With the poll numbers for Barack Obama trending downward, the President’s supporters are hitting Republican challenger Mitt Romney with a string of ludicrous attacks.

An example is offered by Oliver Darcy in Campus Reform, who describes a racialist article penned by an Associate Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

Much of presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s success is due to the white color of his skin, rather than hard work, a university professor contended in an article she published late last month entitled “The White Elephant in Romney’s Room.”

Responding to the now infamous “47 percent” video in which Romney attributed his success to hard-work, Professor Stephanie Li of the University of Rochester said he has not given enough credit to his white upbringing

According to a professor from the University of Rochester, much of Romney’s success can be attributed to his white skin color.

“The former governor’s statement entirely disregards the unearned privileges of his upbringing and race,” wrote Li in the story published by the left-leaning news site The Huffington Post.

His wealth can, in part, be attributed to the “racial foundation provided by his parents,” she continued.

Li went on to sharply criticize Mitt and Ann Romney’s refusal to link their success to their white skin color.

“The Romneys’ shortsightedness on this issue demonstrates their ignorance of one of the central ideas in the field of critical race studies, the unearned privileges accorded to whiteness,” she wrote.

“Romney truly is the whitest man to run for president because he doesn’t realize how his whiteness has influenced his life,” she continued. [H]e is “naïve at best.”

Li is author of the book Something Akin to Freedom: The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women.

According to her faculty bio her research “focuses on the ways in which issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality influence conceptions of freedom.”