wait, did Sarah Palin actually refer to racism as a light burden? Really?

If any of those things keep Obama from getting elected, I'll agree. Because the proof is in the outcome.

I don't know the source for that -- it's been a month of almost daily moral outrage for me, and sadly the sucker punches are starting to blend together.

However, Wise is generally careful with citation and the Soft Skull copy editors are ferocious, so I am inclined to believe it.

@Namrok -- If Obama's loss is what it'll take to get you to believe in white privilege, I regret to report that I hope you never get that chance.

The thing is, it's not that I don't believe white people are viewed differently than black people when they do the exact same things. The article outlined that rather well.

It become a matter of privilege and not merely perception when it, lets say, loses you a presidential election.

Honestly I think we've come too far as a society for that to happen. And I hope I'm not proven wrong by Obama losing.

Namrok: Honestly I think we've come too far as a society for that to happen.

Its a big possibility that we HAVEN'T come that far as a society, especially when you take into consdieration the race poll results released by Stanford earlier this week:

More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can't win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don't have such views. (http://news.yahoo.com/page/election-2008-political-pulse-obama-race)

Look at the graph on the side. White democrats, more so than the other people polled, viewed blacks in general as lazy, irresponsible, violent, and complaining.

I mean, come on.

I don't think you read that graph right. White democrats consistently described blacks using better adjectives than any other group. Their little blue box is the furthest right on positive adjectives, closer to the 40% line, and furthest left on negative adjectives, closer to the 0% line.

aw fuck, you're right.

fucking dyslexia.

The article also pointed out that many of the people who had bad things to say about black people in general had GREAT things to say about Obama in specific.

I mean you'll never win over the "I don't want some {racist remark} in the whitehouse!" But how many of those people are there really?

man, you'd be surprised. But maybe I just see it more since I live in a red state and cubans are very conservative and not very brownie-friendly.

The thing is, white privilege isn't limited to the "I ain't votin' for no HOO-sane" type. You can encounter it in any walk of life.

I can't find a direct quote by Palin about "light burden", but even without that line, this is an interested way at looking at public/media response to the candidates from the filter of racial double standards.
Granted, as the Daily Show pointed out, sometimes being white doesn't help. There was a great example at the hypocracy shown by right wing pundits on Brittany Spears' sister having a teen pregnancy versus Palin's daughter having one.
So I agree with the gist of this article, but the slams have as much to do with power and benefit to the slammers as they have to do with racial issues. I don't think that Palin's clan would get any of the positive spin they are if she wasn't a Republican in office, regardless of her skin color.

Apart from "White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you," I think that most of the items he chronicled are more attributable to *Republican* privilege -- that is, the turn-on-a-dime hypocrisy of the Right Wing Noise Machine. I think Keith Knight nailed it two weeks in a row:

http://www.salon.com/comics/knig/2008/09/17/knig/

http://www.salon.com/comics/knig/2008/09/24/knig/

Namrok: Man, I'm in Georgia, and there are plenty of those kinds of people here.