Mapping Racist Tweets in Response to President Obama's Re-election

Yeah, it's not the most professional way to put things. The question itself is, frankly, ridiculous -- I only see two ways to parse it:

1) This person is asking for a philosophical discussion on the nature of semantics. Given the incendiary context here, if that is a sincere desire, I consider that to be sophistry.

2) This person is impossibly naive about society, the world and the state of current affairs. In this case they should be listening more and speaking less.

At any rate, thank you for your comments and your faith in my abilities. I genuinely appreciate your not flaming me, however deserved, and expressing your concern calmly instead.

However, although rash and inarticulate, stating my feelings the way I did communicates an emotional punch that my outline above doesn't. And although I do sometimes delete hastily-written comments, in this case I will leave my name it. I don't care much for people who can't see the forest for the trees on this issue. Arguing the semantics of racial epithets is, frankly, bullshit.

The sample was from a subset (geolocated tweets) and involved only a very specific set of keywords. In other words, this was not an exercise to see how many racist tweets there are. It was an exercise to see where the racist tweets generally come from. All that was needed here was a relatively small random sample. So the analysis, at least in terms of the sample size itself, is almost certainly valid. You may have misunderstood the point of the post...

If I offended you, I apologize for that. I'm not trying to offend or label anyone racist, I'm trying to point out the double standard. Technically I'm baiting the discussion by begging the question:

    If a white man votes for a white man because he is white, he is racist.

    If a black man votes for a black man because he is black, he is participating in black pride.

Wait, what?!

> Suddenly when it's a black guy THAT'S the issue. How brain dead.

Nope, the issue is that the same standard isn't applied to BOTH groups. The same issue applies to the straight/gay debate: why is it discrimination when someone straight is in a straight-pride parade, but not a gay person in a gay-pride parade?

> Wanting your kid to have positive black role models is not racist, no. That's a not very sophisticated but very valid and certainly not racist reason for voting for Obama that's entirely based on race.

I'm not going to go into why I think Obama is a bad role model. I'm white, but I have people I consider as role models...

My black role models are:

  1. A police officer in Baltimore, whom I call my uncle and has been there for me more than my biological uncles.
  2. A parole officer in Baltimore for juvenile delinquents. He's in his job just to give kids a chance to work out their problems, and to change from the gang/criminal mentality they've had.
  3. And a woman who, as a single mother, raised two daughters and sent them to college by hard work and sheer economy. And now she suffers greatly from diabetes and arthritis but still refuses to give up. She encourages ME every time I see her.

I've seen the lives of these people and respect them greatly. From what I've seen of Obama he doesn't even measure up. If he did, I could have considered voting for him.

So please, don't assume that I'm calling you names or wanting to attack you because you might've voted for Obama because he's black. I just want you to consider: could you have been racist? And maybe you'll think of me next time I vote for a white person, and think better of me than "he's racist".