Clay Burell's Bookmarks tagged racism →  View Popular

When charter schools started in Minnesota in the early 1990s, they were touted as a higher-quality alternative for parents, particularly poor and minority families, looking to escape underperforming district schools.

But a study released today by the University of Minnesota's Institute on Race and Poverty finds that most charter schools have fallen short of that promise and perform worse than comparable district schools on state tests. In the process, it said, charters also intensify racial and economic segregation and compound the problem by encouraging districts to compete by creating ethnic niche programs.

Analysis of the election results by the New York Times produced a
revealing map, which showed that across large areas of the south,
particularly in Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, the national
swing to the Democrats was actually reversed.

In contrast to the rest of the US, Republicans made big gains in counties that
were disproportionately white and poor. Fewer than one in three southern
whites voted for Mr Obama, compared with 43 per cent of whites nationwide.

Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors racial
violence, said: "I think the very idea of a black man being elected to
the White House is shocking to some subset of the American white population."

Sarah Palin will never hold national office nor will any Republican at the presidential level for a long time to come. Why? Because America has uneducated jerks in it but is not a nation of uneducated jerks. The Republicans are done, hoisted on the petard of their own "southern strategy."

The Republican Party is only a step away from becoming the fringe of the fringe, identified more with cross-burning weirdoes wearing hoods, folks like the Alaska secessionist party, all those gun owners stocking up on assault weapons before the "Socialist/United Nations/Obama/Muslim" conspiracy comes to fruition, than with anything remotely like a serious national political force.

The Republican Party--and I speak as a former lifelong Republican who, up through the 2000 primary campaign supported John McCain and even worked for him by arguing his case on various conservative and religious radio stations--is now the toy of the Rush Limbaugh windbags. These folks include outright crazies (such as Sarah Palin's Assemblies of God pals who are waiting for Spaceship Jesus to rescue them and/or rooting out "witches" from their midst), white racists and a few not-very-bright attention seekers, including Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity etc.

The Religious Right, the racists, the anti-gay hate-mongers are now not only marginalized but thoroughly out of step with even members of their own former constituency. For instance the Gordon College student newspaper (Gordon is an influential Evangelical College north of Boston) endorsed Obama this year. Many young evangelicals voted for the Democrats. James Dobson, Fox News, Limbaugh et al. were utterly powerless to do more than stir up hate. They are losing the next generation of their "base."

Meanwhile many former Republicans--like me--ran to Obama as fast as our legs could carry us and away from our willfully "we're not an elite" moronic former party. Republican commentators such as David Brooks and George Will mourned the loss of the Republican center. Others noted the Republicans have become anti-intellectual. "Anti-intellectual?" They wish! How about simply anti-literate?

During a parliamentary session last Thursday, the day after Senator Obama's election victory, Mr Gorski had called him a "black crypto-communist", and a "naive individual whose election must delight al-Qaeda".

Senator Obama "is a disaster, it is the end of the white man's civilisation", he said.

Mr Gorski, 38, is a member of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which was founded by the president and his twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a former prime minister who is still at the helm of the movement.

Mr Gorski has been in the spotlight before.

In 2006 he was among a group of lawmakers who filed a resolution in parliament calling for Jesus Christ to be proclaimed king of this overwhelmingly Catholic republic.

The bill was not passed and the move was ridiculed by Poland's senior Catholic bishops, who said members of parliament should stick to politics.

More than Palin herself, I'm looking forward to the end of an era in which the aforementioned gomers -- these relatively small pockets of bigots and witch hunters -- have enjoyed undeserved attention and disproportionate sway over American politics and policy.

The truth is that politicians like Sarah Palin are merely manipulating, exploiting and inciting these people. In other words, it's the ignorance, stupid. And next Tuesday, we have a chance to seriously marginalize this darker, uglier side of America.

It'd be crazy, though, to suggest that Tuesday will be the last day. To be sure, if Senator Obama wins, we'll be hearing from these knee-jerk wackaloons quite a bit. Hell, Sarah Palin might try to run for president in four years. Nevertheless, we have a chance to tell the Sarah Palin's of the world that there's no room in American politics for fire-eaters who stoke archaic prejudices and fears rather than ameliorating them. We have a chance to tell them that not only doesn't it work anymore, but that it actually exacerbates electoral failure.

But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.

Nor is America’s remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been hoping for it to be. There are even “racists for Obama,” as Politico labels the phenomenon: White Americans whose distrust of black people in general crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people, including a presidential candidate who extends a genuine helping hand in a time of national crisis.

Instead of diminishing Powell's reputation at all, Limbaugh and Buchanan's words have so far, only further diminished theirs. Watching clips of their comments I actually felt a great deal of compassion for both men. Clearly their frustration and fear at realizing that our country is no longer what it was in 1968 -- and never will be again -- or even what it was in 1998 when it was paralyzed by partisanship, has rendered both men lost; as though a time machine accidentally stranded them, in some strange, multi-cultural, forward-thinking universe, and they as relics from the past feel increasingly, irrelevant, outnumbered and out of place.

But I believe that I am not the only one who feels sorry for them. There are plenty of Americans, even those who may not agree with Obama's politics, or Powell's endorsement, who heard the sad rhetoric of these men and thought to themselves, "That does not represent me or the America that I believe in."

And for sparking that revelation, I want to say to Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, THANK YOU.

But SNL may also have given her cover on the campaign trail. Fey's Palin is no love letter--falsely confident, hapless, antiscience and calculatedly adorable--but she's harmless compared with the Real Palin we've seen lately: a culture warrior cannily playing on resentments, a mouthpiece for the McCain campaign's ugliest character attacks on Barack Obama.

The same weekend Fey spoofed the former beauty-pageant queen as bringing a flute for the "talent portion" of the debate, Real Palin was blowing a harsher tune. She cast Obama as a suspicious other--"not a man who sees America like you and I see America"--in a line of attack the Associated Press called "racially tinged." Fey's Palin hasn't set up mass viewers to see this side of her--not yet, anyway. It's not the funny, bumbling Sarah we know! We're conditioned to expect her to ask to "phone a friend," not accuse Obama of befriending terrorists. So the Fey version makes it harder to see Palin as an Agnewesque hatchet woman.