Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

It is perfectly natural to have a sense of kinship with people with whom, at even a superficial level, you feel are like you. It is also perfectly natural to, at some level, be discomforted by "otherness." These reactions are genetically encoded within us.

We can hope and strive for a time when we have, through conscious choice, completely overcome these reactions as they apply to the way someone looks, but unless we tinker with our genome, they will still be there.

This, of course, doesn't mean that hatred and discrimination based on race are inalterably fixed in our psyches. We can and should deal with these reactions in a rational way, and build a firmer sense of likeness with people who are superficially different from us, so that the instinctual response is not triggered.

Racism requires intent and a certain state of mind that extends well beyond the genetic disposition to be attracted to the familiar and similar.
The black man voting for the black candidate and the white man voting for the white candidates are not perforce racists. Racism will be identified if the voter ignores all rational reasons not to vote for the candidate of his race because of a belief that the "other" candidate as a member of a particular race is inherently unsuited for the office.

There has been plenty of debate in this forum about the difference between Obama and Clinton, and while they are not necessarily insignificant, there are far greater differences between them and the Republican candidates than there are between themselves. It is not unreasonable, nor is it racist, for a voter to look at Clinton and Obama, conclude that life will not be terribly different with either of them in the Oval Office and then push the vote button for the candidate who shares their own racial identity.

If someone finds themself thinking "I could never vote for a (insert race here) candidate," guess what? They're a racist.

This seems pretty clear cut to me, and I suspect most people.

What might be a little trickier for some is the situation within which the Clintons have tried very hard to place Obama.

You are a white voter who considers both candidates worthy of the nomination, and, on balance, you may even slightly lean towards Obama, but you vote for Clinton because you believe as a white you are better off with a white president who is not going to feel any pressure to represent the black community over whites. Is this racist?

It certainly seems selfish, and patronizing to the extent that it can be seen as an expression of wanting to see the black community served better, but not better than any other community. It's difficult to imagine and certainly not offered as a realistic possibility, but let's assume for discussion sake that it was possible for a black president to not only entirely level the playing field, but even provide an advantage to blacks. Some white voters may feel that such an imbalance in the opposite direction was "only fair," but I doubt there would be many of them. Is it racist to not want to take that chance, or is it merely an example of normal self-interest at work?

This is what the Clinton strategy has attempted to do, and one of the reasons their supporters tend to refrain from labeling them racist. They are not trying to paint Obama in terms of negative African-American stereotypes. They are not simply trying to reinforce that he is indeed black and then allowing racism to do its work. They are not even hinting that he might be more concerned about Black Americans than Americans of other races. They have, though, been trying to cast him as the Black Candidate, the next Jessie Jackson or Al Sharpton who, because their candidacies were more about becoming President of Black Americans, than President of the US, were reasonably seen as focused on only one race.

The fact that Obama was so appealing to white voters led to the question, among many blacks, of whether he was "black enough?"

Once he was perceived to be taking shots from the Clintons because he was black, he became "black enough."

His identity as a black person, thanks to the Clintons, has been reinforced among blacks, whites and other racial/ethnic groups.
It's that simple.

Yup, and perceived is the operative word.

maybe

I too think its simple, but don't agree with Finn's reasoning (shocker). I think that like the Latino I quoted in my earlier post, a lot of Blacks were in doubt, until Iowa, that their vote for Obama wouldn't be wasted on a hopeless candidate. Why they believed it hopeless is fodder for a whole thread in itself, but there ya are.

Fortunately USA had produced a president
who happens to be a son of a president
to unite the world against USA.

Let all others bow their heads for
AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE.
Count me out please.

Re: Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

With Edwards out of the race, this argument no longer applies. So it seems like a good time to revisit the polling numbers.

To what extent does race enter the equation when the choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is made in the South?

Yeah, what's up with Research 2000? Did they poll a different strata of people entirely or...?

nimh

I'm not sure if you are trying to make a point with these charts, but in order to analize the situation, I would like to see the poll results on a national basis and by other regions. I would also like to see the same polls without Edwards as choice.

All my efforts to find these polls have been frustrating, but you seem tobe the unoffical pollster of A2K. Can you readily find them?

Thanks

IMO, it's time we stopped basing affirmative action on race and started basing it on socio-economic status.

Low quality schools corrolate better with low SES than with race nowadays. Which is not to say that race and low SES neighborhoods don't overlap.

