Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com makes a concise, 10-minute presentation at TED last month on matters of race, voting & geography.
What I wouldn't give to put Nate in the room with the good folks at the Applied Research Center and see what happens! While I like the intent of Silver's presentation, it a revised version could be made that much more compelling if he understood and borrowed from ARC's Compact for Racial Justice. (Disclosure: Afro-Netizen founder, Chris Rabb, is an ARC board member.)
Anyway, enjoy!
H/T to David Whettstone
Interesting piece here. I agree that racism is directly correlated to the mix of people in your immediate area.
Something Nate left out, however, is the other side of the coin. His focus was intently on white racism, white voting patterns. Sure, some people voted against Obama because of his African roots. Other people, however, voted FOR Obama because of his genetic makeup or because their race is the same as Obama's.
While rural areas contain racist people, homogeneous areas filled with blacks and latino's are also racist towards different people. Racism or distaste of blacks by Latino's is well documented. Detroit's black ghetto's are hardly welcoming, if not physically dangerous to non-blacks.
There is plenty of racism to go around. Both sides of the coin have different complaints or myths, but there are 2-sides to the coin.
Posted by: Booogie-Mann | Wednesday, May 06, 2009 at 06:23 PM