This is the last Jay Nordlinger post. I suspect what’s going on here is a chasm between different Ways of Knowing, but this anecdote that he passes on is just bizarre:
So, my husband is black, I am biracial (white/Korean). Here is my three (homeschooled) children’s experience of life: All their black and Korean relatives are voting for McCain (security, taxes, marriage, and abortion). All their white relatives are voting Obama (well-meaning, misguided liberals). At least half the Republican families they know are black homeschoolers.
What exactly does this mean? The myth that the proportion of Republicans decreases as you go up the wealth ladder is in wide circulation. But no one is pretending that non-whites, on average, are more likely to be Republican than whites. Yes, there are black Republicans, and some non-whites lean Right (I do myself), but as a whole American conservatism is white, while liberalism is multicolored. Not that there’s anything wrong with this, it’s just how it is.
Of course, Nordlinger is right that there are stupid people who simply think every rich person is a Republican, and that every non-rich person is a Democrat, who engage in gross impressionistic generalizations. The irony here is that these are statistically illiterate people. They are extrapolating from their own impressions in an unscientific manner. Two wrongs doesn’t make a right.
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