[tptacek]

Accented rural southerners would have no trouble whatsoever in NYC. This is one of those analogies that sounds like it should be true, but has no basis in fact.

It's also a super weird comparison. Southern intolerance is subtextually about animus towards African Americans and Latinos. Nobody is arguing that a Scandinavian would have any trouble in Mobile.

Further: Mobile is a weird choice for a comparison as well, since it's comparatively urban and well-educated. Mobile is more diverse than many parts of Chicago. When we talk about Southern racism, we're generally not talking about the urban south.

Finally, and I want to make this point gingerly, but if we want to drag US political parties into this discussion, the Republican party is almost mathematically determined to be more racist than the Democratic party, which is a coalition of labor, minorities, and liberal whites. It's also just empirically true that the Republican party harbors more overt racists, but we don't have to dive into a lot of value judgements about conservatism and nationalism to conclude that; we can just observe that the Democrats have African American and Latino voters as one of the foundations of their constituency.

[hueving]

>almost mathematically determined to be more racist than the Democratic party, which is a coalition of labor, minorities, and liberal whites

The assumption you build this on is that those groups are not more racist than the groups in the Republican party. The only way you could even make that kind of jump is if you subscribe to the definition of racism where you can't be racist if you are systematically oppressed in some regard. Is that the case?

If not, then you will definitely need some data showing that blue collar workers, minorities, etc have lower rates of racism.

The vast majority of racism I hear (assuming the definition based on race discrimination) comes from uneducated people, regardless of political affiliation.

[tptacek]

I'm making a pretty simple demographic point and not really interested in hacking my way through this briar patch of value judgements and careful parsing. Substitute whatever term you like --- maybe "anti-black anti-Latino racism" --- for the simple one I used.

[hueving]

Ok. That's still not backed up by sound reasoning though. Just because one party has more white people does not correlate with anti-Latino racism. Why would you think that's the case?

Living in the bay area, I've encountered more anti-black racism from Chinese people than any white people. Should I take that to presume whichever party has more asians is automatically racist against black people?

Just because a party has more people of a specific skin color than another says nothing about racist behavior. Anything else would imply that the Bernie Sanders crowd is the most racist group of them all (skews very heavily white).

[tptacek]

This is pretty silly. Less than 30% of Latinos and less than 5% of African Americans are Republicans. The balance are Democrats. The Democratic party simply can't be institutionally bigoted against those groups and survive as a party; those groups are core parts of the Democratic coalition; the Democrats in a real way simply are the Latino and African American vote.

That's all I'm saying. I am not psychoanalyzing Republicans in general. Most Republicans probably aren't racist. That's not my point.

I'm really not interested in what you think Chinese Americans think, sorry.

[hueving]

>The Democratic party simply can't be institutionally bigoted against those groups and survive as a party; those groups are core parts of the Democratic coalition; the Democrats in a real way simply are the Latino and African American vote.

Of course it can be bigoted. Those minorities do not make up a majority of the party and as long as they feel the goals of the party overall help them more than Republicans they will put up with whatever racist crap that comes from Democrats (e.g. "tell em you're a Muslim" Pelosi).

It's all about tradeoffs, a party that offers racist policies in your favor and/or the refusal to enforce laws that affect many of your people is better than a party with no favors offered, even if the former is filled with bigoted morons.

>I'm really not interested in what you think Chinese Americans think

And I never offered you what I thought they think, so go attack some other strawman to attempt to gain some moral high ground.