This is good advice. Let’s remember particularly that rejecting the idea of systemic racism is not of a piece with being racist. Many people who are unreceptive to the “antiracist” articles of faith now trending among urban intellectuals may respond well to appeals to a sense of common humanity irrespective of race.
Very practical and although I am not an atheist I don't promote my religious or spiritual notions in public discourse and I guess I shouldn't my racial notions as well. It makes people defensive and they then vote defensively.
And regardless of "racial" attitudes, the relation to that with opposition climate change mitigation, expanding ACA, the Child tax credit, improved policing, immigration reform, higher taxation of the rich, etc. is arbitrarily related to rachial attitudes. Does anyone really care if these things benefit Blacks or other marginalized groups somewhat disproportionately.
Sure, but the struggle to define terms *is* a political struggle. For example, Kate Manne has proposed an extremely useful dichotomy when talking about gender politics: She makes a distinction between "sexism" and "misogyny." From wikipedia:
"Manne proposes that patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny are distinct: sexism is an ideology justifying patriarchy, while misogyny enforces patriarchy by punishing women who deviate from patriarchy. Manne believes dehumanization of women is not necessary for misogynist violence."
Some folks might take issue with being called "sexist" while others seem to embrace the term. It's not the nuclear term most mainstream Americans think of when they think of "racism." The problem is there's no equivalent to "misogyny" when talking about race. Part of the right's political project is to make "racism" as toxic as possible in order to shut down any discussion of race.
One of my biggest issues with someone like McWhorter is that, as a linguist, he's in a perfect position to tackle this problem head-on...to develop a linguistic framework that would allow Americans to address racial issues in a fruitful way, but he's too busy making the rounds of the Intellectual Dark Web decrying cancel culture and other low-brow nonsense.
I get that defining terms is often a political struggle, which is why it's important to not simply accept using "racist" to such an extent that it's lost any meaning. Bigoted, discriminatory, prejudiced, blinkered, chauvinist, etc. are all replaced with "racist" by those currently on the commanding heights of the culture who seem more interested in deploying the word as a weapon than bringing fidelity to its meaning.
Sure, but no one is using the term "racist" to such an extent that it's lost any meaning. The "natural" meaning of the word is something that corresponds to the (relatively non-controversial) meaning of the word "sexism."
As far as "Bigoted, discriminatory, prejudiced, blinkered, chauvinist, etc. are all replaced with 'racist' by those currently on the commanding heights of the culture" presuming you're talking about "anti-racists" you've got it completely backwards. One of the most basic claims of the anti-racists is that racism is an institutional framework embedded in the larger society. (That's where the much-debated claim "black people can't be racist in America" comes from.)
Given its prevalence in the discourse, changing messaging means pushing back on claims of systemic racism. Let’s give it some practice in the context of a claim in this post.
Yes, the structure of the Senate benefits rural whites. But in the current alignment, black voters are proportionally overrepresented in the most likely electoral college tipping point states, and Hispanic voters are underrepresented. Then there’s the house, where civil rights legislation introduced majority-minority districts, which have their own idiosyncratic systemic effects.
When these systemic effects happen to run in different directions, it’s not as helpful to think in terms of the system. After all, would we really argue that moving from the electoral college to the national popular vote would be a systemically racist change because it devalues black votes?
I’m not sure this is accurate. Arizona, Wisconsin, and even Pennsylvania don’t fit your formula with regard to the over representation of Black people and Georgia doesn’t either, given the importance of other races. State legislators are more important in shaping Congressional districts.
Not sure what you mean about the importance of other races (and Congressional districts aren’t related to the EV), but the recent competitiveness of Georgia is indeed crucial to this claim. To put it another way, Stacey Abrams would have had a far more diluted effect on the 2020 election without the electoral college.
So with this pandering to rural voters by talking less about structural racism, what do you envision happens to policy efforts to reduce the effects of structural racism?
They get stronger, because you can focus on raising taxes on the rich to support childcare for all and dismantling zoning and expanding Medicare, and all this does much more to reduce the effects of structural racism than diversity trainings.
I think that our justice system is weighted against people of color (look at the disparity between people wrongly convicted or murder). I'm also strongly against the War on Drugs, which is the result of much of our erosion of civil liberties, and again is more strongly persecuted against people of color. I'm also for greatly reforming or removing qualified immunity etc
And of course I believe that there still is racism in this country today.
