that ny times piece is horribly written

both were clearly racist but i actually think rob parker's critique of rgiii made more sense. kinda embarrassing for a professor to write so muddled-ly.

ok so adolf's bias is clear: "thinly veiled racism of tea-party" and "Republicans’ desperate need to woo (or at least appear to woo) minority voters" etc.

but i had no idea what his point was. i realize i looked at this too long but i kinda wanted to figure it out. i mean this is a poli sci prof at upenn!

so half the article seemed pretty laudatory. minority appointing minority, whatever. racist tea party put up the money for black republican's campaign against 2 white people. but then, what was the rest of it about?

is it, hey repubs, get in line with black people's interests or you're going to lose more elections? that might be true but he just got appointed - his election is not for 2 years.

it could be, white people are willing to vote for black people but black people won't vote for any color of republicans. conclusion: white republicans are racist. but we've heard that before.

or: when republicans have appointed black people, they did so with some sort of political agenda (but unlike democratic politicians, their agenda was not diversity, so it was evil). the logical conclusion would be: this must be advancing some form of agenda for nikki haley - but that wouldn't look good because she's a minority woman. adolf's conclusion: white racist republicans appointed scott for tokenist reasons.

or: maybe this is good news from the republican party but since there are other things that are easier to call racist, let's bring those up and talk about poll taxes.

i had to look elsewhere to find what other people considered his point: "the appointment [was] as an empty gesture made to silence critics and not a genuine attempt to diversify the GOP." so basically he's saying, democrats clearly consider race, but it's ok because they're trying to diversify. republicans must have been thinking about race (no citation) but they're not interested in diversity (no citation); they're only interested in empty gestures (because if they were serious about diversity, they would have picked a black democrat).

i guess the real question is: what's the difference between a token and a sign of progress? and can't a token lead to progress?