Byron York observed recently that due to President Obama’s very high approval numbers among African-Americans he appears to be more popular in opinion polls than he really is. When various people responded to that observation by saying it was racist to suggest that black people’s opinions are not in some sense objectively and statistically real, York got snippy.
A few commentators on the left are calling me a racist for my post, “The black-white divide in Obama’s popularity.” I suppose if you haven’t been called a racist by the usual suspects on the left, you haven’t been writing for very long. But to address their complaint:
The accusations of racism seem to come from a single sentence in the piece: “But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.” I wrote my post because of the striking numbers in the New York Times poll. Those numbers raise a question: What if a president were wildly popular with one group, and only middlingly popular with another group and yet was often portrayed as being hugely popular with the whole group?
Or, in other words, ‘what if black people didn’t exist?’ The Editors call this auto-crucifixion, which seems about right.