Yes, good point - hard to say anything about this being a Southern thing if you dont have comparative data for states elsewhere as well. I want to still do an update.

Well, considering Super Tuesday is already tomorrow, that will probably be a comparison based on exit polls rather than these opinion polls!



Well the cool thing about these is that you can review the difference that occurred once Edwards dropped out - for most states, the first few polls still have him in, while the last few, conducted after he dropped out of the race, don't have him anymore.

It looks like in Tennessee, Edwards' white voters shifted en masse to Hillary, with Obama picking up nary a vote.

In Missouri and Alabama, the picture is more diffuse. In Missouri, both Obama and Clinton were 18 points higher in the SUSA poll of 1/30-31 than in the Research 2000 poll of 1/21-24. Questions about that Research 2000 poll aside, one could read this as meaning Edwards supporters split both ways. But that's not necessarily all that clear. After all, the percentage of undecideds also went down 14 points, so who knows whether Edwards supporters didnt go to Hillary while the undecided went for Obama, for example - or, less likely, the other way round?

Or, of course, whether the redistribution of Edwards voters didnt coincide with a flow of white voters from Hillary to Obama?

It's that latter problem that comes up in the Alabama numbers too. In the Rasmussen poll of 1/23, Obama got 9% of the white vote; in the SUSA poll of 1/30-31, he gets 28%, a huge difference. But there is a week between the polls, and it's a week in which Obama surged across the country. So is the difference because Edwards supporters moved en masse to Obama, or because the redistribution of Edwards people coincided with a general momentum for Obama?

The poll done in between by Capital Survey (on behalf of the Alabama Education Association) gives a clue: it has Obama up 8 and Clinton down 8 compared to the Rasmussen poll. So that hints at the size of the overall shift of white votes from one to the other. Then compare the Survey USA poll in which the Edwards vote is pretty much wholly redistributed, and which has Obama up another 11 points and Hillary up 14, and you can speculate that Hillary got as many votes from Edwards as Obama did, just that there were also many voters going from Hillary to Barack.

Those Tennessee polls I mentioned first, in contrast, have no comparable ambiguity. It's hypothetically possible that Edwards voters actually split equally between the two candidates but Hillary got all the bump because there was a concurrent shift of white votes to her from Obama, but I have seen no signs of such a shift in any other state, so it's improbable.

So the short of it is that in these Southern states, the Edwards vote (almost entirely white) went to Hillary in Tennessee, while they must have split in some more or less equal fashion between the two frontrunners in Alabama and Missouri, probably with the edge going to Hillary in Alabama and to Obama in Missouri.

In states elsewhere in the country Edwards support seems to have gone in clear majority to Obama, or at least that's the impression I've gotten. So you could argue, if rather speculatively, that it is something specific to the South that many of his voters there preferred Hillary instead.

As promised:



Percentage of votes cast by white voters in Democratic primaries so far, for Obama, Clinton, and other candidates or uncommitted.

The names of the states in the South are listed in red. (I have adopted a very flexible definition, including both Missouri and Oklahoma.)

All the states for which exit polls were done are listed. In Iowa, instead of an exit poll there was an 'entry poll', in which caucusers were asked as they arrived for whom they were planning to caucus. In many of the 2/5 caucus states (like Minnesota) no exit or entry polls were held.

The early primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and Florida) are special cases, in the sense that at least one other major candidate was still formally in the running, which automatically meant that fewer votes were cast for Obama or Clinton. To signal the different situation in those states I have faded out their names (to grey, or orange if they are in the South).

Feel free to draw conclusions or speculate about what the numbers show.

C'mon now snood.

In states where 70% of whites voted for Hillary, it is implied by some (perhaps not you) that this is racism.

So if 70% of blacks vote for Obama, why is it not racism by the same definition?

You'll never get him to answer this.

I don't think it is racism because blacks have been fighting for their place in government for years along with women. If Obama didn't have anything more going for him other than having a mixed ethnic background; I doubt 'blacks' would have gotten behind him regardless. They didn't sharpton. But he does. He is bright and articulate and he speaks to the many problems that many of the working class can relate to both white and black; plus holding many of the views in which those who have been concerned with our civil liberties and our standing in the world community share with him.

