Letters to the Editor
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Pantanal--we blue color males object
Can you see the leap you make in the following? Can you see how it really hurts to have you (a) specify a subset of the "Southern white male" and then (b) generalize?
You write about "certain white southern males, typically without a college education, blue color, and with racist and xenophobic attitudes. Those who claim that this type of person is a liberal invention are lying, because there are ten of millions of them around, unfortunately. My point is that there's absolutely nothing a Democratic candidate can do to get the support of the average southern white male."
I'm a white, working-class Southerner with a Ph.D. in the Humanities and a job teaching kids who are predominantly white, predominantly working class, and still politically up for grabs. My politics are always liberal if they are not, as they are on occasion, outright radical. I resent your linking me with know-nothings your suggesting that my students--the children of coal miners and dirt farmers--have no choice but to be ignorant hillbillies.
But I resent even more the idea that, doggone it, we all just have to admit that there just isn't a lick of good you can do for one of those benighted rednecks besides write them off and pity them while the decent folk get down to the business of living life as it ought to be.