Some links/articles noticed on Negrophile. Like I said, nothing new here.
From the entry Once government turns on one minority, who knows where it will stop?, a link to No Votes Here by Peter Beinart:
If Republicans stopped trying to redistribute wealth upward (and changed their views on explicitly racial issues like the Confederate flag), blacks might listen to them on gay marriage. But that's like saying that, if Democrats changed their views on abortion, they could win over white evangelicals like Gary Bauer who oppose privatizing Social Security and support raising the minimum wage. You don't win voters over by agreeing with them on issues they consider peripheral; you win them over by agreeing with them on the issues they care about most.There's one more problem for the GOP. It's not just that blacks get squeamish when gay marriage becomes associated with Republicans; they get squeamish when it becomes associated with government in general. It's one thing to want the government to legislate morality when you're the cultural and racial majority. It's quite another when you're a racial minority with an acute memory of that morality being legislated against you.
And from 'Like, I want to go there, but then again, I don't, because of the racial aspect of it.', the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel piece UW minority students alone in a sea of white:
Minority students at UW-Madison often are the only ones - the only one in a class, the only one in a restaurant, the only one on a bus. People ask if they are athletes. If they favor certain kinds of foods. When a class breaks into small groups, they feel shunned.Often, the attention from non-minorities is not malicious but can still be insulting.
"They want to pet your hair like you're a dog," said Tamara Middleton, 20, a junior from Milwaukee, chuckling.
Then there's the classic scenario: the lone minority student in a class is asked, often by a well-meaning professor, "What do (insert race or ethnicity here) people think about (insert issue)?"
True, that last one is depressing as fuck, as I'd kind'a hoped there would'a been some progress on that sort of thing since I graduated (and see comments at Negrophile in that entry for something even more cheerful).
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the right-wingers pounce on the anecdotes related in the second article as evidence of racism on the left.
Disgusted, yes, but not surprised.
I'd be surprised and impressed if they managed to tackle the issues raised in the first article up there in an intelligent fashion, but I'm not holding out much hope on that.
In happier non-news, check out yesterday's All Fools Day edition of La Cucaracha. Which, I point out, is La Cucaracha; I actually skimmed over it yesterday (thinking it was something else) because, um, I'm easily fooled, apparently.
Minority voter registration and minority voting is ESSENTIAL exactly because of the things you wrote about. When minority voting was not allowed by repressive local governments in many communities, the effort to vote was greater and the value given to voting by minorities was greater. Now minorities stand to lose their voting rights because of apathy. Many feel that their vote does not matter. But in Florida in 2000, the scandalous removal of legitimate voters from the voting rolls because of false information about them being felons DETERMINED THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. Sorry for yelling. I get a little upset. I'm okay now. Anyway, those of us familiar with that little illegal action on the part of the state of Florida know that the destruction of those voting rights was aimed directly and specifically at African-Americans. Nobody seemed to mind much. Except, of course, a few alert people who paid attention and who care about having a real democracy where everyone of legal age has a vote and uses it.