Your pet topic, white guilt, you summarize, saying, “yuppies and hipster, liberal, youth desperate to feel good about themselves by voting for a member of the ‘oppressed underclass’” gain fulfillment by supporting Obama. You imply that these imaginary and stereotypical privileged white kids feel guilty about their privileged lives and from this comes their self loathing and desire punishment in the form of black leadership. You presuppose all sorts of evils about Obama saying things like he’s an internationalist (i.e. not a patriot), he’s “possibly…a militarist,” he’s gonna “pull an FDR,” yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda to preclude any consideration that he might actually be a good and qualified leader. It seems your point is really that you don’t like what Obama represents to you, that you’ll assign any fault to him to justify your feelings, and to attack anyone who doesn’t see it your way by assigning them some mental defect. Please take a step back and think about something other than justifying your prejudices for a moment.

As one of the people whose mind you’re trying to read, let me tell you, I suffer from no decadencies of privilege. Though white, I am no elite (an assumption that sheds some light on your predisposition.) I’ll support candidates that reflect my outlook regardless of their class or race. Because I am lower middle class as were most members of my family going back to when they came over on the boat, because I am in a religious minority, and because I have great disdain for those who choose greed over altruism, I’ll support the candidate who will tax the rich and give to the ambitious to build a comfortable and productive middle class, who will protect my right to be free from religion, and who will make American corporations earn the support of the American people and not the other way around. I am not fighting against myself; I am fighting for myself. It just so happens that on the American scale of wealth I am much closer to the “oppressed” than to the “elites”—as are most white people in this country. Your decision to paint liberal whites as a self-loathing privileged class is an appeal to folks who think that because they are white they are elite, and your argument is predicated by the contrary assumption regarding blacks. Your argument is bound to gain ground with racists who share your incorrect presumptions. In so many ways your argument reveals what’s wrong with politics and race relations in this country.

When more lower class whites like myself stop listening to pundits and start thinking for themselves, maybe we can start rebuilding America in our image rather than in the image of medieval Europe.