric and anti-White rhetoric, which many blacks have said they do not find objectionable or even out of the ordinary. Then there was Obama’s “bitter, clinging” statement. That certainly made it seem as though he didn’t understand or sympathize with working class Whites. Then there was his “typical White person” characterization of his grandmother. Do you think Whites without a college degree may have heard that blacks are voting 90-10 for Obama? Perhaps they think what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Last of all, probably because the media has gone to lengths to keep it buried, there is Michelle Obama’s thesis, which revolves around her blackness and her concern for the black community. In fact it’s all about race!
Can an honest person sum up all these things as having to do with race? Which of them is not a legitimate concern? Can an honest White get credit for being honest? Why are Whites the only group whose voting patterns are not only scrutinized but criticized?
Everyone in the CNN studio Tuesday night was well aware of Wright. The exit polls reflected his impact. Were the pundits not listening? Apparently not. A few months ago David Gergen defended Obama by downplaying the importance of these race-related issues. He thinks anyone who can’t set aside Wright and overlook Obama’s gaffes must be irrational and is therefore a racist.
Other pundits seem equally blind and/or biased. They find it easier to accuse Whites of being stupid and ethnocentric than to admit that Obama and the people he associates with are more overtly ethnocentric. They can’t face the possibility that Whites are justified in not liking or trusting Obama. They’d sooner slur and defame Whites than accept the possibility that Whites are right.
My third thought was, wow, 9 out of 10 voters who said race was a factor voted for Clinton. But that means the other 10% voted for Obama. So how many blacks voted? How many voted for Obama? How many of them said race was a factor?
For some strange reason the answers to these questions are not easy to find. It’s surprising because CNN, and especially the AP story cited by Pandagon, reported plenty of statistics about Whites. They could have provided the black numbers for comparison, but they didn’t. Wouldn’t it have helped illustrate how Whites differed? Wouldn’t it just be fair and informative to provide those numbers?
The AP writer says:
Seven in 10 whites overall backed Clinton in Kentucky, including about three quarters of those who have not completed college.
No black statistics. I’d like to have the raw data CNN and AP used, but they don’t offer it, and I can’t find it.
WaPo, however, did provide some important numbers:
In Kentucky, Obama won by better than 9 to 1 among black voters, but they made up just 9 percent of the electorate.
So more than 90% of blacks voted for Obama. Wow. CNN and AP didn’t mention that.
What’s more intriguing is that 8-9% of Obama’s voters were black and 10% of the voters who said race matters voted for Obama. What was the overlap between these groups? Might it have been larger than the 19% of Clinton’s White voters who said race matters? In other words, could a deeper examination of these statistics reveal that race was just as much or more of a factor for Obama’s black voters than it was for Clinton’s White voters?
Did David Gergen or Jeffery Toobin or anyone else in the CNN studio that night think such thoughts? Why did Gergen use the epithet “redneck” in explaining the thoughts he did have? Why didn’t anyone there object to that epithet or the hateful anti-White conclusions he and Toobin were jumping to?
Gergen and Toobin and the anti-racist bloggers who consider them heroes think a large fraction of Whites saying race affects their vote is wrong, something to be concerned about, something to renounce. But it seems likely Obama’s black voters are equally human. If White voters who say race is a factor are racist, then aren’t blacks who say it racist too?
Will CNN or AP share their raw data? Will Gergen and Toobin or any other media pundit go on prime time cable to apologize to Whites? Or will they call on Obama to reject the votes of black racists? Are there any liberal anti-racist bloggers who will admit they made a mistake and renounce their own anti-White hate?
I doubt it.
Jackie Mason, Cranky Old Marxist
http://rustymason.blogspot.com/
Nice job. I do take offense (hah! – more PC) to associating my anti-racist beliefs with these anti-racist hypocrites.
Anti-racist does not equal anti-white unless you’re a hypocrite.
As I explained flippity, the distinction between racialism and racism is real and important. If anything you’re an anti-racialist, because you don’t think anybody should favor their own race, and you’re consistent about it. An anti-racist is someone who pretends to care about that but really just sniffs out and demonizes race consciousness in Whites.
