I don’t know if Shelby Steele was always a crank or Barack Obama just made him a crank, but man oh man is he a crank:
Whites in general used to be stigmatized as racists. By going with Obama, liberals now feel that they’ve escaped that stigma. That means the stigmatization of whites is now focused on the Republican Party and on conservatism as a point of view. [Liberals say] this is where racism is now located, and we can isolate it in those red states in the South and Southwest.
Here’s a brief reminder of where the Southwest is located, versus where the non-South cluster of red states is:
Meanwhile, nobody is saying that all Republicans are racists. It is, however, true that there was a broad national swing against the Republican Party and that the exceptions to that swing are either explicable by home state effects or else concentrated in a region of the United States (not the Southwest) that has an unusually fraught history of racism.
Previous in TP Media
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.