How Many Southern Whites Believe Obama Was Born in America?
Cees Binkhorst
ceesbink at XS4ALL.NL
Tue Aug 4 21:07:20 CEST 2009
REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
De discussie van de 'birthers' die maar niet willen geloven dat Obama in
Hawaï geboren is, gekoppeld aan het 'Gates' incident (Harvard professor na
thuiskomst gearresteerd door blanke politieman, geboeid en 4 uur
vastgehouden op buro) waarbij Obama (m.i. terecht) een opmerking over
maakte over racial profiling, brengt diepe tegenstellingen in het oude
racistische zuiden naar boven.
Obama heeft overigens als senator in Illinois een wet gepromoot, en
aangenomen gekregen, die de politie in Illinois verplichtte bij te houden
welk ras hun arrestanten waren. Dit zorgde voor een beduidende afname van
de racial profiling daar. Obama weet uit eigen ervaring, ook als
buurtwerker, waar hij het over heeft.
Of het slim was daar op dit tijdstip zo'n opmerking over te maken is een
andere zaak, maar ik kan me wel een paar dingen voorstellen waarom hij
zijn mond niet wilde houden.
Groet / Cees
http://washingtonindependent.com/53396/how-many-southern-whites-believe-obama-was-born-in-america
How Many Southern Whites Believe Obama Was Born in America?
By David Weigel 7/31/09 4:56 PM
The breakdowns of the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll that asked 2,400 people
about where they believe the president was born are revealing. As Steve
Benen and Markos Moulitsas both pointed out, only in the South is there a
sizable number of Americans with questions about the presidents
citizenship. While around 90 percent of people in the Northeast, Midwest
and West know that Obama was born in in United States, only 47 percent of
people in the South believe this. Twenty-three percent think he was born
somewhere else; 30 percent dont know.
But how many Southern whites arent sure whether the president has lied
about his citizenship? The South defined by the poll includes 30 percent
of the countrys population, in twelve states: Florida, North Carolina,
South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee,
Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. Thats around 99.2 million
people, of whom 61.3 million are non-Hispanic whites, according to the
U.S. Census Bureau. According to the exit polls in those 12 states, 30.6
percent of the voters in this region who cast ballots in 2008 were black,
Hispanic or members of another minority group.
According to Del Ali of Research 2000, if you excluded those people from
the pollif you look only at white voters in the Souththe number of
people who doubt Obamas citizenship is higher than the 47 percent figure
that has grabbed headlines today. There was no deviation in the number of
black, Hispanic, and other voters from one region of the country to
another, Ali told TWI. In the South, like everywhere else, the vast
majority of non-white voters said that Obama was born in the United
States; 97 percent of black voters, 87 percent of Hispanic voters, and 88
percent of other minorities. The extremely low overall percentage? Thats
due to white Southerners, who dragged down the average with an extremely
high level of doubt about Obama.
So what proportion of Southern whites doubt that Obama is an American
citizen? While Ali did not release the racial breakdowns for the the
South, and cautioned that the margin of error in the smaller sample of 720
people would be larger than the national margin of error (2 percent), the
proportion of white Southern voters with doubts about their presidents
citizenship may be higher than 70 percent. More than 30 percent of the
people polled in the South were non-white, and very few of them told
pollsters that they had questions about Obamas citizenship. In order for
white voters to drive the Souths dont know number to 30 percent and
its born outside the United States number to 23 percent, as many as
three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didnt know
where Obama was born.
One thing to keep in mind, if only a quarter or a fifth of white
Southerners believe Obama was born in the United States, thats more than
voted for him last year in some states. Obama won 14 percent of the white
vote in Louisiana, 14 percent in Mississippi, and 10 percent in Alabama.
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