All that being said, I also believe that the vast majority of people in this country aren't racist. And while things aren't perfect (and they never will be, we are dealing with flawed humans), things are WAY, WAY, WAY better than they've ever been.
For the vast majority of Americans being a racist is a really bad thing. And being called a racist is a real insult. Thus when we fling around the racist word WAY to casually it's as a surrogate for disagrees with me on policy that's a real problem.
Likewise I'm strongly opposed to loaded terms like white privilege's. It's way to broad a term, and again is super divisive. Are we really supposed to believe that a poor white kid in a trailer park is more privledged than Obama's kids?
Thus while I think there's a number of places where I could find common ground for reform, the racist rhetoric from the left, and the divisive woke agenda are big non starters for me.
We should be moving as much as possible towards a color blind society, not making skin color the most important thing you can know about someone.
My hunch is that there is much discussion of racism is to divide the working class for the benefit of the professional and business classes. Policies that benefit the latter two, such as government loans for graduate school or lack of drug price controls, come at the expense of the former. However if the working class of all races was to unite they could stick it to the professional and business class. That can't happen so we keep hearing about pointless odes to have a conversation on systemic racism while policies that reinforce privilege get passed with no attention.
Yes. Also, the observation that “most white Americans don’t like being called racist” is a pretty poor basis for the argument that institutional racism and white privilege don’t exist. Rather, it’s a testament to the very successful campaign to define racism out of existence by raising the bar so high that almost nothing meets the criteria.
> When Senator Tim Scott goes up on television to say “America is not a racist country,” what claim is he making?
This kind of statement is about sentiment, not facts.
Conservatives and rural voters are inherently more parochial; it's built into the ideology. To call it "thinly-veiled tribalism" would be an overstatement, because liberals are the ones who think tribalism should be veiled; for conservatives, it's an unquestionable part of life.
So when Tim Scott says something like that, he's expressing the following sentiments to his constituents:
1. Your way of life is legitimate.
2. You earned what you have.
3. People who are worse off than you deserve to be that way.
#3 is the least straightforward, but the most important. The popularity of racism-denial politics on the right is driven by relative status, not absolute status. By and large, conservative voters aren't doing any worse than they have been for decades. But they see people who used to be below them in the hierarchy doing better and moving up, and they feel threatened. "Last place aversion" is the term of art here.
This dynamic has driven racial politics in the US since the beginning. And pretty much an explicit trope in conservative politics until about the time Lee Atwater noticed “you can’t say ‘n*r’ anymore.”
(It’s one of the many reasons folks on the right rightly see a more accurate and inclusive history of the United States—or as they’re mislabeling it “CRT”—as dangerous.)
Was nobody else underwhelmed by the level of statistical analysis in that article? It's hard to know what they actually did, or tested, but I'm surprised that they tried out so few controls given that omitted variable bias is a huge concern in a simple correlational study like this. Education level and income would be nice for one, although I'm sure there are plenty of others. I also didn't understand how they concluded that racial attitudes led to a 32 point gap rather than an 8 point gap. Wouldn't it actually be a 21 point gap based on their own methodology? Pretty sloppy all around.
I live in a city of around 75K in Montana, which is certainly rural by national standards. I consider myself a progressive. And MT has a long history of Democratic influence, from Senate Majority leader Mike Mansfield through Reps. Lee Metcalfe and Pat Williams,, who spearheaded a lot of important conservation legislation in the 70s and 80s. My decidedly inexpert thoughts:
I don't think Dems have to drop their racial messaging or pander to racist-ish whites. They do need to target their racial messaging, though. Systemic racism plays a role in, for example, California housing. But Montana, which has its own housing crisis, doesn't have a history of redlining, and what works in CA won't have the same effects here. Systemic racism is real, but it isn't a component of every problem everywhere in the US.
The Dems need a real, comprehensive rural agenda. They don't have anything right now except some handwaving at "rural broadband." They need a high priority agricultural message. When we stop using/run out of carbon fuels, we'll still need many of the chemicals and materials they now provide. That problem requires agricultural solutions. Even though ag isn't the only part of rural economies anymore, talking about ag is an easy proxy for talking about rural voters. And an ag message doesn't (have to) threaten Dem messaging about race, immigration, healthcare, crime, etc. Also, right to repair can be a good, progressive-friendly aspect of the larger ag messaging.