I’m arguing with an anti-racist over at Bang the Drum. The anti-White attitude is deeply seated. The denial is virtually complete.
Tanstaafl, I really enjoyed and appreciated your arguments over at Bang the Drum. Rigorous and relentless. More please.
Happy to oblige Kindred. The Drum seems all banged out. I think Flanders’ comment overloaded a circuit.
Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. Tan had a good roll.
I think its more likely that the conversation turns when they can’t gang up on those with whom they disagree.
I’m lobbing reality grenades in the “reality-based community” of sex- and race-difference deniers over at Pandagon.
They don’t really like reality. A few are absolutely hostile to it.
The truth that finally got beaten out of the Drum is that she thinks Clinton’s appeal to “hard-working White voters” is inherently “racist”. Confronted with the fact that her anti-racism is just a euphemism for anti-White she can only shrug.
Another outstanding post — thanks, T! I know you already know this, but most people cannot grasp/handle the amount of clarity you’re throwing at them. Too much logic for the PC person to handle!
This was in the NYT (believe it or not) last March:
“The assumption has always been that a black candidate should perform worse among white voters in states with less racial diversity because those voters are supposedly less enlightened. In fact, the reverse has been true for Obama: in the overwhelmingly white states of Wisconsin and Vermont, for instance, he carried 54 and 60 percent of the white voters respectively, according to exit polls, while in New Jersey he won 31 percent and in Tennessee he won 26 percent. As some bloggers have shrewdly pointed out, Obama does best in areas that have either a large concentration of African-American voters or hardly any at all, but he struggles in places where the population is decidedly mixed.
“What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so.”
I find the smug, sanctimonious modern liberal mind incomprehensible – as illustrated by the comments on those blogs. All-knowing and all-wise and eternally ready with hyper- aggression to attack. Unable to abide rational debate.
From MW on-line-
racialism: “a theory that race determines human traits and capacities”
racism: 1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
Im anti-racialist because I dont believe the “theory” is the end all in determining human traits and capacities – does it influence? How could I deny that high blood pressure [racially anomalous] in African-Americans “influences” a particular trait or capacity?
I’m anti-racist both in #1 and #2.
If you want to further the racialism definition as “favoring” on the basis of race, then yes, I’m anti-racialist on that basis as well.
If anti-racist and anti-racialist have already been monikered to a particular group, I guess I will have to come up with another for myself. The hypocrites you have identified are non-white racists in denial and Obama-esque-aracial wannabe’s.
Origins of the word racist…
In the case of the word “racist” as an adjective, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary)ascribes the first known usage to Hirschfeld himself. Who was Magnus Hirschfeld and what did he have to tell us about “racism”?
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a German-Jewish medical scientist whose major work was in the field of what came to be known as “sexology” — the scientific study of sex. Like Havelock Ellis in England and Alfred Kinsey in the United States, Hirschfeld was not only among the first to collect systematic information about sexuality but also was an apostle of sexual “liberation”. His major work was a study of homosexuality, but he also published many other books, monographs, and articles dealing with sex. He wrote a five-volume treatise on “sexology” as well as some 150 other works and helped write and produce five films on the subject.
It is fair to say that his works were intended to send a message–that traditional Christian and bourgeois sexual morality was repressive, irrational, and hypocritical, and that emancipation would be a major step forward. His admiring translators, Eden and Cedar Paul, in their introduction to Racism, write of his “unwearying championship of the cause of persons who, because their sexual hormonic functioning is of an unusual type, are persecuted by their more fortunate fellow-mortals.” Long before the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, Magnus Hirschfeld was crusading for the “normalization” of homosexuality and other abnormal sexual behavior.
Even when Hirschfeld is right in his critique of the early race theorists, it is often because he has chosen easy targets. His “refutation” of “racism” is largely centered on irrelevant common-places that even extreme exponents of racial differences might readily acknowledge–that all human beings are part of the same species and can interbreed, that blood transfusions can take place between races, that “there is no such thing as a pure race,” that the races are identical in the vast majority of physical characteristics, that cephalic index is not a meaningful measurement of intelligence or character, etc. Yet his “scientific” evidence is often merely anecdotal or simply his own opinion asserted as unquestioned truth.
