When Carter's latest statement hit the news, I vaguely recalled allegations that Carter had been somewhat racist in his early political years. But The Corner notes an incident I hadn't heard before:

As Laughlin McDonald, director of the ACLU's Voting Project, relates in his book A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia, Carter's board tried to stop the construction of a new "Elementary Negro School" in 1956. Local white citizens had complained that the school would be "too close" to a white school. As a result, "the children, both colored and white, would have to travel the same streets and roads in order to reach their respective schools." The prospect of black and white children commingling on the streets on their way to school was apparently so horrible to Carter that he requested that the state school board stop construction of the black school until a new site could be found. The state board turned down Carter's request because of "the staggering cost." Carter and the rest of the Sumter County School Board then reassured parents at a meeting on October 5, 1956, that the board "would do everything in its power to minimize simultaneous traffic between white and colored students in route to and from school."

Given that Carter himself had been, and may still be a racist, and given the clear importance many white liberals assigned to Obama's race as a candidate, I wonder how much of the "opposition is based in racism!" argument, among those who sincerely believe it, is a form of projection?

I was listening to a talk show this week, and an older gentleman called in. He had lived under Jim Crow, and admitted he was fighting his own racist inclinations from that era. (A very noble thing to do!) He admitted that whenever Obama spoke, he couldn't help but see him as, primarily, a "black man" — so therefore he thought perhaps most other people saw the world the same way.

He was, by the way, a liberal Democrat who had voted for Obama. I would guess he did so (at least in part), as I think many others of his party did, to "atone" for what they perceive as their own, or someone else's past racism, or prove they were beyond all that. (Of course, needing to prove you're beyond something sadly proves you aren't.) Many also seem to hold a view that implies African Americans should be given more deference than others, even when clearly wrong, and insulated from the same criticisms you'd level against a person of European or Asian descent. And there certainly are more than a few progressives who share the outlook of Barbara Boxer, but are too polite (or smart) to say it out loud, in quite those words.

This isn't the same kind of nasty racism of the old days, but it's still thinking which says we should pay special deference to a person based on their skin tone, or the suffering of some group that looks like them, or otherwise treats a man or woman more as a member of a racial group than an individual.