This Associated Press article attempts to tackle a pretty big topic. What is the difference, if there is any difference, between a white person voting for a political candidate because the candidate is white, and a black person voting for a candidate because they are black? Unfortunately, the article doesn’t do much more than collect a sample of black people saying that they support Obama because he is black. Here’s one example:
The actor Samuel L. Jackson said much the same thing: “I voted for Barack because he was black,” he told Ebony magazine. “Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people – because they look like them.”
I’m pretty sure that I could take the political positions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and present them to Samuel L. Jackson and he would say he prefers Obama’s policies. I am also pretty sure that he wouldn’t change his mind if it turned out that the race of the candidates were reversed. It’s true that Obama got 95% of the black vote in 2008, but Kerry got 88% in 2004 and Gore got 90% in 2000. Blacks prefer the Democratic Party in overwhelming numbers. Women preferred the Obama/Biden ticket to the McCain/Palin ticket by a wide margin. Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States, but he is the first president who wasn’t a white man. He was the first presidential nominee who wasn’t a white man. No one votes for a presidential candidate because he’s a white man. No one is going to vote for Mitt Romney because he’s white. But some people will vote for him because he’s a Mormon.
Sometimes, groups that have been discriminated against will rally around someone from their group who is breaking new ground even if they disagree with them on a lot of things. Italian-Americans were excited when Antonin Scalia was nominated to be on the Supreme Court. The then New York Governor Mario Cuomo threatened any Democratic senators against voting against him. He was confirmed 98-0. There is a small degree of that kind of behavior going on in the black community, but it is impossible to find an issue where Romney’s policies are preferred to Obama’s by a majority of blacks.
The problem with this Associated Press article is that it does a very poor job of explaining why blacks prefer the Democratic Party and it does an even worse job of explaining why some white folks are voting against Barack Obama simply because of his appearance.
When you ask a black person if they are voting for Barack Obama because he is black, you need to be careful to make sure you know what their answer means. Did they vote for John Kerry and Al Gore and Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis, and Walter Mondale, too? Because, if they did, I don’t think you have explained much by getting them to say that they support Obama because he is black.
When you ask a white person if they are voting for Mitt Romney because he is white, it matters quite a lot to know whether they supported every Democrat until Obama. If they considered themselves a Democrat for thirty years but won’t vote for Obama because of his race, then that is a whole different kettle of fish.
Because what you are really trying to discover here is whether there are people who are voting for or against a candidate solely because of race. And only racists do that. Find me a black person who would vote for Allen West for president over Hillary Clinton despite preferring Clinton’s policies on everything, and I’ll show you a racist black person. But there are not many black people like that in this country. And there a lot of white folks who are Democrats every day of the week until they have to choose a black candidate over a white one.
Racial or ethnic pride is a lot less problematic when it comes from historically marginalized groups than when it comes from the white majority that has always held power in this country, and that is because they are behaving in an affirmative way. They aren’t acting out of hate for the other. They are celebrating their own progress in obtaining equal treatment rather than resenting having to share a small degree of their power. But it doesn’t extend to tokenism. Many women were for Hillary Clinton for affirmative reasons, but they couldn’t transfer those feelings to Sarah Palin because she didn’t share their values and her policies would not have contributed to women’s equality.
This isn’t rocket science. Black people like the Democratic Party. They like Barack Obama, too. In combination, it’s a recipe for monolithic support. But almost no one is truly voting for Barack Obama solely because of his race.