In a nutshell, the 2012 election comes down to 65.4 white votes for Obama and 27.6 white votes for his Republican opponent. Overall, white voters favored Obama.
Granted, Obama needed and received strong voter support among African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans to give him such a decisive victory in 2012.
Now, I want to turn to Joan Walsh's straightforward statement answering the question raised in the title of her book. In the last sentence of her postscript, she says that the white minority who did not vote for Obama in 2012 are "mourn[ing] the past" (page 311) -- the 1950s when WASP culture was the unchallenged prestige culture.
Please don't misunderstand me here. I am NOT suggesting that we do not have a prestige culture in the
Moreover, for understandable reasons, we will probably always have a prestige culture in the
But is Joan Walsh right in suggesting that white conservatives are mourning the past? (In the context, she is clearly referring to nondeath mourning, not to mourning due to the death of a significant person in one's life.)
If she is right, then we should hope that their mourning stays healthy and that they are able to work through their mourning and resolve it. However, if their mourning does not stay healthy, then they will not work through their mourning and resolve it. Instead, their unhealthy mourning will remain unresolved.
I suggest that we should take Susan Anderson's book THE JOURNEY FROM ABANDONMENT TO HEALING (2000) as our guide to understanding the process of nondeath mourning.
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