Note to ‘race realists’: Obama won Asians too
For a little perspective, consider the votes of another minority — Asians. Romney won among all voters making more than $100,000 a year by a margin of 54-44. Asian-Americans happen to be the highest-earning group in the U.S., out-earning whites, and they generally place enormous emphasis on family. A perfect fit for Republicans, no?
No. Asians voted for Obama by 73-26; they were more Democratic than Hispanics.It’s possible that Hispanics and Asians are more communitarian than individualistic, leading them to identify more with Democrats than Republicans. But most immigrants, like most other Americans, possess both strains in their political DNA. (People rarely pull up roots and move to a new land without a strong sense of individualism.)
So perhaps the decisive characteristics are not in the Asian and Hispanic communities so much as in the Republican Party. The GOP is overwhelmingly white and insistently, at times militantly, Christian. Democrats, by contrast, are multiracial with a laissez faire attitude toward religion and spirituality. If you were a black-haired Buddhist from Taipei or a brown-skinned Hindu from Bangalore, which party would instinctively seem more comfortable?
Republican exceptions prove the rule. As Shikha Dalmia has pointed out, the two high-profile Indian-Americans in the Republican constellation — Governors Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana — both converted from their traditional eastern faiths to Christianity. It’s unlikely that’s a coincidence.
There’s a certain segment of racists who call themselves race realists, mix a little culturalism in there, and try to pretend that they’re not just pro-white. Most of these race realists put Asians up on a pedestal, given the relative success of Asians in the US educational and economic systems.
This kind of bullshit filters into GOP politics. We saw before the election the racist code words like ‘food stamp president’, we say Romney telling the NAACP if they want free stuff to vote for the other guy, we’ve heard the allegations about illegal immigrants just wanting to move here and suck up resources. All this bullshit is aimed at Hispanics and blacks, grounded in the racist belief that those groups are shiftless, lazy, depedent on government, etc.
Yet, the racial demographic group that is the highest-performing in the US— Asians— are even more Democratic than Hispanics.
There’s a lot of room to debate why this is— the article goes into some of it . I think it’s a mix of education, cultural upbringing that stresses communalism, and a knowledge that the GOP is very much a white-conservative-Christian organisation.