Not white? Sorry, you can't be student council presidentFollow

I'll never understand how people can be so stupid. Seriously, didn't anyone stop to think about what sort of fallout you'd get by having rules like this?

I clicked the link thinking that surely this was a misconstruction or hype exploitation of some innocent but easily misunderstood memo. Nope. It's entirely hilarious, if only because my only other choice would be to find it terribly depressing. Apparently the original intent was to ensure presentation among black students, so that they couldn't be democratically excluded, but that's a pretty shizzy method for trying to fix the situation.

I'd much appreciate it if you didn't try to connect a group of people to a situation where there is no evidence for connection. You only legitimatize the Tea Partiers' complaints that the bigotry within their group is only a false accusation.

Edited, Aug 27th 2010 3:59pm by Allegory

What Joph Allegory said.

Black people can be stupid, too.

Alma.

I see what the administrators are thinking--it's stupid, but I understand how they could think that. If black students are consistently underrepresented in the school's governing body, then the issue isn't the lack of representation but that they aren't able to win a proportionate number of votes in a democratic election. Simply giving seats to black students solves nothing.

Sorry, not gonna get into a fight with you today, gbaji. Headed out to dinner. Here's a nice Salon article with lots of evidence in it, though. Happy reading!

What the ****...

Whew! I thought I was the only one confused about how that article related to this. Other than it mentioning the tea party of course...

It didn't have anything to do with this, which is why I deleted all the ranting in the OP and the subsequent post and replaced it with "doesn't belong."

gbaji quoted deleted bits. I assumed the topic of discussion was "teabaggers are old, white, racist redneck hicks." He asked for evidence. I provided a link.

I had a really annoying conversation with my father-in-law today and it has made me irrationally angry at tea baggers. I falsely associated the Tea Party movement with the OP because my thinking was "this is exactly the kind of **** my father in law would think was a good idea."

I assumed the topic, which you started, was about the policy of that school setting aside certain student council seats for black and white students. I figure the side subject was how easily people might mistakenly assume this sort of racism has its roots in conservative ideology. I'm frankly unsure why, after having been shown that your initial assumption was horribly misplaced, you decided to continue to make this a rant about members of the tea party.



And the link didn't provide evidence for much of anything other than that the author is bigoted against members of the tea party (the use of the word "teabaggers" is a big tip-off btw). He makes broad claims about what "teabggers" want versus what they say being hypocritical, then provides vague statistics as support, apparently expecting no one to actually follow the link to the survey (did you?). While there may have been a survey with more specific information about members of the tea party, the one he linked didn't have such data. It was a general poll, yet that didn't prevent him from writing this:




Where on earth in the linked survey does the author get the information he's acting on? Maybe the Bloomberg site changed the pages around or something, but this makes no sense at all. And even the linked Bloomberg article doesn't go as far as the Salon one does.

I certainly don't get "racist" or "rednecked" from any of that. While the Tea Party is slightly older than the general public, and slightly more white, and slightly more male, it's not significantly so. 2/3rds of Americans are white. 50% are male. And I'm not sure what percentage of politically active people are 55 or older, but 40% doesn't seem that far outside the mainstream to me. Far from being some extreme subset of society, the Tea Party is far far more broadly representative of the voting public than is generally acknowledged. And it's not like the authors of those articles lied or anything. They just wrote statistics in a tone that makes the reader assume those numbers are somehow "bad".

How representative of the public at large is the Democratic party? Have you checked? If you haven't, then aren't the numbers you're being fed meaningless?




I don't know your father in law. It could be the guy is just a jerk. But just because he may be a racist redneck does not mean that the whole Tea Party movement is made up of people like him.

There's also an element of self-fulfilling assumptions here. If you associate for or against positions on certain issues with racism and bigotry, then you're automatically going to label anyone who holds those positions as bigots and racists without ever bothering to find out *why* that person holds that position. It's more than a bit absurd to look at a movement which is overwhelmingly about fiscal policy and infer a whole set of social positions based on the "side" they appear to be on. Yet, that's exactly what a whole lot off people do.

Hi, you must be new here.

Now go ramble on somewhere about something being fair, equal, etc, no one gives a rat's ***.