This is what Michael Gerson, a George W. Bush speechwriter, once referred to as the "soft bigotry of low expectations," and it's certainly the conventional view on the left as illustrated anecdotally by Ami Horowitz.
Horowitz went to Berkeley recently to interview liberal white students about their views on requiring voters to present identification at the polling place in order to minimize the opportunities for fraud, and many of them, at least the ones he included in the video, gave pretty much the stock response that such requirements are racist. Why? Because, the reasoning goes, obtaining IDs is beyond the capacities of too many black people.
Horowitz then traveled to Harlem to interview African Americans to see what they thought about what the Berkeley students had said. The results, the ones that survived the editing at any rate, were interesting:
Who are the racists, those who expect blacks and others to be able to perform the same task that whites perform all the time, i.e. secure an ID, or those who believe that blacks just can't be expected to manage what almost everyone else in the country can manage with little difficulty? It seems to me that if there is real racism lurking about in the issue of voter ID it's being exhibited by the young progressives at Berkeley, but, in truth, I doubt that these people are genuinely racist. I agree with the interviewees in Harlem. They're probably just ignorant.
