A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 45% of Americans described the [border] situation as a crisis, while another 32% said it was a major problem.So 77% of poll respondents think the border is somewhere between a major problem and a crisis. The AP's take is that this is a result of Trump's illegitimate rhetoric's beginning to "resonate" outside his "base." Even those awful Hispanics on the border, and those awful Chicago Democrats, are objecting. And Gov. Abbott's "publicity stunt" of sending north a tiny fraction of the illegal immigrants has begun to be viewed by faithless progressives as straining local budgets so close to them as to be impossible to ignore any longer. As long as it was just tiny Eagle Pass, Texas, who cares.
Are 78% of Americans racist extremists?
The AP lards this story with scare quotes from the Bad Orange Man, but it can't quite obscure the poll results:
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7 comments:
I forget if the orthodoxy at present is that all people are racist, or if that only white people can be.
Well, there are those 10s of millions of us who are irredeemably deplorable, and there's Biden's 15% percent of us who are just no good, so there's that. Those 10s of millions work out to a skosh under 50% of us Americans, which with those 15% put us all in AP's ballpark.
Add in, next, those blacks who don't support Biden and so aren't really black, and we get closer. In fact, if we keep looking, we're likely to discover that the AP's 78% coarsely underestimates the situation.
Eric Hines
And the socialization of the white western patriarchy makes male monkeys play with toy trucks more than do female monkeys. And only white people can be racist. And...
There are so many things one must take on faith to be a bien pensant these days.
as james also noted, the usual line is that only white people can be 'racist' because that requires not just prejudice but power.
That is the official story, certainly. We used to have a word, "racism," that denoted a vile habit of despising people on account of their inherited ethnicity. Now the word has been altered in fashionable circles to mean despising people on account of their inherited ethnicity, UNLESS they are perceived to have power over others, or to have ancestors who had power over the ancestors of others, in officially designated victimhood classes. In the latter, exceptional case, despising people for their inherited ethnicity is now mandatory.
We need new terms to tell these errors apart, perhaps legacy racism and progressive racism. Those of us who abhor both errors may continue to say simply "racism," though we're sure to be misinterpreted except among ourselves.
New terms would help for clarity, but I don't think that is what is wanted by the people crafting the terms. My first comment was a joke; they're actually arguing both things at once. Charles Mills, the late scholar of race and racism, argues that everyone is inescapably racist (and thus that racism requires permanent government involvement and constant manipulation at every level to address); the popular anti-racist movement argues the 'prejudice plus power' angle to excuse forms of racism that they approve of by people on their list of accepted classes.
At this point people who outright reject race because it doesn't exist as a real category are still 'racists' under potentially both of those systems.
Once upon a time I thought that 'sexism' could use another term to distinguish people who believe that sex is real and has real effects, but who don't want to use that belief to punish or harm others. We didn't get one, and now we can see the downstream effects of the lack of clarity: recognizing that there really are women (and others who are not women) is considered a sort-of prejudice against the 'women' who aren't, in fact, women. Now you have to send women and 'women' to prison together, otherwise you're... er... sexist. (To say nothing of voluntary things like sports leagues!)
And of course power is always relative. Biden may be able to order armies to mobilize, but he has nothing to say about what goes on in a Turkish prison. GM's CEO may feel like she's somebody powerful, but if she's walking down the wrong street in Baltimore, she isn't.
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