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Is It Racist, Fringe, Paranoid, Out Of The Mainstream To Believe That Obama Favors Blacks Over Whites?

Apparently so, according to the New York Times and all those who religiously adhere to all the views it now sees fit to print.

In answer to Question 52 of the recent New York Times/CBS News Survey of Tea Party Supporters, 25% of Tea Party supporters said they believed the Obama administration favors blacks over whites, compared to 11% of the general population. 65% of Tea Party supporters believe it treats both groups the same, compared to 83% of the general population.

In digesting and regurgitating these results for its readers, the New York Times itself, through a news article, used that finding and others to paint a picture of Tea Party supporters as alienated, out of the mainstream right-wingers.

The overwhelming majority of supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites ? compared with 11 percent of the general public.

Charles Blow, a regular NYT OpEd columnist, wrote that ?even when compared to other whites, [Tea Party supporters?] views are extreme and marginal.? They were, he pointed out, ?more than eight times as likely as white independents and six times as likely as white Democrats to think that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.?

Paul Butler, identified as associate dean and the Carville Dickinson Benson Research Professor of Law at George Washington University and the author of ?Let?s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice,? one of those asked by the NYT to comment on the survey, wrote that the Tea Party supporters

have a collection of outside the mainstream ? even mainstream Republican ? views about race. They are more likely to believe that too much has been made of the problems that African-Americans face, and that the administration favors blacks over whites.

Now, let?s leave aside my own belief that the Times? and its men Blow?s and Butler?s accounts here would have been no more mind-boggling than they are had they reported with the same shock, awe, and disgust that ?Tea Party supporters are eight times more likely than white independents and six times more likely than white Democrats to believe that the Emperor was wearing no clothes.?

I do agree, though, that the reported numbers are indeed shocking. How could it possibly be that 83% of the public and even 65% of Tea Party supporters do not believe the Obama administration favors blacks over whites? Certainly those reality deniers recognize (don?t they?) that the Obama administration avidly practices and fervently preaches preferential treatment based on race.

At least the higher education establishment and its press recognize the administration?s commitment to racial preference policies. As the Chronicle of Higher Education has just reported,

the Obama administration's intent to be much more supportive of race-conscious admissions than the Bush administration became clear last month, when top lawyers from the Education and Justice Departments joined in submitting a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the University of Texas at Austin in a lawsuit pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The brief reinforces the university's defense of its race-conscious admission policies.

Whereas the Bush administration had sided against the University of Michigan in a Supreme Court case challenging that institution's consideration of applicants' race, the brief the Obama administration lawyers filed last month strongly endorsed Texas's argument that only race-conscious admissions policies would provide it with sufficient levels of diversity to reap the educational benefits it sought.

The euphemistic fig leafs employed by practitioners of racial preference and their chroniclers ? ?race-conscious,? ?consideration? of race, and that mother of all euphemisms, ?diversity? ? do not disguise the racial favoritism that the administration is here defending.

If Tea Party supporters are out of the mainstream for recognizing this truth more others, all that proves is that the mainstream has been polluted by the mainstream media.

Full post as published by Discriminations on April 18, 2010 (boomark / email).