A Slant Truth
One of my non-blogging buddies (one of the coolest mofos on the planet, actually) tipped me to this nice little article, by Byron York, entitled The black-white divide in Obama’s popularity. Imagine the look on my face when I read this, the very first paragraph (actually, don’t imagine that look; it’s not pretty):
On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.
Um, yeah…WTF?
This dude actually wrote this. Here, let me translate this for you:
Black people don’t count (or if they do count, they sure as hell don’t count for more than 3/5’s of a white person) so, even if President Obama has a high approval rating, it’s not accurate (or actual) because black folks are all up in the mix. We all know that only white people’s opinions matter, right?
The entire article says nothing other than black people like Obama, and so he’s not really as popular as you think he is. It doesn’t matter that we happen to be members of the population and so our opinions count too. It doesn’t matter that black folks also overwhelmingly liked Bill Clinton. No one challenged Bill Clinton’s popularity because black folks loved him (ok, now that I think on this some more, I bet a good handful of folks did, but still). But when a lot of black folks happen to like another black dude, well then obviously something is amiss.
Post-Racial United States. Gotta love it.
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