Back to the white Stupid

Here’s a really good email from Richard Stump at http://andune.blogspot.com/:

Sir,
I am aware of how welcome unsolicited emails usually are, so I will keep this brief. In your article “Its the White Vote, Stupid” you discuss how the White vote, a majority, went one way and the minority vote (usually) went another. I have three main questions.

First, you use the word ‘stupid’ in close conjunction with ‘White’ on several occasions; the
implication seems clear. Yet you freely admit that White voters were pretty evenly split for Kerry and Bush. Do you want to imply *all* White voters are stupid?

Second, you speak of the South being solidly Republican and having a “big, fat, white vote”. Yet
many Southern states have a higher percentage of minorities living in them than Northern states
(Georgia compared to Minnesota, for example). How do you account for the ‘bigger, fatter, whiter” voters of Minnesota voting for Kerry?

Third, you capitalize Black, Latino, and Asian when referring to race, yet you do not capitalize White when referring to race. Why is that?

Actually I enjoy getting emails this good, no apologies needed. And I will be brief in reply. To the extent that I mean to infer anything by the closely connected usage of “stupid” and “white” together, it would pertain to a collective phenomenon. Therefore, it would be a fallacy of division to derive from my claims any conclusions about *all* white people.

Indeed 50 percent of white voters in Minnesota voted for Kerry (according to exit polls, etc.) , proving that there is nothing immutable in the white collective preference for Bush. What’s different about white voters in Minnesota? That’s a good question, and I haven’t tried to answer it yet. Any suggestions? What works with white voters in Minnesota that has not yet been tried on white voters elsewhere?

As for capitalization, I am just doing a little typographical counter-supremacy. It’s a small thing, yet noticable to discerning readers.

Please if you have any more emails like this, send them along.

–Greg Moses