On January 30th on All Things Considered, Democratic Strategist Dan Payne said, “There isn’t really a place for the white male to find a candidate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. All you have to do is look at them and see they’re not like white men.” Hear this commentary at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18549097
This comment is blatently racist and sexist, in that it assumes white men have no good option now that there are no white men in the race. Since the sufferage movement won the right of women to vote, women have voted for white men. Since the drives to register black voters in the 1960’s and before, black men and women have voted for white men. The idea that white men don’t have a candidate to vote for now in the democratic party is patently absurd! The second sentence of this comment gets even worse, in its assertion that women and black men and women are completely different types of human beings than white men, and by implication, are substandard. You don’t often hear such blatant discrimination stated on NPR, and I would urge them and anyone else considering hiring Dan Payne to reconsider.
Carla
2 responses so far ↓
emmaatlast // February 13, 2008 at 11:05 pm |
“they’re not like us”. hmmm. seems to be the expression of every ‘ism’ out there.
brethrenpriestess // February 16, 2008 at 12:46 am |
That’s pretty incredible. Does he really think that white men are so incapable of reaching outside their own racial and gender identities to find commonality with someone different? Or does he just think that women and black men are incapable of reaching beyond THEIR identities to take HIS needs (the ones rooted in his racial and gender identities, that is) into account? One would indeed think that the long history of white women and people of color finding a way to reach across their gender and racial identities to vote for someone ‘not like them’ would indicate that we ARE able to do so quite well, thank you! So maybe it is his faith in white men that is shaky?