Finally, in 2010, 5 of 6 statewide elected offices in MT were held by Dems. Ten years later, it's the opposite. In that time, the population grew by 95K. This is due to migration, not just birthrate, obviously. So what's happened, in part, is that MT got more conservative as it got larger, because conservatives from liberal areas carpet-bagged their way here. Look no further than our Governor Chokeslam, Greg "Jersey" Gianforte, and Rep. "Maryland" Matt Rosendale. Point being, rural conservatism and racism isn't just a redneck problem, it's also the result of conservatives on the Coasts choosing to infest my otherwise pristine home state.
I think the whole point of pointing out the "racist" attitudes of rural people by academics is to justify policies and actions which may end up harming the rural folk. I am extremely skeptical of the entire woke movement; throughout US history these puritanical movements typically had the effect of pilfering resources from the accused to the the accusers. I also think that wokeness will leave many of the minorities it purports to help worse off.
I think EVs are one example of this. The people who are most likely to buy them are well-off, woke suburbanites and urban dwellers. Many of the minerals needed to make them such as lithium are in remote locations in the US. To avoid paying royalties to people living on the land a justification of "addressing systemic injustice through climate justice" is a useful slogan for companies involved in the extraction business. Such a statement is also good for the customer base; the less they have to think about how their car was made the more likely they are to buy one and recommend another to their friends.
I think that there is some validity to the rural viewpoint. I am absolutely not saying that there is not systemic racism. But an awful lot of the unreasonable crap (like mistreatment by cops) that happens to poor black people happens to poor white people. I can see how they might be annoyed that "liberal elites" are framing as racial what might be framed to cover their own mistreatment.
Ok. So the Pew survey shows a +22 U-R Gap and the 2020 CCES shows +25 (45% rural disagreed vs. "just 1 in 5" (20%) of urban Americans). NOTE: The shift from % to a fraction comparison is a silly anchoring trick that exposes some biases of the authors.
I downloaded that full CCES dataset. Obviously there's a 1000 ways to play with these numbers and they do a lot of weighting but if you look at the Education Gap on the same question (CC20_440a) it's similar to the Urban - Rural Gap. College and post-grad (37% of responses) have a +26 to agree with "white people have certain advantages" vs. those who didn't attend college (30% of responses).
A more generous reading of the survey responses could be ... rural whites who didn't attend college don't think they have certain advantages from being white and they might be right, they don't.
Cornel West has a good way of framing this ... "I don't give a damn for popularity I'm trying to be wedded to integrity I want to put a smile on my Grandmama's face in the grave and she told me as a Christian that if the kingdom of God is within you and everywhere you go you ought to leave a little Heaven behind and Heaven takes the form of laying bare the humanity of each and every one of us especially the least of these ... as 25th chapter Matthew ... what'd you do to the least of these you do unto me ... who are the least of these: the orphan, the Widow, the poor, the children, the elderly, the workers, the gays and lesbians, the trans - especially the trans .. they're black folk, they're brown folk, they're poor white folk, they're indigenous peoples - not just here but around the world - and what does that mean ... that means that you have a certain kind of calling that will always pick you over and against those who are well adjusted to injustice no matter what color they are"
Rural whites who didn't attend college still have "certain advantages". However, they are disadvantaged when compared to much of the degreed upper middle class. Additionally, it is hard to fault them for being annoyed at our intense focus on correcting the former rather than the latter.
I try not to think conspiratorially, but sometimes it really does feel like we’re focusing on this because parts of both parties, of many colors, are beginning to realize they have common class-based grievances. We haven’t had a groundswell of class politics like this in a long time, and I’m sure that really does make some people nervous.
Assuming MY's take is fully on target then the next question is can the Democrats do anything about it by simply not talking about structural racism, now that the cat is out of the bag. That is, it seems like Republicans can simply still talk about it. And if the dog whistle of, "There is no racism in this country. There is no such thing as structural racism. White's have it just as bad as blacks or worse" appeals strongly to Rural voters then how do Democrats win those voters back?
It's ironic that it may well be structural racism (in our political system) that prevents Democrats from talking about structural racism.
I think we're vulnerable to thinking this urban/rural split is permanent and longstanding. This is not so; in fact, it's really recent.
