I was bemused in reading that when the Episcopal bishop of South Dakota planned to close down some chapels on the Pine Ridge reservation. The locals were upset .A lot of Native Americans are Epicopalian, and even when they might not attend church, they see the pastor as a comfort, and the local chapels as places where they were baptised and their relatives are buried.
But for some, the anger then turned personal:
One blogger wrote:
 It has been known for some time that several Pine Ridge leaders (mostly Oglala Lakota) and the Bishop (who is Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota) have been squabbling or estranged. There are many struggling congregations in South Dakota – why did the Pine Ridge take the hit?”
My point is not to show that Episcopalians are prejudiced, but to point out two things about prejudice:
One: That those who have suffered discrimination in the past are likely to point to racial, ethnic, religious, or clan prejudice as the reason behind a decision when a closer look suggests that the decision or remark was due to a different reason (in this case, a tight budget and the need to close underattended churches).
But the second reason I use this as an example is to point out that there are a lot of people who have suffered discrimination.
Yes, In know. Discrimination against Catholic/Orthodox ethnics, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, and other “white” people has never been as bad. as the legal restrictions of black people in the past.
I’m old enough to remember when we visited the South in the 1950’s, and there were “colored” bathrooms, hotels, etc., and that one intern whom I worked with worried when she and her white husband visited her home in Virginia, since at that time interracial marriage was illegal.
Yet in the past 50 years, things have changed.
But people have long memories, and racism is “taught” as a child. So I am not surprised to see that “hidden” racism (i.e. people who believe in negative stereotypes) is widespread in the American public.
Yet now we are being told that if we don’t vote for Senator Obama, the reason is because we are a bunch of bigots.
Wait a second…
Your assumption itself shows ignorance and bigotry: who is lumping all “whites” together, are ignoring that not all whites have the same history, and that many whites themselves suffered from discrimination?
When Geraldine Ferraro tried to point this out, she was misquoted and condemned as racist. Yet white ethnics and Asians in large cities often have had to compete with their black neighbors for jobs, apprenticeship programs, college placement, and scholarships because of affirmative action.
So is the country ready to elect a Black president named Barak?Well, that depends.
You see, among working class democrats, there is racial prejudice, but the majority are smart enough to exempt those that they know from these false generalizations. So an Obama who could campaign and encourage white workers to identify with him would be given a “pass” because the majority of people do try to be fair.
That was what making Senator Joe Biden his VP pick was about: To show that they too were represented in TeamObama, the team for change and hope.
Joe Biden is a klutz, but he is likable, and could teach the Obama team a lot about ordinary folks. He seems to be all over the place, giving speeches…alone. One has to wonder why Senator Obama hasn’t seemed to do a lot of campaigning with Biden. Obama is missing his chance to pick up Hillary’s huge blue collar vote.
This is where Governor Palin comes into the discussion.
Senator Obama has a problem, not because he is black, but because he is a snob. And to make things worse, he is the darling of the snobbish elites.
The snobbish elites have been having a field day making rabid personal attacks on Governor Palin.
Oh, I don’t mean those that question her lack of foreign policy experience (although similar criticisms could be made of Obama).
What I mean are the personal attacks against her appearance, against her children, against her religion, against her marriage, but mainly against her failure to be part of the club of those who went to Harvard and can discuss ideas (but not change a tire, fix a faucet, change a diaper, or teach a kid to fish...).
How bad is it? GatewayPundit has a list… and the list doesn’t even include Andrew Sullivan’s tirades, the libels in the gutter press, Huff Post and DailyKos, or the ridicule of her religious faith in editorials or by pundits on Television.
Ralph Peters, no friend of Bush and company, puts it this way:
When The New York Times, CNN, the NBC basket of basket cases and all the barking blog dogs insult Palin, they’re insulting us. When they smear her, they’re smearing every American who actually works for a living, who doesn’t expect a handout, who doesn’t have a full-time accountant to parse the family taxes, who believes in the Pledge of Allegiance and who thinks a church is more than just a tedious stop on daughter Emily’s 100K wedding day.
His essay goes into details, but you get the idea. Every time some elitist who is a known Obama supporter attacks Palin on a personal level, Obama loses votes.
Finally, the press hasn’t quite noticed it, but there is another segment of the population that may desert the Democratic Party: The church-going Catholic voter. It’s mainly about abortion, of course, an issue that wasn’t supposed to be in play for this election. Obama’s policies might lower the abortion rates, so he is claiming this why people of faith should ignore the issue and support him. He was actually making some headway with this argument.
But then Obama’s own people blew it.
First Nancy Pelosi and then Joe Biden started Catholic bashing by criticizing and denying what Catholics believe on national television. The result has been that some bishops have actually gotten enough backbone to publicly correct them. No problem. The press didn’t give the bishops much publicity in the matter.
