I don't know who is worse, professor Ryan D. Enos of Harvard for claiming that demographic changes will drive liberal whites to the GOP out of racism or the editor of The Washington Post's Outlook section for publishing this piece. Then again they have faculty at Harvard like this??? Really?
How the demographic shift could hurt Democrats, too
It’s assumed that, as the United States becomes increasingly non-white, white Democrats will continue to support the party. But a substantial amount of social-science evidence suggests a different conclusion: As the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, liberal whites might start leaning Republican.
Okay then, once I wiped away the coffee I snorted onto my keyboard from laughing so hard, I read on, I mean this one's gotta be good. NOT.
Consider a straightforward experiment I conducted last year: Over two weeks, I sent pairs of Latino men in their 20s to ride commuter trains in the greater Boston area, often cited as one of the nation’s most liberal regions.
These people were not asked to do anything out of the ordinary, just to wait for the train and ride it. The pairs I sent were native Spanish speakers, so when they spoke to each other, it was probably in Spanish. To gauge other riders’ attitudes about Latinos, I surveyed them before the experiment and two weeks into the tests. In each case, the trains and times were randomly selected and were later compared with a control group of riders on different trains. These trains originated in communities with very few Latino residents, and the men I sent to ride the trains were often the only Latinos at those stations on a day-to-day basis. In this sense, the experiment was testing how people react when a very small group of Latinos moves to a new community.
The results were clear. After coming into contact, for just minutes each day, with two more Latinos than they would otherwise see or interact with, the riders, who were mostly white and liberal, were sharply more opposed to allowing more immigrants into the country and favored returning the children of illegal immigrants to their parents’ home country. It was a stark shift from their pre-experiment interviews, during which they expressed more neutral attitudes.
Alrighty then, a few supposedly "liberal" white Bostonians are afraid of The Brown Ones on the T, therefore the GOP is saved. Whaaaat?
The comments on the article rightfully savage the author, there are almost none supporting the viewpoint of the professor. Perhaps The Washington Post might want to rethink their race to the bottom as their stock price tanks.