I think of Carlton County in Minnesota, up in the northeast part of the state near Duluth. It's small (35K residents), 90% white and 1% Black.
The thing is that is has traditionally been staunchly Democrat. From 1976 to 2012, its average vote was 66% for Democratic presidential candidates, with a tiny standard deviation of 2 percentage points. (You can take that back to 1960 and its average remains at 66%.)
And then . . . 2016. It only went Democratic 51 to 49. That's a swing of 6.7 standard deviations which as any statistician will tell you is a helluva small probability if it were to happen randomly. But it wasn't random. In 2020, the % for Biden dropped further to 50%.
This was a rural Democratic stronghold for generations. It voted 64% and 63% for Obama. What happened to suddenly change that in Carlton County (and many other rural counties that historically gave substantial support to Democrats)? I don't live there, so don't know, but my guess is that Trump activated and gave permission to underlying attitudes they hadn't act on previously, or maybe even weren't sure they had, and this was compounded by what they see as the increasing wokeness of an urban-centered Democratic party.
How do we turn that around? Matt just answered that in his previous post. You start with a Post-It.
For some reason I'm fairly pessimistic about that. It could reverse, but how or why would it? What's on the horizon to go the other way? It seems like urban / rural and educated / non-educated are the trends for the foreseeable future.
The only good news from that prediction is it would mean racial polarization would tend to continue to decrease from here on out. Non-whites are increasingly moving into suburbs and exurbs and rural areas and intermarrying with white people. And blacks and hispanics will be less educated than whites as groups for the foreseeable future, nudging them towards a nativist, anti-intellectual right.
I think prediction is hard ("especially about the future"). When one thing happened almost always between 1960 and 2012 (vote Democrat) and then didn't happen in 2016 and 2020, one might be led to say that 2016 and 2020 now define the foreseeable future, but we really don't know, do we? Things change, especially if you work hard to help them change.
This is good advice. Let’s remember particularly that rejecting the idea of systemic racism is not of a piece with being racist. Many people who are unreceptive to the “antiracist” articles of faith now trending among urban intellectuals may respond well to appeals to a sense of common humanity irrespective of race.
Very practical and although I am not an atheist I don't promote my religious or spiritual notions in public discourse and I guess I shouldn't my racial notions as well. It makes people defensive and they then vote defensively.
And regardless of "racial" attitudes, the relation to that with opposition climate change mitigation, expanding ACA, the Child tax credit, improved policing, immigration reform, higher taxation of the rich, etc. is arbitrarily related to rachial attitudes. Does anyone really care if these things benefit Blacks or other marginalized groups somewhat disproportionately.
A thing can be 100% true and still be an electoral loser.
Sorry, but everytime I hear the word "racist" this is where I go:
https://youtu.be/8Gv0H-vPoDc
More salient: https://youtu.be/RovF1zsDoeM
Good video, thanks. That kind of highlights the problem with the contemporary usage of the word which is now quite far from the dictionary definition.
Sure, but the struggle to define terms *is* a political struggle. For example, Kate Manne has proposed an extremely useful dichotomy when talking about gender politics: She makes a distinction between "sexism" and "misogyny." From wikipedia:
"Manne proposes that patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny are distinct: sexism is an ideology justifying patriarchy, while misogyny enforces patriarchy by punishing women who deviate from patriarchy. Manne believes dehumanization of women is not necessary for misogynist violence."
Some folks might take issue with being called "sexist" while others seem to embrace the term. It's not the nuclear term most mainstream Americans think of when they think of "racism." The problem is there's no equivalent to "misogyny" when talking about race. Part of the right's political project is to make "racism" as toxic as possible in order to shut down any discussion of race.
One of my biggest issues with someone like McWhorter is that, as a linguist, he's in a perfect position to tackle this problem head-on...to develop a linguistic framework that would allow Americans to address racial issues in a fruitful way, but he's too busy making the rounds of the Intellectual Dark Web decrying cancel culture and other low-brow nonsense.
I get that defining terms is often a political struggle, which is why it's important to not simply accept using "racist" to such an extent that it's lost any meaning. Bigoted, discriminatory, prejudiced, blinkered, chauvinist, etc. are all replaced with "racist" by those currently on the commanding heights of the culture who seem more interested in deploying the word as a weapon than bringing fidelity to its meaning.
