Should Democrats Be Less Racist Than Everyone Else? September 23, 2008

The underlying tone to the reaction to the new AP/Yahoo! News poll seems to say so.

“One-third of white Democrats harbor negative views of black people”, the article led, and went on to detail the findings of the poll, some of which, granted, were quite ugly:

One-third of white Democrats harbor negative views of black people, calling them “lazy,” “violent” and responsible for their own troubles, a new poll has found…Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word ‘violent’ strongly applied.

Among other words, 22 percent agreed with “boastful,” 29 percent “complaining,” 13 percent “lazy” and 11 percent “irresponsible.”

When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

The articles goes on to contrast the 70% backing that Obama enjoys from the Democratic party with McCain’s 85% backing from the Republican party.

Should Democrats be so much different than everyone else? The Washington Post/ABC News poll a few months ago gave the figure of “roughly 3 in 10 Americans” harboring racist views, a figure which is in line with the above “one-third”.

Perhaps it’s an “inconvenient truth”, but the Democratic Party has as much house-cleaning to do of its racist views as anyone else. While we lefties are always on the side of the downtrodden and championing the rights of the oppressed, we can’t consider ourselves perfect, nor can we be considered perfect by others. I, at a minimum, would hope that the Democrats who do harbor anti-black views would allow themselves this election to be ruled by intellect and not by racist gut reactions, that their minds would overpower their ethnocentric hearts: a vote for McCain is a vote for America as a 2nd world country, a continuation of the worst policies in a generation, and an extension to the military activities which already strain our budgets. It is a vote for a vice-president who wants rape victims to have their assailants’ babies against their wills, and a vote for tax cuts for the rich which leave the majority of Americans out of their benefits. I would hope that all Democrats, regardless of color, think of this. I would hope that Democrats seriously weigh the decision to vote McCain this Election Day.

And “but it was either this or a black guy” is the saddest excuse one could invent for doing so.