In another section, he recounts the names of those he considers the 70 most outstanding figures in world history and announces that “all such lists, when made without bias, will show that persons of genius and persons of outstanding talent are not set apart from the ruck by any colour of their eyes, by a peculiar shape of the skull or the nose, by any ‘ethnological’ characteristics whatever. What is decisive in human beings is not race but individuality.” It does not seem to occur to Hirschfeld that all but about 8 or 9 of the 70 world-historical figures on his list are white Europeans. There are no Negroes and only two Asians (Confucius and Sun Yat Sen).
kindred, I couldn’t agree more, at least about Pandagon.
Drum is a small fish, and now cornered in her inconsistency she seems more a victim of brainwashing than anything else.
The specimens at Pandagon are manufacturing the brainwash. They call it “framing”. There are some dark people there. As in moral-, ethic-, and reason-free. They reflexively attack by psychoanalysis and insult, and eagerly play their well-worn “racist” and “nazi” cards. Next comes censorship. It’s an utterly predictable pattern.
It’s notable that they display no sense of shame or responsibility for their own genocide-inducing rhetoric, even though that is what they apparently expect of me when they point to topics discussed here and cry “racist”. The sickness of their fantasies – whether expressed directly or projected onto me – is disturbing. It’s not surprising however – just another example of their chronic hypocrisy.
Also of interest and further to Spiro’s thesis, Hirschfeld’s ire is focused upon Grantians, Anglo-Saxons, Nordicists.It is interesting that for all his contempt for “racism”, Hirschfeld never once mentions IQ studies or the considerable psychometric evidence about race and intelligence that was already available even in the 1930s. Most of Hirschfeld’s polemic is aimed at the proponents of intra-European racial differences (Nordics, Alpines, Mediterraneans, Dinarics, etc.) and not at differences between whites and other major races (though he steadfastly denies such differences as well).
Tan, very true. Obama uses the same technique. He has a lofty perch from which he can survey humanity in it’s entirety – objectively. We, on the other hand, have our purely subjective opinions aka “resentments” shaped by either Marxist economic/class or Freudian psychological causes.
Thanks Desmond. Clearly “racism” is a social construct. It was deliberately constructed to bash Whites, and that’s all it will ever be used to do.
You are correct, Tan, when you state that, “Clearly “racism” is a social construct. It was deliberately constructed to bash Whites, and that’s all it will ever be used to do.” It is used, too, against other than whites, and it is a limiter on speech.
It’s main use is as a divider of majorities and an expander of minority power. When a minority class can use a slogan in order to beat and batter a bigger or stronger class, it gains a power which is disproportionate to that which it deserves. When that minority can convince the majority to use it against themselves, and then prevent them from complaining about it, then they have used the power of racial concepts for a potent weapon against the majority. Isn’t that the purpose for racism under their use for the term?
You may want to check my post:
http://myflandersfields.blogspot.com/2008/05/jinos-rinos-and-democratic-socialism.html
It has an example of ways which the leftists have for keeping the unwitting masses on the party line.
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I’m convinced that Amanda Marcotte is the single most loathsome creature on earth. It’s frightening to think that her blog is so popular.
Sorry for nuking your buddy Rastaman Flanders, but he deserved it. He’s like too many pro-zionist anti-jihadis. His pro-zionism comes first. Way first. You follow your nose where it takes you and you write bluntly about what you discover. I appreciate it. Rastaman apparently thinks nothing of threatening you to NOT express certain opinions OR ELSE. In that way he sounds like a jihadi.
Anti-jihadis spend a ridiculous amount of time wondering how the West’s self-confidence got hollowed out. I used to do that. Then I realized it had something to do with hyper-sensitive foaming-at-the-mouth anti-anti-semites (left, right, and center) that consider any criticism of jews, and only jews, a sign of impending apocalypse. They feel free to criticize Whites, as a race, all day long, but the second a White gets uppity and speaks unkindly of jews he’s a “Skinhead Jew-hating wanna-be-Nazi”.
