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A Mighty Low Bar For ‘Hate’

Jonathan Capehart has seen the new AP poll, and is appalled, just appalled: While folks were obsessing over polls that showed their preferred presidential candidate being up or down, I obsessed over a poll that revealed a troubling rise in hatred among the American people. According to a poll for the Associated Press, anti-African American and anti-Hispanic […]

Jonathan Capehart has seen the new AP poll, and is appalled, just appalled:

While folks were obsessing over polls that showed their preferred presidential candidate being up or down, I obsessed over a poll that revealed a troubling rise in hatred among the American people. According to a poll for the Associated Press, anti-African American and anti-Hispanic attitudes have grown since the election of the nation’s first black president.

I’m not one of those people who thought sending Barack Obama to the White House would exorcise the nation’s racial demons, that centuries of strife and tribulation would simply melt away with one historic election. But I did hope that some remnants of the the wave of good feeling that swept over the United States between Election Day 2008 and Inauguration Day two months later would remain. How silly of me.

What a drama queen. You ought to see the actual questions the poll asked. Racial attitudes have remained remarkably stable, it seems to me, considering that the US has been suffering its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and has had no real respite for the entirety of the Obama presidency. People tend to get real suspicious of and hostile towards those not like them in times of economic stress. Maybe I expect less of people, but it seems to me that the poll numbers could have been much worse, considering how much pain and anxiety people have been dealing with regarding the economy.

Anyway, “hate”? Really? The poll results, however disappointing they may be, don’t justify that kind of rhetorical hysteria. Except of course if you’re searching in advance for an emotionally satisfying reason to explain why America’s first black president lost his job — which is how Steve Sailer interprets the freakout.

 

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