Last September, when Grammy-award winning hip-hop superstar Kanye West said on national television that "President Bush doesn't care about black people", the statement provoked outrage in the media and among conservative pundits. West made his remarks during a fundraising program for victims of Hurricane Katrina, and it was clear to anyone with a normal intelligence that the federal response to that catastophe proved the statement. Whether or not President Bush personally "doesn't care about black people" is beside the point: his policies of tax cuts for the wealthy and neglect for the growing percentage of Americans living in poverty - a disproportionate number of which are black - speak for themselves.
But now it appears that President Bush is simply practicing smart politics. The Washington Post today has an interesting article on the role unconscious bias has in political preference. The Americans in the study who harbor prejudice against blacks showed a strong affinity with George W. Bush and Republican politics:
That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.
(...)The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.
"Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the prejudice level of the president," said Banaji, "but it does show that George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice."
(...)"If anyone in Washington is skeptical about these findings, they are in denial," he said. "We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice against blacks. If people say, 'This takes me aback,' they are ignoring a huge volume of research."
Can there be any doubt what the outcome would be if the study were expanded to include prejudice against gays and lesbians? How many Republican voters are biased against both blacks and gays? This is President Bush's political base, and with Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court we are likely to see legislation that will gratify this group. A sample of what we can expect is in the same newspaper: a new proposed law would permit racist and bigoted health workers to deny medical care to people if it conflicts with their "moral values".
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