"Confessions of a former Republican" by Jeremiah Goulka at AlJazeera

Confessions of a former Republican

by Jeremiah Goulka at AlJazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/20129109147503198.html

"SNIP................................................

I dove into the research literature to try to figure out what was going on. It turned out that everything I was "discovering" had been hiding in plain sight and had been named: aversive racism, institutional racism, disparate impact and disparate treatment, structural poverty, neighbourhood redlining, the "trial tax", the "poverty tax" and on and on. Having grown up obsessed with race (welfare and affirmative action were our bêtes noirs), I wondered why I had never heard of any of these concepts.

Was it to protect our Republican version of "individual responsibility"? That notion is fundamental to the liberal Republican worldview. "Bootstrapping" and "equality of opportunity, not outcomes" make perfect sense if you assume, as I did, that people who hadn't risen into my world simply hadn't worked hard enough, or wanted it badly enough, or had simply failed.

But I had assumed that bootstrapping required about as much as it took to get yourself promoted from junior varsity to varsity. It turns out that it’s more like pulling yourself up from tee-ball to the World Series. Sure, some people do it, but they’re the exceptions, the outliers, the Olympians.

The enormity of the advantages I had always enjoyed started to truly sink in. Everyone begins life thinking that his or her normal is the normal. For the first time, I found myself paying attention to broken eggs rather than making omelets. Up until then, I hadn't really seen most Americans as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping, loving, dreaming, hurting people. My values shifted - from an individualistic celebration of success (that involved dividing the world into the morally deserving and the undeserving) to an interest in people as people.

................................................SNIP"