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Walter C Uhler » Race/Racism

Thinking About Racism as the Election Draws Near

November 5th, 2012 | Add a Comment

Last month professors Josh Pasek, Jon Krosnick and Trevor Thompson published a remarkable paper titled, “The Impact of Anti-Black Racism on Approval of Barack Obama’s Job Performance and on Voting in the 2012 Presidential Election.” The paper is based upon three online surveys of at least 1,000 Americans; one conducted in 2008, one in 2010 and a third that ended in early September of this year. The surveys enabled the authors to measure the existence of both explicit and implicit racism among people who call themselves Democrats, Independents and Republicans. Explicit racism, as measured in these surveys, is nothing like the explicit racism that existed fifty years ago. Lee Atwater, a bare knuckles campaign advisor to both President George H. W. Bush and President George W. Bush, explained the … Read entire article »

Filed under: African-American History, American History, Cultural Criticism, Current Events, Race/Racism

“Symbolic Racism” and the “US of KKK A”

April 3rd, 2008 | Add a Comment

Hannity, Clinton, Obama, Rev. Wright and “Racism 101″: Part Two I’d be a millionaire, if I had a dime for every time some white American expressed some variant of the opinion: “Slavery ended a long time ago. Blacks have it much better today. They’ve achieved equality under the law and many middle class blacks have achieved de facto equality. Why can’t they just get over it?” Well, it’s one thing to insist that blacks take responsibility for their own lives, even in the face of past and present racism. In fact, a November 2007 Pew Research Center poll found that 53 percent of America’s blacks believe: “blacks who don’t get ahead are mainly responsible for their own condition.” But, it’s quite … Read entire article »

Filed under: African-American History, Politics, Race/Racism

Hannity, Clinton, Obama, Rev. Wright and “Racism 101″

March 27th, 2008 | Add a Comment

Part One: “Not God Bless America. God Damn America” What are we to make of FOX NEWS hate-monger, Sean Hannity? Years after he gave Neo-Nazi Hal Turner a secret guest call-in number to WABC — in order to assure that his calls could always get on his radio show — Hannity recently “broke” a story about the inflammatory rhetoric occasionally used by Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Quote from Hannity: “I broke this story.”) And, now, a desperate Hillary Clinton is piling on. Not only has she said that Jeremiah Wright “would not have been my pastor,” she also mistakenly compared Rev. Wright’s statements with those of Don Imus — which is something nobody familiar the moral asymmetries in racism … Read entire article »

Filed under: African-American History, Politics, Race/Racism

The South Continues to “Make” Race: Will the Supreme Court Follow?

December 10th, 2006 | Add a Comment

How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses, by Mark M. Smith University of North Carolina Press, 2006, 200 pp. A few years ago, in exasperation over pre-invasion polls indicating that a large majority of Americans erroneously believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on 9/11, I was forced to return to Walter Lippmann’s classics about Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, along with other books explaining why Americans were so highly susceptible to political manipulation. Ultimately, that reading led to the article, “Democracy or dominion?” written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [ Jan/Feb. 2004] Although the general response to that article was quite positive, a highly esteemed professor insisted that I overlooked the obvious: “Most … Read entire article »

Filed under: African-American History, Book Reviews, Race/Racism

Learning Black History Is a Way to End Ignorance about the Races

February 3rd, 2000 | Add a Comment

Originally published in The Philadelphia Inquirer Do we need Black History Month? You bet we do. We need it for the same reason we need affirmative action. And what is that reason? Our ignorance. We need social institutions that will help us all learn our way out of centuries of prejudice and misinformation that still are too much with us. John Rocker, relief pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, has been suspended and required to undergo psychiatric counseling for publicly uttering his despicable remarks about, among other things, non- whites populating New York. Is he just a fringie? I don’t think so; I think uncounted masses silently share his views. An otherwise decent friend of mine refused to root for any football team having a black quarterback. … Read entire article »

Filed under: African-American History, Cultural Criticism, Race/Racism