Black Vote?

[jackofallgeeks]

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.

Comments

[dikaiosunh.livejournal.com]

I think there's a third option.

Race matters in the US in part because the structural legacy of racism still lingers - it's not an accident that Baltimore's population is overwhelmingly black *and* overwhelmingly poor. It's not that everyone who is black is poor or vice versa, but if we "act like race doesn't matter," we can't address the continuing linkage there head-on.

That's a bit different from courting "the black vote," though. I think there was a pretty plausible argument to be made that Edwards' policies, overall, would have done more to address poverty among blacks than Obama's. And I at least do *not* think that having Palin in the VP slot would do anything for women. But, you can't discount entirely the power of symbolism. I remember Oprah talking about seeing Lt. Uhuru on Star Trek and running to tell her mother that there was a black woman on TV who wasn't a maid. Symbolically, if electing Obama moved us toward a situation where people thought, "oh, yeah, well there have been some black presidents, too" (and I suppose I have to concede that Palin would also have this effect for women), that would be a step in the direction of actually eliminating race as a factor in our politics, rather than just pretending it isn't.

I mean, think of how times have changed since electing Kennedy. At the time, the fact that he was a Catholic was a huge deal - nowadays, Kerry's Catholicism was almost a non-issue, and people barely batted an eye even at Lieberman (try electing a Jew in the 19th century...).