Crossposted from Moral Questions Weblog.
Digby wrote this today:
Apropos of nothing in particular, take a look at the exit poll data from Mississippi, where George W. Bush picked up the votes of 85 percent of the white population and just 10 percent of the African-American vote. In a state whose electorate is 65-percent white, that led to a hefty 60-40 win for the incumbent. Mississippi’s an unusually stark case, but not all that much of an outlier. Georgia saw 75 percent of whites and 12 percent of blacks pull the lever for Bush. It was 75-9 in Louisiana, 78-15 in South Carolina, and a comparatively minor 63-6 in Arkansas (generally speaking, whites are most monolithically Republican in the least-white states like Mississippi and more open to Democrats in whiter states like Arkansas).
All of which is just to say that an awful lot of the post-election talk about “culture” and its impact on voting serves to obscure the extent to which a lot of politics is about race. In Mississippi, Bush got a larger percentage of the vote from people who “somewhat dissaprove” of his administration than he did from black voters. He did better among self-identified Democrats than he did among blacks, and far better (23 percent against 10 percent) among self-identified liberals than with non-whites. I’m not sure exactly what follows from that, and I appreciate that commentators don’t like to raise the point in order to avoid just engaging in naive allegations of racism, but it’s really, really not possible to understand the politics of the South without delving into this stuff.
It’s also not possible to understand why the US is the only first world nation that has rejected national health care and a robust safety net without delving into it. And it’s not possible to explain these maps, in which we see the power of the southern based party having reasserted itself, without delving into it.
It’s fundamental to understanding our country, our politics and our culture. Unlike any other western country, we had to fight a bloody civil war to end slavery in the middle of the 19th century and we lived with segregation for another century after that. This is built into the fabric of our nation. It’s naive to ignore it.
It really is a truly sad thing that no one wants to talk about racism anymore. How often have prominent members of the black community’s point of view on the subject been marginalized and even rejected by a MSM petrified at the idea of offending its target white demographics? How many times did we hear this past couple weeks, Democratic politicians reject the idea that if it had been white people down there, the president would have been all over the situation? Race has been such a bitter question in the country somehow we’ve gotten to the point where its become a kind repressed ideology: denied and reject consciously, yet plainly obvious in our culture and media to anyone whose not white.
My bet: there’s a hell of a lot of issues that cut just a little to deep for baby-boomers. It may well be a generation before we ever revisit these questions again.