woops:
It should be “bred in”, rather than “inbred”, but the meaning and context are exactly the same.
Bottom line: This “beyond race” presidential aspirant has publicly declared that white people can be negatively stereotyped as having inbred fears of unfamiliar black men they encounter on the street.
Its wrong on so many levels - but clearly he is a hypocrite. Which is what the Wright tapes reveal.
I agree with you that Obama's dealing in messy stereotypes and that he picked precisely the wrong one to mess with.
One, it is true that the Pew Trusts sponsored a 1999 sociology survey that resulted in a political typology of the U.S. electorate (grouped into about a dozen groups) that showed that older women were a distinct typology at ~6% of the population, and that they harbored very anti-black views (based on fears for their own safety). They were also very much against private gun ownership (same reason) and were prime gun-grabbers.
Older women's personal-security motive fits in both debates, but it never gets brought up when race is being discussed, so that these women are dragged in, misleadingly, as data for general white racism toward blacks rather than as group-appropriately fearful for their own safety on many fronts, as is actually the case for older women (and probably across racial boundaries, I might add).
Two, 25,000 dead people per year, murdered mostly by young black men, in the late 80's and early 90's (the annual death toll is down to about 16,000/year now), offer a great, big, fat reason for anyone to be worried, like Jesse Jackson (as he once admitted), about being followed down an alley by young black men. At the height of the murder boom, 91% of all black murder victims (and black victims were half the grand total by themselves) were murdered by YBM; of the non-black half of murder victims, 25% for sure were murdered by YBM, and probably most of the 25% described coyly by police statistics (what do you bet they know better?) as "stranger murders" with "race of assailant unknown" were also murdered by YBM. Meaning that up to three-quarters of all murders committed during the murder-boom years were committed by YBM.
Three, what proportion of the murders of non-blacks by YBM was racially or hate-motivated? Nobody ever seems to ask. If it's as little as 15%, then the 4700 blacks lynched between 1866 and 1962 would seem to have been eclipsed long ago by a hecatomb of non-black "hate crime" victims, in amongst all the economically-motivated workaday murders.