8 Comments Add your own

• 1. Vinny  |  November 13th, 2008 at 9:23 am

  

  It is hard to debunk things that the guy didn’t say. He did not say that race had “nothing to do” with the black vote. He said race was not the only reason blacks voted for Obama. Nor did he say anything like “the fact that not every white voted for him is proof that whites are racist.”

• 2. elliot  |  November 13th, 2008 at 10:32 am

  

  Honestly, I’m in no mood to parse individual words…which is why I didn’t do it in the first place.

  But since you insist…

  He didn’t say either thing exactly, but that was the implication of sentences like:

  “For Obama to win fewer white votes in those states suggested nothing less than the continuing existence of “hardcore racism” ”

  And yes, he said race wasn’t the only reason blacks voted for Obama (which I agree with. In fact, I think hardly anyone voted mostly on race and those that did benefited Obama), but that ignores that fact that at least as many blacks who voted for Obama were probably motivated soley by race as the number of whites he implied are racists because they may have voted against Obama based on race.

  His overall implication is that race wasn’t a big factor for blacks and it was for whites.

  My point is that’s bullshit.

  And his statement that “It was a historic black turnout, with 95% of black voters – approximately 16.6 million people – going to the polls. ” proves it.

  Because you can just as easily conclude that those additional 35% of blacks who turned out WERE motivated to vote simply because Obama was black.

  So, an impartial observer would conclude that those people were just as much evidence of “hardcore racism” as the small percentage of whites who must have voted for Kerry but didn’t vote for Obama.

  And, in fact, someone from Mars would conclude that blacks are much more racist than whites because 43% of white Americans voted for Barack Obama and approximately 0% of African Americans vote for John McCain.

  (I’ve edited one word in my original post to more accurately reflect what I meant at 7:00 this morning. I changed “nothing” to “little”.)

• 3. Vinny  |  November 13th, 2008 at 4:48 pm

  

  I still think you are setting up a straw man. If I were to say John McCain did not lose “solely” because of the economy, I would not be saying his loss had “little” or “nothing” to do with the economy and I would not be implying it either. I would simply be saying that other factors played into the loss.

  As far as racism goes, Kane only suggested that as an explanation for Obama’s failure to get more white votes than Kerry in four states, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. I personally don’t find that to be a particularly outrageous conclusion. My mother-in-law is from Little Rock. She voted for Hillary in the primaries but voted for McCain in November because, as she put it, she could not vote for one of “them.”

• 4. Dave  |  November 13th, 2008 at 7:00 pm

  

  This may seem a little obvious and maybe a little simple but I think the fact that race continues to be an issue in politics only serves to perpetuate the existence of racism. If we continute (we as in Eugene Kane and his ilk) to harp on the race issue we will never get past it. It’s like a kid who is shorter than everyone that continually complains that everyone picks on him for being short and that they should stop. No one will stop until he stops being a baby about it. Sure people will still see him as short but he won’t get picked on for it if he stops complaining as much. The analogy falls apart in the fact that people will see him as short but people will alwasy see others who are different than them as, well, different.

• 5. Dave  |  November 13th, 2008 at 7:02 pm

  

  (For an English major that was a terribly written paragraph. My head is hung in shame.)

• 6. Jeni  |  November 13th, 2008 at 10:39 pm

  

  I contacted Mr. Kane once asking why he approached topics with so much race baiting all the time – something to that effect, I was polite – and seriously curious.

  He lambasted me!! Said I was judging him and rude or some such thing.

  SO I told him I guess he didn’t know how to have a respectful conversation with a middle aged, WHITE WOMAN and was very, very sorry I bothered him….what a bigot that guy is and frankly, I’d even go so far as to say he definitely embarks in racism – often.

• 7. elliot  |  November 13th, 2008 at 11:01 pm

  

  As a fellow English major, Dave, I always felt that all our heads should be hung in shame. ;)

• 8. Vinny  |  November 13th, 2008 at 11:40 pm

  

  I never read anything by Mr. Kane before this morning and nothing in that column struck me as particularly provocative.

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