Redstate

Posted at 7:49pm on May 10, 2008 Not a racist? Prof. Alan Abramowitz thinks that makes you even more of one.

By Jeff Emanuel

Headshot of Prof. Alan Abramowitz, the most assuredly not racist professor of PoliSci at Emory University. Click the image above to send Prof. Abramowitz an email about his column in which he called "working class whites" who don't admit that blacks' problems are due solely to racism, racists.

Tomorrow's Washington Post (h/t Adam C) will feature an op-ed by Emory University PoliSci professor Alan Abramowitz ("In These Primary Numbers, Warnings for the Fall") that seeks to turn logic and rationality on its head for the purposes of calling White America racist.

"Voting patterns in Indiana and North Carolina show that resistance to a black candidate among some white Democrats remains a serious threat to his chances in November," Abramowitz writes. "Obama continues to have particular difficulty with one segment of the Democratic electorate: white working-class voters."

His explanation of this is long on unsubstantiated, not-rationally-supportable conjecture, and his conclusions lack anything remotely resembling evidence or facts. I suppose that's the price one pays for (or the benefit of) being a political "scientist": rather than having an academic specialty that prepares one to conduct research (and draw conclusions from that research) and analysis, all a political "scientist" like Abramowitz seems to feel the need to do is obtain numbers. His analysis and conclusions drawn from those numbers are all assumption, with no explanation added as to how those conclusions were reached, or why they should be accepted as correct.

The backdoor assault on working-class whites begins with Abramowitz's declaration that, despite a dearth of "overtly racist beliefs" (which he concedes "are much less prevalent among white Americans of all classes today"), "a more subtle form of prejudice, which social scientists sometimes call symbolic racism, is still out there -- especially among working-class whites."

"Symbolic racism," he explains, "means believing that African American poverty and other problems are largely the result of lack of ambition and effort, rather than white racism and discrimination."

Read on.

Posted in Academia | Barack Obama | Liberals | liberals in the mist | Racism — Comments (78) / Email this page » / Read More »