Hillary is more centrist on those issues than him whether those who hate her on the right want to admit it or not. You have remember she was a conservative before she turned democrat and she still thinks like a conservative in many ways except with health care and other social domestic issues. Women may prefer Hillary because she has been an advocate for health care and the right to choose and other women's issues for years rather than anything to do with black/white issues.

Obama has done better in the south than I thought he would which is a good thing as far as judging how far we have come in the racial issue.

I agree. No matter what ends up happening here, I'm heartened by the generational split in the south (I'm sure of South Carolina and I think this was true of other states too but would have to look it up) -- young white people more willing to vote for Obama then their elders. (In South Carolina, young white voters went for Obama over Clinton, 52% to 28%.) Seems like the country might really be moving forward.

For one thing, 70% of blacks voting for Obama is not the same thing in my mind as 70% of blacks voting for Sharpton. Because in my mind, there would be little reason other than his being black to vote for Sharpton, whereas I see a world of reasons other than his being black to vote for Obama. The fact that he identifies as a black man just gives me lagniappe to celebrate his candidacy.

For another thing, you are right to say (parenthetically) that I haven't called racism about the fact that Clinton's support among whites was stronger than Obama's. What I was agreeing to in the launch of this thread was the suggestion that old attitudes about race still linger in some corners of the South, which would explain why those polls showed Obama doing better with whites elsewhere. It seems that some here are trying to put a particularly ugly spin on that. So let me try to deal with the whole "blacks are racist if they vote for blacks" thing...

I believe in affirmative action. In 100% of the cases, if two people, one black one white of equal qualification are brought before me in competition for the same position, I will probably give the position to the black person. I believe if the white person has a clear advantage in my mind in qualification, I would give the position to the white person. I have been in this situation with who to give a waiver promotion to, and I am not insecure in my ability to judge fairly.

I think Hillary Clinton is an exceptional candidate (especially compared to what we've had to choose from over the last several elections), and I will support her if she wins the nomination. I think Obama is better qualified in the ways this country needs a president to be right now. And I do not apologize for celebrating endlessly the fact that he identifies as a black man. It is not at all the measure of him, or of this moment in history. Because of where we as people of color have come from in this country, it is simply for me the cherry on top.

One last thing...
I think it can't be overstated that the reason we saw Barack take control of the black vote is not just because a bunch of those black people all of a sudden decided to vote for a black person. I think they were freed, by his victory in Iowa at first, of their fears that doing so would just be a waste of their vote. I don't believe that black people are by and large some mindless monolith of a voting block. I think more black people are paying very close attention to things, especially now.

If anyone is personally offended by my agreement that the polling shows lingering hesitation among whites to vote for blacks in the south, you really should get over it. Disagree with me if you want. Say that the polls don't mean that, but something else. But don't simply roll over and start accusing me of being some smarmy "black racist". I think that diminishes everyone.

...yep. it seems the young folk are really having a say in this one.

I think my point, in context, was 'blacks who vote for a black because he is black' are racist, just as 'whites who vote for a white because he is white ' are racist.

We see lots of black racism in the North as well as the South, just as white racist attitudes are not limited to the South either.

Obama's pastor makes statements that appear to be very racist.

His comments about 9/11 being 'a wake up call for white America' is IMHO a racist statement.

Also the church website describes the church as 'black', implying that whites would not be considered part of the 'in' group at this church, (i.e. the church is existant 'for' blacks, not others)

It is for the 'black community' according to the site.

Very exclusivist language. http://www.tucc.org/about.htm

Why does Obama remain in a church that is run in this manner?

If a white candidate retained his membership in a country club that excluded black members, he would be raked over the coals.

Why the double standard in our society toward black racism?

No whites are "excluded" from his church - and your advancement of that idea is sleazy and disingenuous. when it is called a "black" church, it has the same connotation it would to call a community or a college "black" - none, other than that's what the hell are there in predominance - black people.

There's no need to call white churches "white", because the separation is so evident its taken for granted. Sunday mornings in America are some of the most segregated times we experience as a country.

Obama has said more than once that he doesn't agree with everything his pastor says, and he was referring directly to the fact that his church had once bestowed some kind of honor on Farrakhan, and sometimes states things in terms that sound Afro-centric, like "the needs of the black community", and so forth.

People of good faith have long since abandoned the idea that Obama's membership in this church bespeaks something nefarious. I have lost considerable respect for certain people trying to stir that particular pile of shyt here.