Black Vote?

This
bothers me. "Is Obama doing enough to get out the Black vote?" "The McCain
campaign is cedeing the Black vote in Florida to Obama." My question is:
what the hell is a Black vote? No, I'm not being stupid or
intentionally obtuse, but how can we as a society complain about
inequalities and racism when we all seem to take every opportunity to
underscore the fact that we're different? And we are different, we
shouldn't pretend like we aren't and there's something to be said for the
need of a political candidate to address socio-political issues that concern
one demographic or another, but... It just seems to me that we're never
going to be able to say that race doesn't matter until we start
acting like Race doesn't matter.