The South, Now With More Racism! (according to the NY Times)

One last post on the political front before I retire my post as resident political pundit:

The New York Times has once again labeled the South racist, crediting the shocking tendency of the South to vote Republican. This time, it’s obvious because, in various locations, the South voted as much as 10% more in favor of the Republican party than in ’04’s election. The title of the article is “For South, a Waning Hold on Politics,” but it should have been “The South, Now With More Racism!” because it was nothing more than a thinly-veiled attack against Southerners, with skewed statistics and an agenda the author didn’t even attempt to conceal. Once you read into the article, you’ll realize how thinly veiled it really was, too, if it was veiled at all:

Mr. Obama’s race appears to have been the critical deciding factor in pushing ever greater numbers of white Southerners away from the Democrats.

I don’t know who to be mad at with this, the NYTimes for stirring up something that’s less an issue here than it is even in New York–I’ve experienced the haughty New York bias against Southerners, and it’s uglier than any form of prejudice now in the South, my friends–or my fellow Southerners, who, if this article is true, have finally broken my spirit, because they are backwards. My tendency is to blame the author, because he chose a tiny hamlet in western Alabama as representatives of the entire South. Sure, there are pockets of racism alive and well, in Vernon as well as in other places all over the country. Possibly even (GASP!) New York City. Does Ocean County, New Jersey, who voted 58% in favor of McCain, represent your political values, Mr. Author? I doubt you’d like that very much at all if your political values were criticized because of a nearby town’s voting preferences, especially if those preferences happened to be the opposite of your own. So hey, New York, why don’t you work on your own prejudices and leave us alone? Or, better yet, why don’t you help educate some of these areas you’re indicting instead of tattling on them to the rest of the world?

For the article, the author didn’t visit quaint Montevallo or stately Huntsville, the home of this nation’s space program, for a sampling of reactions to Obama’s election. No, they visited Vernon, populatin 1,900 and change. A small, isolated town that I’m imminently familiar with, where the high school graduation rate is low. The people swell with Southern hospitality, but, isolated as they are, you might say they’re behind on the times. I’m not saying they’re backwards, they’re isolated, and there’s not much cultural diversity there, so they have fewer experiences in relating to minorities than many of us do. Maybe that sounds like I’m making excuses, and maybe I am. The point is that the majority of counties in Alabama increased their votes for Democrats this election compared to ‘04, but this author chose Vernon to represent the entire state–the entire South, even.

The article isn’t an outright lie, but in it the author does misrepresent a large geographic area by using skewed statistics. He reveals only the statistics that will paint the South in an ugly fashion, and conceals the others. This article could just as easily have been written about the numbers of people who did vote for Obama (myself included), and the massive amount of progress overall.

Map, election '08

The article even points out the fact that Virginia and North Carolina:

made history in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama.

But did they use Virginia or NC as representative of the whole South? Did they focus on positives or progress? No. They chose Vernon, Alabama. They didn’t even choose nearby Shelby County, Alabama, in which I live, which voted (according to this map), 5% higher Democrat in this election than in ‘04, with a population that’s 87.8% white. Sure, McCain still won the county, but he would have won it no matter who was running on the Dem ticket. And that’s not the point of the article, which only wants us to focus on percentage points gained or lost as compared to the Democratic voters of 2004.

So why not pick Shelby County to represent the entire South? Well, because you can’t pick one spot to represent an entire geographic area. Not if you want to be fair and balanced, which this article obviously did not want to be. It wanted to present the South as a bunch of backward racists, so it found the spot where it could present the message it wanted to deliver.

Of the people I know of who voted for McCain, they did so because of Obama’s policies, and argued their points with competence. For instance, as one friend of mine pointed out, isn’t it possible that middle income families will feel the tax crunch when the taxes on the wealthy are raised? Sure, Obama’s plan calls for a hike in taxes only for people making over 250k, but the people who make that much are the owners of a lot of businesses we middle and lower-class folk work at. Isn’t it possible, seeing their taxes go up, that they might hire fewer people, offer fewer pay raises, and essentially constrict our earning potential?  

In the end, this is just another jab by an ignorant bigot, who unfortunately has published this misleading misrepresentation in one of the most widely read periodicals in the world. One more slap to the face of every Southerner who has worked to overcome the past, to embrace the future and try to make right.

My name is Matt Mitchell. I am a white male. I live in Montevallo, Alabama, and I voted for Barrack Obama.