Another video clip:
https://youtu.be/GYmHYQPaHaw?t=46
Sure, but no one is using the term "racist" to such an extent that it's lost any meaning. The "natural" meaning of the word is something that corresponds to the (relatively non-controversial) meaning of the word "sexism."
As far as "Bigoted, discriminatory, prejudiced, blinkered, chauvinist, etc. are all replaced with 'racist' by those currently on the commanding heights of the culture" presuming you're talking about "anti-racists" you've got it completely backwards. One of the most basic claims of the anti-racists is that racism is an institutional framework embedded in the larger society. (That's where the much-debated claim "black people can't be racist in America" comes from.)
Given its prevalence in the discourse, changing messaging means pushing back on claims of systemic racism. Let’s give it some practice in the context of a claim in this post.
Yes, the structure of the Senate benefits rural whites. But in the current alignment, black voters are proportionally overrepresented in the most likely electoral college tipping point states, and Hispanic voters are underrepresented. Then there’s the house, where civil rights legislation introduced majority-minority districts, which have their own idiosyncratic systemic effects.
When these systemic effects happen to run in different directions, it’s not as helpful to think in terms of the system. After all, would we really argue that moving from the electoral college to the national popular vote would be a systemically racist change because it devalues black votes?
I’m not sure this is accurate. Arizona, Wisconsin, and even Pennsylvania don’t fit your formula with regard to the over representation of Black people and Georgia doesn’t either, given the importance of other races. State legislators are more important in shaping Congressional districts.
Not sure what you mean about the importance of other races (and Congressional districts aren’t related to the EV), but the recent competitiveness of Georgia is indeed crucial to this claim. To put it another way, Stacey Abrams would have had a far more diluted effect on the 2020 election without the electoral college.
So with this pandering to rural voters by talking less about structural racism, what do you envision happens to policy efforts to reduce the effects of structural racism?
They get stronger, because you can focus on raising taxes on the rich to support childcare for all and dismantling zoning and expanding Medicare, and all this does much more to reduce the effects of structural racism than diversity trainings.
Some background here.
I think that our justice system is weighted against people of color (look at the disparity between people wrongly convicted or murder). I'm also strongly against the War on Drugs, which is the result of much of our erosion of civil liberties, and again is more strongly persecuted against people of color. I'm also for greatly reforming or removing qualified immunity etc
And of course I believe that there still is racism in this country today.
All that being said, I also believe that the vast majority of people in this country aren't racist. And while things aren't perfect (and they never will be, we are dealing with flawed humans), things are WAY, WAY, WAY better than they've ever been.
For the vast majority of Americans being a racist is a really bad thing. And being called a racist is a real insult. Thus when we fling around the racist word WAY to casually it's as a surrogate for disagrees with me on policy that's a real problem.
Likewise I'm strongly opposed to loaded terms like white privilege's. It's way to broad a term, and again is super divisive. Are we really supposed to believe that a poor white kid in a trailer park is more privledged than Obama's kids?
Thus while I think there's a number of places where I could find common ground for reform, the racist rhetoric from the left, and the divisive woke agenda are big non starters for me.
We should be moving as much as possible towards a color blind society, not making skin color the most important thing you can know about someone.
My hunch is that there is much discussion of racism is to divide the working class for the benefit of the professional and business classes. Policies that benefit the latter two, such as government loans for graduate school or lack of drug price controls, come at the expense of the former. However if the working class of all races was to unite they could stick it to the professional and business class. That can't happen so we keep hearing about pointless odes to have a conversation on systemic racism while policies that reinforce privilege get passed with no attention.
Yes. Also, the observation that “most white Americans don’t like being called racist” is a pretty poor basis for the argument that institutional racism and white privilege don’t exist. Rather, it’s a testament to the very successful campaign to define racism out of existence by raising the bar so high that almost nothing meets the criteria.
> When Senator Tim Scott goes up on television to say “America is not a racist country,” what claim is he making?
This kind of statement is about sentiment, not facts.
Conservatives and rural voters are inherently more parochial; it's built into the ideology. To call it "thinly-veiled tribalism" would be an overstatement, because liberals are the ones who think tribalism should be veiled; for conservatives, it's an unquestionable part of life.
