Why the Republicans are (mostly) white

Some people have remarkable difficulty understanding how racism works. Specifically, they seem to have a problem understanding why black people might gather together in groups, create black-majority neighborhoods, schools, and organizations, and reliably vote in a block for one party and against another.

They think this is somehow racism.

Here's a photo of President Obama and some school children.

A comment on the Gawker post about the photograph reads like this:

Token_Smurf: It's pretty telling what kind of president we have when there's not a single white face in this picture. Whose the racist now?

Extra credit: spot the white child in the photo.

Racism divides people into ethnic groups, privileging some groups more than others. But -- and it feels weird to have to point this out -- when you separate the whites from the blacks and give the whites extra benefits, you get both a group of affluent whites and a group of poverty-stricken blacks.

Black people are not a block because they are racist. They are a block because legislation and intimidation put them there.

And even though racism is officially over, black people remain remain a block because we still see the effects of more nearly four centuries of economic and ethnic exploitation and discrimination.

Black people joined the Democratic party in large numbers in the 1960s thanks to the Republican Southern Strategy. They have stayed there because Republicans refuse to accept white responsibility for the black economic situation, blaming black people instead and treating criticism as reverse-racism.

Republicans -- particularly the kind of rank-and-file Republicans who leave comments like the one above -- have been slow to recognize this. Instead, they look at all the white, well-off faces at their rallies and assume that the black people aren't there because the black people are racist and lazy, not because the Republicans pushed them out. As long as that thinking predominates, Republicans will stay a mostly white party.