Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition? I only ever see this claim from people who want to raise the bar for racism above what they’ve been accused of. It’s not like targeting welfare to play on racism is a completely outlandish claim—I hope you’re familiar with Lee Atwater’s very famous description of the Southern Strategy:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition?
No, they just declare each individual instance ‘racist’ no matter how tenuous the argument. The rather ludicrous attempts to dismiss the Tea Party as ‘racist’ being the most prominent example.
Has anyone ever claimed that any criticism of Obama is racist by definition? I only ever see this claim from people who want to raise the bar for racism above what they’ve been accused of. It’s not like targeting welfare to play on racism is a completely outlandish claim—I hope you’re familiar with Lee Atwater’s very famous description of the Southern Strategy:
No, they just declare each individual instance ‘racist’ no matter how tenuous the argument. The rather ludicrous attempts to dismiss the Tea Party as ‘racist’ being the most prominent example.