A new
Associated Press poll says that race relations have worsened in the last four years, with a higher percentage of Americans now expressing “openly racist” attitudes towards blacks.
Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not....
Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.
I don’t believe the results or the methodology behind them, let alone the objectivity of those charged with measuring “implicit views.” Such polls have been published for years, though the
ones that find whites feeling more put upon are usually ignored or dismissed.
But for sake of argument, let’s stipulate that anti-black racism is more prevalent in 2012 than in 2008. Why would that be?
Maybe because for four years we’ve heard that criticizing the policies of a president who promised to “fundamentally transform” the country that a lot of people liked as-is constitutes
racism.
On Thursday, August 16th, Toure a co-host of The Cycle on MSNBC said that Romney is engaging in the "niggerization" of the campaign. Romney's crime? Saying that Obama should "take his campaign of division and and anger and hate back to Chicago." ...
Just about a week before that instance, Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive has an article titled "Romney Goes Racist on Welfare". What was Romney's crime this time? Criticizing Obama for waiving legally unwaivable provisions in the welfare reform law. See, according to Rothschild, Romney is only bringing up this issue " to appeal to white working class voters who can be swayed by not-so-subtle racist innuendo."
