A friend joked about Rick Santorum’s belated victory in Iowa: “Who cares that six more white people in Iowa voted for Santorum.” Of course, Iowa is pretty darn white. Its population is 91-percent white.
South Carolina is not. In fact its population is 66-percent white and 29-percent black.
So how is it that 98 percent of the voters in the South Carolina GOP primary were white? Not to mention 98 percent of the voters were Christian (with 37 percent of those Catholics and 42 percent Protestant).
According to Courtland Milloy over at The Washington Post, the unbearable whiteness of the GOP is not talked about enough given that
those who call themselves Republicans have coalesced around nothing more than their whiteness. What else could it be? Certainly not economic self-interest.
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes
When a professor of history calls Barack Obama a “Food Stamp President,” it isn’t a mistake to be remedied through clarification; it is a statement of aggresion. And when a crowd of his admirers cheer him on, they are neither deluded, nor in need of forgiveness, nor absolution, nor acting against their interest. Racism is their interest.
This calling out racism is not something some of the more mainstream newspapers are willing to do. The New York Times has been criticized by FAIR for avoiding the term “racism” for less accurate descriptions like “the politics of race.” But even the Times admits that it was Newt’s willingness to be “mean” (a.k.a. racist) that won him the South Carolina primary.
In an editorial, the Times argued that
It was Mr. Gingrich who pulled the race into the gutter, where he found considerable support. He repeatedly called Mr. Obama “the greatest food-stamp president in American history,” and lectured a black questioner at Monday’s debate about the amount of federal handouts to blacks, suggesting their work ethic was questionable.
Two-thirds of voters interviewed in exit polls said they made their decision on the basis of the two South Carolina debates, where Mr. Gingrich exploited racial resentment and hatred of the news media to connect with furious voters.
But in a refusal to see just how racist the GOP has become at this point and just how racist many white American voters are, the Times editorial ends with this fantasy:
It is still hard to imagine a path to the nomination for a divisive candidate like Mr. Gingrich, let alone one to the White House. If he continues along this muddy road, there is still time for Republicans in upcoming states to repudiate him, and demonstrate that South Carolina has become an aberration rather than a bellwether.
Um, yeah, right. All of a sudden GOP primaries states like Florida and Arizona won’t be about racism. Instead, they will be about “anti-immigration sentiment” (a.k.a. racism).
It’s time to admit the truth. The GOP can only muster up about 1 in 10 nonwhite voters nationally (compared to nearly 4 in 10 for the Democrats). The Grand Ol’ Party is now the party of white anger. Large numbers of young, poor whites are flocking to the GOP. They are angry about their futures and rather than blaming the greed of the few who have taken from the many, they blame blacks or Mexicans or even gays. It is time for the news media, even outlets as white as The New York Times, to start calling the GOP what it is–a party that manipulates white resentment and white privilege in order to gain votes. And like any party based on a sense of racial rights that have been stolen, it is playing with fire.