So when Tim Scott says something like that, he's expressing the following sentiments to his constituents:
1. Your way of life is legitimate.
2. You earned what you have.
3. People who are worse off than you deserve to be that way.
#3 is the least straightforward, but the most important. The popularity of racism-denial politics on the right is driven by relative status, not absolute status. By and large, conservative voters aren't doing any worse than they have been for decades. But they see people who used to be below them in the hierarchy doing better and moving up, and they feel threatened. "Last place aversion" is the term of art here.
This dynamic has driven racial politics in the US since the beginning. And pretty much an explicit trope in conservative politics until about the time Lee Atwater noticed “you can’t say ‘n*r’ anymore.”
(It’s one of the many reasons folks on the right rightly see a more accurate and inclusive history of the United States—or as they’re mislabeling it “CRT”—as dangerous.)
Was nobody else underwhelmed by the level of statistical analysis in that article? It's hard to know what they actually did, or tested, but I'm surprised that they tried out so few controls given that omitted variable bias is a huge concern in a simple correlational study like this. Education level and income would be nice for one, although I'm sure there are plenty of others. I also didn't understand how they concluded that racial attitudes led to a 32 point gap rather than an 8 point gap. Wouldn't it actually be a 21 point gap based on their own methodology? Pretty sloppy all around.
I live in a city of around 75K in Montana, which is certainly rural by national standards. I consider myself a progressive. And MT has a long history of Democratic influence, from Senate Majority leader Mike Mansfield through Reps. Lee Metcalfe and Pat Williams,, who spearheaded a lot of important conservation legislation in the 70s and 80s. My decidedly inexpert thoughts:
I don't think Dems have to drop their racial messaging or pander to racist-ish whites. They do need to target their racial messaging, though. Systemic racism plays a role in, for example, California housing. But Montana, which has its own housing crisis, doesn't have a history of redlining, and what works in CA won't have the same effects here. Systemic racism is real, but it isn't a component of every problem everywhere in the US.
The Dems need a real, comprehensive rural agenda. They don't have anything right now except some handwaving at "rural broadband." They need a high priority agricultural message. When we stop using/run out of carbon fuels, we'll still need many of the chemicals and materials they now provide. That problem requires agricultural solutions. Even though ag isn't the only part of rural economies anymore, talking about ag is an easy proxy for talking about rural voters. And an ag message doesn't (have to) threaten Dem messaging about race, immigration, healthcare, crime, etc. Also, right to repair can be a good, progressive-friendly aspect of the larger ag messaging.
Finally, in 2010, 5 of 6 statewide elected offices in MT were held by Dems. Ten years later, it's the opposite. In that time, the population grew by 95K. This is due to migration, not just birthrate, obviously. So what's happened, in part, is that MT got more conservative as it got larger, because conservatives from liberal areas carpet-bagged their way here. Look no further than our Governor Chokeslam, Greg "Jersey" Gianforte, and Rep. "Maryland" Matt Rosendale. Point being, rural conservatism and racism isn't just a redneck problem, it's also the result of conservatives on the Coasts choosing to infest my otherwise pristine home state.
I think the whole point of pointing out the "racist" attitudes of rural people by academics is to justify policies and actions which may end up harming the rural folk. I am extremely skeptical of the entire woke movement; throughout US history these puritanical movements typically had the effect of pilfering resources from the accused to the the accusers. I also think that wokeness will leave many of the minorities it purports to help worse off.
I think EVs are one example of this. The people who are most likely to buy them are well-off, woke suburbanites and urban dwellers. Many of the minerals needed to make them such as lithium are in remote locations in the US. To avoid paying royalties to people living on the land a justification of "addressing systemic injustice through climate justice" is a useful slogan for companies involved in the extraction business. Such a statement is also good for the customer base; the less they have to think about how their car was made the more likely they are to buy one and recommend another to their friends.
(End Rant)
I think that there is some validity to the rural viewpoint. I am absolutely not saying that there is not systemic racism. But an awful lot of the unreasonable crap (like mistreatment by cops) that happens to poor black people happens to poor white people. I can see how they might be annoyed that "liberal elites" are framing as racial what might be framed to cover their own mistreatment.
Ok. So the Pew survey shows a +22 U-R Gap and the 2020 CCES shows +25 (45% rural disagreed vs. "just 1 in 5" (20%) of urban Americans). NOTE: The shift from % to a fraction comparison is a silly anchoring trick that exposes some biases of the authors.
