BDBoop
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Why Race Has Been the Real Story of Obama's Presidency All Along -- New York Magazine
Excellent article, but it's seven pages long so if you're interested, you'll need to set aside some time.
A different, unexpected racial argument has taken shape. Race, always the deepest and most volatile fault line in American history, has now become the primal grievance in our politics, the source of a narrative of persecution each side uses to make sense of the world. Liberals dwell in a world of paranoia of a white racism that has seeped out of American history in the Obama years and lurks everywhere, mostly undetectable. Conservatives dwell in a paranoia of their own, in which racism is used as a cudgel to delegitimize their core beliefs. And the horrible thing is that both of these forms of paranoia are right.
Excellent article, but it's seven pages long so if you're interested, you'll need to set aside some time.
By the outset of Obamas presidency, they found, the gap in approval of the president between those with strongly liberal views on race and those with strongly conservative views on race was at least twice as large as it had been under any of the previous four administrations. As Tesler delved further into the numbers, he saw that race was bleeding into everything. Peoples views on race predicted their views on health-care reform far more closely in 2009 than they did in 1993, when the president trying to reform health care was Bill Clinton. Tesler called what he saw unfurling before him a hyperracialized era.
In recent history, racial liberals have sometimes had conservative views on other matters, and racial conservatives have sometimes had liberal views. Consider another measure, called anti-black affect, a kind of thermometer that registers coldness toward African-Americans. Prior to 2009, anti-black affect did not predict an individuals political identification (when factoring out that persons economic, moral, and foreign-policy conservatism). Since Obama has taken office, the correlation between anti-black affect and Republican partisanship has shot up. Even peoples beliefs about whether the unemployment rate was rising or falling in 2012which, in previous years, had stood independent of racial baggagewere now closely linked with their racial beliefs.