Tea Bird
Democrats
The Race Vote in Pennsylvania
Yesterday I was interviewed by Pete Dominick, host of Pete’s Big Mouth, on Sirius Radio. He led off his series of questions about Pennsylvania and the PA primary with a question about whether some Democrats voted for Clinton because of Obama’s race. I know some of them did, because quite a few of them told me they would. This issue doesn’t receive a lot of media attention, but it is a fact of our lives.
Of course, race motivates some people. If you’re a young African-American father, like the guy I talked to during Obama’s final rally in Pittsburgh, then you might find that Obama, as a fellow African-American, is inspirational because of the juxtaposition of his color and his status, and you sincerely hope that your child inherits his legacy in some way. On the other hand, if you’re a young white guy hauling heavy camera gear up and down Heart Attack Hill in Oakland for the Obama rally at $9/hour, and you live in Wilkinsburg with some of the worst African-American gang violence and poverty in Pittsburgh, you might say, as did the sweaty guy in front of me in the media line for the Obama rally, “I wouldn’t walk across the street for this n#@!&er if I wasn’t being paid to do it.”
Did most of Clinton’s supporters vote for her because of Obama’s race? Of course not. We do not live in a post-racial society, but neither do we live in a pre-civil rights society either. Clinton still would’ve carried Pennsylvania, and Obama will still probably carry Pennsylvania in November. Republicans are not inherently more racially biased than Democrats. They actually nominated Lynn Swann, an African-American, for Governor in 2006 to run against Ed Rendell.
Barack Obama’s mother was a white woman with Irish ancestry. Barack Obama’s father was a black man with Kenyan ancestry. Why, if he is equally as white as he is black, is he always black? Sure, he adopts that self-identification, but does he really have a choice in how others would racially categorize him? Who wouldn’t/doesn’t consider him black? So, does black taint the white and so detract from it for us that we no longer remember or think of the white?
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