But the bishops aren’t the only ones upset. The Knights of Colombus are also getting into the act, and unlike the bishops, who run things from the top and often are out of touch, the Knights are a grass roots organization… You can ignore the bishop in his mansion on the hill, but your next door neighbor is in the KC…and they have been fighting anti Catholic bigotry for over a hundred years.
So there you have it. On one side, a vote for racial tolerance, hope and governance by the best minds of academia. On the other side, beer, church goers and uppity Nascar loving union workers: or as President Blaine would have put it “rum, Romanism and Rebellion“.
What, you never heard of President Blaine? My point exactly…
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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines. She writes about human rights at Makaipablog.
13 users commented in " Prejudice? Yes. At many levels of America. "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThere are two types of whites ~ the poorer whites and the richer whites.
The poorer American whites have an incentive to hold on to their racism ~ as a poorer black person might come into direct competition with them.
Like George Bush’s presidency ~ he has brought in a whole host of different people ~ as a rich white he not really threatened by some black or Hispanic getting that job he really wanted.
The big question is how long have the poor whites been poor? White is usually presented as a unified front ~ and that probably gives great comfort to poorer whites ~ although richer whites may wish to distance themselves for the poorer ones ~ except during an election ~ and the whole religious ban wagon gets pulled out ~ to appeal to the base.
The people in Appalachian ~ are saying on the international media ~ I ain’t votin’ for no black guy ~ after what we done to them ~ they may make us sit at the back of the bus!
That’s the base ~ or part of the base of the Republican Party ~ and the richer whites depend on this feeling of belonging and of separation ~ to keep themselves in power.
What did they get this time for their vote ~ jobs gone to China ~ 4 years ago of a Fox News weekend business show ~ they were laughing at the people losing their jobs to China ~ literally ~ remember Kerry was talking about it ~ because those guys were making more money in the stock market ~ at the expense of the American people’s jobs.
I know Fox News is your favorite channel ~ but what do those rich presenters care about the cost of your health insurance, whether your child can go to college on a credit for doing community work ~ beaurocrats deal with John McCain’s health insurance as a Senator ~ but that’s the same one Obama wants to offer you. If you make under $250,000 you are going to get a tax cut with Obama ~ John McCain’s family takes in 6,000,000 a year ~ and his biggest concern is paying an extra 3%-4% in tax. The first day of the RNC Cindy McCain’s outfit cost $300,000 ~ and you’ll vote to pay high taxes so these guys can pay lower taxes.
600,000 people have lost their jobs this year ~ 1,000,000 people have lost their homes. Wall Street is crashing ~ this is when John McCain wakes up in his ‘I’ll fix it’ mode. Before that the economy was fundamentally sound – with just a few problems.
The poorer White never owned a plantation ~ they only wished they did. If the blacks were the slaves who worked the fields ~ the poor White are the mental slaves, still tethered by the mind.
Country First ~ Big oil got 30 year oil drilling contracts out of the Iraqi war and not a WMD in sight but 4,000 lives lost. Drill Baby Drill! Georgia near Russia ~ there is gas pipeline through that country. Now according to John McCain speech at the RNC we are fighting the old USSR. Palin casually says that we can go to war with them ~ in the warmer areas of the US people who have solar panels on their roofs with a two way system ~ so that the excess energy flows to the power plant and when you need energy you draw from the power plant ~ their electricity bills are like $5 to $10 a month.
Now, there is some talk of getting Russia involved in a war of attrition ~ through aid to Georgia ~ to eventually take Russia. They got a lot of oil up there ~ but unlike Iraq ~ they really do have weapons of mass destruction.
So now four years if up ~ time to visit the preachers ~ and to roll out the religious Christian Values message ~ it’s a sure vote getter. But when are the poor Whites going to start asking for something for their vote. You can actually vote for lower taxes for 95% of the people, for cheaper health insurance ~ like the one that John McCain gets for himself. If your teenage kid does 100 hours of service ~ then they’ll get a $4000 credit to go to college ~ as well as getting a loan for school will be made easier and 10% off the top of your mortgage payments.
There is Big government that goes to war after war for oil ~ or Big Government that helps your family.
As for prejudice ~ everyone should go get a test on their genes ~ then you can find out who you really are ~ instead of the illusion!
You see whites as a monolith. They are not. Neither are blacks for that matter.
A good background on the various ethnic groups and the political divides can be found in the CSMonitor’s series on “The Patchwork Nation”.
http://www.csmonitor.com/patchworknation/csmstaff/
As for Fox news: it is not available in our small rural town in the central Philippines. We watch CNN, the BBC or ABS-CBN…
I agree with Nancy. There are a lot of people who are afraid to say that they are supporting John McCain for fear of being accused of racism. The people I know are informed, anything but racist. They simply do not like Obama’s views, his association with a racist, anti-American church that gives awards to bigots like Louis Farrahkan, his friendship with terrorists William Ayers and Patricia Dorhn, his anti-Christian comments, his extremist pro-abortion views etc. They do not believe that he has the experience for the job.
