You don't think that the "birther controversy" was racist in nature?

No.

You think this whole thing is a coincidence?

Racists do not generally like Obama because he has an African father. This is incredibly surprising? Do a google search for racist epithets and say Condoleezza Rice.

Are you really saying that if Democrats had a white candidate on election day 2016 and Republicans a black one, you wouldn't find the appropriate slurs online?

You think this type of thing doesn't happen?

Of course it does. Do you have evidence it happens often enough to be a concern rather than pointing out anecdotes? Also what has this got to do with Republicans rather than American society as a whole?

You think this is a complete fabrication?

No why would I? A mere two decades before that there was basically a new splinter party just on the segregation issue.

This seems like a complete failure of critical thinking.

I will say the same. You seem to have utterly failed at the principle of charity if not outright straw manned my position.

I am not an American. I'm not a Republican. Yet the examples you picked seem to target a CNN caricature of a Fox News viewer. Why did you pattern match me to that? That this post got up voted to 3 karma before my response suggests filling a post with solid partisan digs can be a good way to gain votes on LessWrong and is an indication of us suffering a lack of diversity.

If this isn't what you're saying, could you say plainly what it is you believe and why?

I believe most people in America and the West have on a conscious level an irrational aversion to racism two or three orders of magnitude out of proportion to the actual utilitarian damage it causes. This is partially caused by virtue signalling spirals.

The opportunity costs of this are non-trivial.

You don't think that the "birther controversy" was racist in nature?

Yes, it's amazing how easy it is to find evidence of racism when you're willing to claim things are secretly motivated by racism with no evidence.

You think this whole thing is a coincidence?

Wow, there appears to be one twit a day that uses both the words "Obama" and "nigger", and almost half of those appear to be pro-Obama twits using "nigger" ironically.

You think this type of thing doesn't happen?

Given the correlation between race and crime, I don't see your point.

This seems like a complete failure of critical thinking.

Since you appear to be relatively new to LW, let me point out that this kind of ad hominem is completely inappropriate on LW even if it didn't follow laughably weak arguments.

If you assume that people of color are at least moderately competent judges of their own interests, then the Republicans not attracting people of color should at least be weak evidence that Republicans show prejudice.

It is also weak evidence that the Democratic party is offering non-white voters benefits beyond those they offer to white voters. A model of a race preference Democratic party and a race blind Republican party works just as well as long as you assume Democrats are slightly anti-white.

It's weak evidence because there are other possible explanations-- perhaps people of color don't like feeling so strongly outnumbered so there's a stable situation which isn't a result of white racism.

See Thomas Schelling's Models of Segregation

In 1969 and 1971, Schelling published widely cited articles dealing with racial dynamics and what he termed "a general theory of tipping".[10] In these papers he showed that a preference that one's neighbors be of the same color, or even a preference for a mixture "up to some limit", could lead to total segregation, thus arguing that motives, malicious or not, were indistinguishable as to explaining the phenomenon of complete local separation of distinct groups. He used coins on graph paper to demonstrate his theory by placing pennies and nickels in different patterns on the "board" and then moving them one by one if they were in an "unhappy" situation.

Schelling's dynamics has been cited as a way of explaining variations that are found in what are regarded as meaningful differences – gender, age, race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, and religion. Once a cycle of such change has begun, it may have a self-sustaining momentum. His 1978 book Micromotives and Macrobehaviors expanded on, and generalized, these themes[11] and is standardly cited in the literature of agent-based computational economics.