I’m entirely fed up with it.
There’s an interesting post over Ross Douthat’s blog: Conservatives and “Liberal Guilt”. It’s actually mainly about “white guilt” and how a liberal writer believes it’s a good thing.
‘Justin JJ’ makes a few comments, the gist being that:
The effects of slavery and a century of Jim Crow laws are still with us. To step back and say that one should feel no guilt for the actions of one’s ancestors, when the effects those ancestors created still dominate the culture, is to take an excessively minimalist view of moral culpability.
If your grandfather swindles someone out of their house, and the victim’s grandchildren are still homeless while you sit on the house’s porch watching them, a guilty conscience doesn’t seem so absurd, does it?
AND:
Now, should you feel guilty simply for being born (relatively) well? No, no more than someone born wealthy should feel guilt over the silver spoon in their mouth. But when that silver spoon was bought with a fortune built on the backs of slaves, you inherit a certain guilt that comes with dirty money.
———
Whenever i hear arguments like this i feel that i’m being subjected to a Darkness at Noon style mugging. If you accept the premises then you accept guilt. The arguments that ones own ancestors were not slave owners and you personally had too work hard etc – which one poster made – seem lame and defensive.
Justin JJ seems the archetype of modern liberal thinking. What should the counter-argument be – given your talent in this area.
(I’m interested in how a usable effective argument could be structured than in responding to the commenter’s there – as Justin JJ does seem to have internalised thoroughly a ‘white privilege’ course at college. And there seem to be many who have been through the same process. And an effective riposte or antidote is needed).
Justin is free to feel all the guilt he wants. When he tries to impose it on others he steps over the line. I would tell him to jam it.
The “sins of the father” is an idea from the Old Testament. Perhaps one of my other visitors could comment on it. I don’t feel qualified.
I am inclined to reject the idea I am responsible for my ancestor’s sins. This might make me a bad Christian, seeing as it could mean I also reject Original Sin, but then so be it.
I have two main objections: where does it stop, and who does the accounting? What man can be trusted as arbiter? Where do we draw the lines in time and space? I mean, X thousand blacks were lynched decades before we were born. Y thousand White women have been raped since the Civil War and right on up to tens of thousands per year today. Likewise with interracial murders. So, since we’ve presumably dropped the “no such thing as race” pretense to talk about what Whites owe blacks because of Jim Crow, what I want to know then is what do black owe Whites because of welfare and laws favoring blacks and black-on-White violence? I suspect that on balance they owe us, but I’m willing to live and let live if they are.
I’m convinced that Amanda Marcotte is the single most loathsome creature on earth. It’s frightening to think that her blog is so popular.
Her comments about the Duke rape hoax bear out your opinion.
Her comments about the Duke rape hoax bear out your opinion.
Yup. Here are the relevant comments from Marcotte. Note that this is from February 2007, long after even the most radical ideologues had accepted that the case was a hoax.
In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out.
Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?
So unfair.
Yes, how dare a rape victim act confused and bewildered like she was raped or something.
Natalia, do you know the details of the case? If so, why do you think a women enthusiastically jumped into a sexual situation with men making slavery jokes at her? Furthermore, what is your theory on why she supposedly looooooved having sex with guys holding her facedown on the bathroom floor? There’s no “if” they behaved in a disrespectful manner. We have conclusive evidence that happened.
This is about race and class and gender in every way, and there’s basically no way this woman was going to see justice. In her part of the country, both women and black people are seen as subhuman objects to be used and abused by white men.
Yeah, I know, Alon. Which is why I’m frustrated that people are pretending ‘can’t identify which one raped her” somehow equals ‘wasn’t raped’. I had some initial confusion about exactly who was assaulting me when I was assaulted, but that doesn’t mean that his hands weren’t actually where they were.
Plus, the media is acting like these men are exonerated!
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/02/edwards-fiasco.html
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I mean, X thousand blacks were lynched decades before we were born.
I believe X = 3, and most of them were guilty of capital crimes.