I downloaded that full CCES dataset. Obviously there's a 1000 ways to play with these numbers and they do a lot of weighting but if you look at the Education Gap on the same question (CC20_440a) it's similar to the Urban - Rural Gap. College and post-grad (37% of responses) have a +26 to agree with "white people have certain advantages" vs. those who didn't attend college (30% of responses).
A more generous reading of the survey responses could be ... rural whites who didn't attend college don't think they have certain advantages from being white and they might be right, they don't.
Cornel West has a good way of framing this ... "I don't give a damn for popularity I'm trying to be wedded to integrity I want to put a smile on my Grandmama's face in the grave and she told me as a Christian that if the kingdom of God is within you and everywhere you go you ought to leave a little Heaven behind and Heaven takes the form of laying bare the humanity of each and every one of us especially the least of these ... as 25th chapter Matthew ... what'd you do to the least of these you do unto me ... who are the least of these: the orphan, the Widow, the poor, the children, the elderly, the workers, the gays and lesbians, the trans - especially the trans .. they're black folk, they're brown folk, they're poor white folk, they're indigenous peoples - not just here but around the world - and what does that mean ... that means that you have a certain kind of calling that will always pick you over and against those who are well adjusted to injustice no matter what color they are"
Rural whites who didn't attend college still have "certain advantages". However, they are disadvantaged when compared to much of the degreed upper middle class. Additionally, it is hard to fault them for being annoyed at our intense focus on correcting the former rather than the latter.
I try not to think conspiratorially, but sometimes it really does feel like we’re focusing on this because parts of both parties, of many colors, are beginning to realize they have common class-based grievances. We haven’t had a groundswell of class politics like this in a long time, and I’m sure that really does make some people nervous.
Assuming MY's take is fully on target then the next question is can the Democrats do anything about it by simply not talking about structural racism, now that the cat is out of the bag. That is, it seems like Republicans can simply still talk about it. And if the dog whistle of, "There is no racism in this country. There is no such thing as structural racism. White's have it just as bad as blacks or worse" appeals strongly to Rural voters then how do Democrats win those voters back?
It's ironic that it may well be structural racism (in our political system) that prevents Democrats from talking about structural racism.
I think we're vulnerable to thinking this urban/rural split is permanent and longstanding. This is not so; in fact, it's really recent.
I think of Carlton County in Minnesota, up in the northeast part of the state near Duluth. It's small (35K residents), 90% white and 1% Black.
The thing is that is has traditionally been staunchly Democrat. From 1976 to 2012, its average vote was 66% for Democratic presidential candidates, with a tiny standard deviation of 2 percentage points. (You can take that back to 1960 and its average remains at 66%.)
And then . . . 2016. It only went Democratic 51 to 49. That's a swing of 6.7 standard deviations which as any statistician will tell you is a helluva small probability if it were to happen randomly. But it wasn't random. In 2020, the % for Biden dropped further to 50%.
This was a rural Democratic stronghold for generations. It voted 64% and 63% for Obama. What happened to suddenly change that in Carlton County (and many other rural counties that historically gave substantial support to Democrats)? I don't live there, so don't know, but my guess is that Trump activated and gave permission to underlying attitudes they hadn't act on previously, or maybe even weren't sure they had, and this was compounded by what they see as the increasing wokeness of an urban-centered Democratic party.
How do we turn that around? Matt just answered that in his previous post. You start with a Post-It.
For some reason I'm fairly pessimistic about that. It could reverse, but how or why would it? What's on the horizon to go the other way? It seems like urban / rural and educated / non-educated are the trends for the foreseeable future.
The only good news from that prediction is it would mean racial polarization would tend to continue to decrease from here on out. Non-whites are increasingly moving into suburbs and exurbs and rural areas and intermarrying with white people. And blacks and hispanics will be less educated than whites as groups for the foreseeable future, nudging them towards a nativist, anti-intellectual right.
I think prediction is hard ("especially about the future"). When one thing happened almost always between 1960 and 2012 (vote Democrat) and then didn't happen in 2016 and 2020, one might be led to say that 2016 and 2020 now define the foreseeable future, but we really don't know, do we? Things change, especially if you work hard to help them change.