Re: Campaign 2016 Part XVIII: I'm OK, You're Deplorable
Here's what I've been wondering. A fair number of people on this Board have commented on friends or relatives who have indicated they support Trump. Are those friends and relatives included in the sexist, racist, Islamaphobic, homophobic and hateful "deplorables", or is this like Congressmen, where your guy is ok, but it's everyone else's guy who is deplorable?
Saying half of Trump's supporters are scum is also saying half of Trump's supporters aren't scum.
But also, you can be racist or sexist or -- especially, given where some of this country is still stuck -- homophobic and not be a scumbucket. You might just come from a backwater, or have an icky parent or an icky pastor. There are people on this forum who I wouldn't mind having as coworkers or as friends who also say and think laughably homophobic things because their daddy or their priest taught them those things or because they just don't know any better. Within the confines of that topic they're creepy, but that doesn't make them Universally Creepy.
Good people can have racist beliefs, and because they are good people, or because they know other good people with racist beliefs, they convince themselves they aren't really racist, because Racist is Bad. But that's a misunderstanding of the way racism works. People think of it as an attribute of an Evil Person. It's always portrayed that way in fiction. A racist is a monster -- therefore, if I'm not a monster I can't be a racist. But bigotry comes in with mother's milk, and really good people can be really racist.
40-something percent of Republican whites think blacks are "less intelligent" than whites. And before my side celebrates, it's about 30-something percent of Democratic whites. That's
insanely racist. There is absolutely no link between intelligence and race, because race
isn't a real thing when it comes to the genetic characteristics of intelligence. When people post statistics showing differences in achievement between whites and blacks, they are proving that poverty is a b-tch and really screws you up, and that people who are mixed in with the general social attitudes towards poverty also face prejudice even if they are nice well-scrubbed middle class "good ones." That's why every black parent teaches their children they have to be twice as good to get half the respect.