Hayes: The problem of the color line

>>> my story of the week today, the problem of the color rhine. last week during a brief tangent in our discussion of medicare that got at the nature of the republican base, i was defending the gop against blanket generalizations and then concluded with this statement.

>> it is undeniably the case that racist americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other. the problem with that statement is that it's not true. i was just wrong about what the data say about the way explicit avowed racists are distributed between the two parties. economist alex tabarac say equally white republicans and democrats fave laws against interracial statement and believe with the statement that blacks shouldn't be pushy. overwhelmingly, he says that those who would vote for a black president and says "it's undeniable that some americans are racists, but it splits evenly among parties." no party has a monopoly. we fleshed out the picture, using data from 2008 national election study, he shows people who express explicitly racist views, such as black people are lazy or black people unintelligent, more likely to be rubpy ln kazz than democrats. identification with democrats tends to decline and tends to increase as attitudes towards blacks become less favorable. when you look at the general social survey data through the prison ideology, this tendency is even clearer. and twice as many white conservatives as white liberals would strongly oppose a close relatively marrying a black person . the good news, the numbers in both cases are low only 20% of white conservatives and 10% of white liberals, so i was wrong when i said that "it is undeniably the case that racist americans are almost entirely in one political coalition and not the other." that is simply not borne out by the data, it was a moment, frankly when my own biases led me to say something that wasn't true. my bad for saying it. thank you, internet, for correcting me. my deeper focus is counting racists as people with an essential core nature that can be analyzed and chartered rather than on focusing how it reverberates and the vast racial disparities and the effects of the policies favored by each coalition. this is a seductive error that the great jay smooth warned us about in his classic how-to video about how to talk about race and racism.

>> remember the difference between what they did conversation and what they are conversation. the what they did conversation focuses strictly on the person's words and actions and explaining why what they did and what they said was unacceptable. the what they are conversation on the other hand takes things one step further and uses what they did and what they said to draw conclusions about what kind of person they are i don't care what he is, but i need to hold him accountable for what he did. and that's how we need to approach those conversations about race.

>> instead of focusing on what cob conservatives are, we need to keep the conversation focused on what they are doing. this realm, very obvious racial asymmetries, the first and most obvious one, an issue we are covering here. new restrictions on voting, whether through voter i.d. laws or curtailment on early voting that will disproportionately disenfranchise people of color . one republican said he opposed additional voting hours, we shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban -- read african-american voter turnout machine." this is a core truth about american politics . we have a multiracial society with two political coalitions . one, democrats, contains almost all of the african- americans , a majority of latinos and asians and a minority of white people this is what the other political coalition looks like. if the obvious racial disparity you see at the political rallies inflected in the institutional makeup of the parties this is the breakdown of the u.s. according to 29010 census. this is the break down of the delegates of the dnc in 2008 and the breakdown to the rnc in 2008 . it is, therefore, not too surprising in tuesday's nbc/ wall street journal poll, romney managed to get 0% from black voters and keep in mind this is a country that is only growing less white . this is what america's racial composition will look like in 2050 , according to the census bureau . just 50% white . into a nation already realing from a total crisis of authority, a cascade of institutional failure and a stalking, corrosive decline, they managed to get elected, the first black man to run the country in the nation's history, one of the chief paradoxes of his time in office, despite the fact that the economic misery produced by the crisis and resolution, has fallen disproportionately on people of color , they are more optimistic than the future than white people are. barack obama was elect on a promise to soothe the gaping wounds of slavery, rape, listening, discrimination, that have marked our body of politic from its birth. today, it's a wound if no longer festering quite so openly is scarred over in such a way it cannot be scrubbed away or excised or covered. part whof we are. the turn at the 20th century , w.b. dubois preticketed that the problem of the on 0th century is the problem of the color line . 12 years into the 21st century , on the eve of a nominating convention on the party that destroyed slavery and enshrined the right to vote, and the hard fought re-election of the first black president , that line is uniraceable as ever from our politics.

>>> good morning from new york. i'm chris hayes here with