Jason
While were on the subject of Obama’s – possible faults lets look at Palin’s – She belongs to a church that believe Jews in Israel are being attacked as a punishment from God !!
Her church is called Wasilla Assembly of God _ The Third Wave or Underground Evangelical church movement also known as Joel’s Army.
Their aim is to take America – and then the world with some sort of Holy War _ she did talk of going to war with Russia _ in order to set up God Kingdom here on Earth.
Sounds sane to you ~ and she doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state ~ like Iran she would attempt to create a Christian authoritarian state – Banning books and policing what people do in their private lives according to her own personal beliefs.
See your perfect Christian reality right here in a video of Palin’s Church the one McCain had removed from youtube
http://vimeo.com/1679097
And if you manage to elect her over Obama ~ will you please put in a prayer that she doesn’t go to war with Russia ~ I don’t want to lose a few cities for your vote.
Sarah Palin church video
http://vimeo.com/1679097
The one they removed from youtube
Cole,
Thats right, higher taxes for the ones who create the jobs, and they will go where there are less taxes, therefore they will be less lobs. Check out Jimmy Carter’s record when he did that.Do we really want to go back to those days?
Why go all the way back to Carter ~ why not Clinton
While the Republicans chased Clinton down for his immoral behavior
he created the largest economic grow ever _ in the entire world.
And those are the adviser that will be assisting an Obama administration
George Bush the Rep. pick ~ doubled the debt ~ took us to war _ the only thing doing well in the economy is the thing he cared about most and that was oil.
And the military to some extent.
Listen to Palin ~ if that doesn’t sound like Bush I don’t know what does. She’s talking oil and she’s talking war.
Cole,
Only because he had a Republican majority congress. Carter was the last Democrat with a Democratic congress. I hate to think of a Democratic President who wants to spend like there is no end, and a democratic congress as his accomplice .
Get real, he wants to give everything to everyone , but will not have the money when the wealthy business owners move there businesses elsewhere, or just raise prices to cover the costs of higher taxes. That is where your tax breaks will go, higher prices and lower wages.
The Republican ideal ~ doesn’t bear out to its reality!
Bush and Bush ~ the debt counter broke with the first Bush and with the second we just have better counters.
Understandable every party in opposition will work to tempter the other. The Republican’s views should be moderated by the Democrats and likewise the other way round.
At the moment we have a problem with the overall direction of the Party in charge. Bush for example has put in place [trickle down/increased competition] policies [which proved flawed] ~ of Bush Sr. and of Reagan. And it seems which McCain wants to continue.
Verses Clinton’s more simplistic plan ~ of real fiscal responsibility and actually paying down the debt with what you have ~ keeping taxes a touch bit higher until the debt is under control.
– unlike the Bush plan that tried to stimulate the economy ~ and with this [predicted] grow and increased earnings ~ the debt would then be paid off faster as the taxes which came in allowed.
It seemed that all the money went into stimulating the economy ~ to finally get it to that Nirvana place ~ where they can finally act fiscally responsible and pay down the debt.
That’s where the Democrats hope to come in – in this election and bring this economy back to the more simplistic Clintonian model ~ maybe the plan doesn’t reward the rich as much ~ and deals with the issues of those less well off a little more ~ but the Clinton model is more stable ~ no pie in the sky waiting for economic grow to then pay the debt ~ we pay the debt and act responsibly now and get the country back on track.
Funny all the things the Republicans predict will happen under the Democrats are happening now under the Republicans ~ As promised George Bush gave the wealthy their tax breaks and
as you say “your tax breaks will go, higher prices and lower wages.” Well your Republican tax breaks have amounted to higher prices and lower wages. When Clinton was in wages were up, people had jobs and could get a mortgage.
It is Republicans who have shipped jobs overseas – like they said on Fox News ~ you can more money on the stocks when they do. They were quite happy about it then. But jobs overseas ~ mean people can’t pay their mortgages or their mortgage insurance ~ AIG
There is an arrogance that has been a part of the Republican Party ~ that coupled with incompetence is dangerous. If the Democrats get like that after being in power too long ~ rightly throw them out and give the Republicans a turn.
It’s time for the Republicans to step aside and not to allow the ‘fixing’ of their old ideas but to allow new ideas to emerge until these get old and worn out – then we can switch Parties again.
Cole, you are very smart and make valid points with facts behind them. I agree with you and hope for the best outcome for the election.
Nice going Cole, you have valid points.
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