Fake America

Several times since the election, I've seen right-wing pundits, those who spent months slinging horrible smears at now-President Obama, patting themselves on the back over the fact that "we" just elected a black man to be our President.

No. You didn't. Cut it out with the first person plural here. You spent the past year throwing every old quasi-racial slur at him that you could get away with on tv. I mean, black people as possible socialists, disloyal to America? Large black men threatening white women? Those were some oldies. This happened in spite of you--you were dragged to this "great moment" kicking and screaming

Some of this, I'm sure, is genuine cognitive dissonance. Mostly, though, this is an attempt to create a story about a post-racial America, where the generous white people finally all got over our collective racism, so now all those brown people need to stop complaining.


It's a nice story, I guess. But let's look at the actual evidence. (We'll leave aside, for the moment, the odd contention that voting behavior is a good proxy for the impact of structural racism on the lives of people of color)

Did Barack Obama win the white vote? Of course not. It would be extraordinary for a Democrat to do so. Obama won 43% of the national white (non-"hispanic") vote, which is a statistically insignificant 2% increase over John Kerry's performance four years ago. There is some evidence that there was a geographic shift here, with Appalachia and the western areas of the South voting more Republican than they did four years ago (presumably made up for by an increase elsewhere).

So white voting preferences, in aggregate, stayed stable, and became more geographically polarized. White people who were inclined to vote for Democrats (mostly young people, non-Christians, single women and union households) did so. So where did Obama get the support he needed to win the election? And not just win, but win big. A majority of the electorate--the first Democrat to do so in decades?

In short, people of color. They turned out in greater numbers than ever before, and voted more solidly Democratic. As Matthew Yglesias writes:

The big difference is that Obama increased the share of the black vote [in the total electorate] from 11 percent to 13 percent, increased the share of the “other [race]” vote from 2 percent to 3 percent, grew his share of the black vote by seven percentage points, grew his share of the Hispanic vote by 13 (!) percentage points, grew his share of the Asian vote by five percentage points, and grew his share of the “other [race]” vote by 11 percentage points.

Despite all the Clinton campaign's claims during the primaries about those horrible racist Asians and Latinos who would never vote for a black man, Obama's share of the vote among these groups--and their share of the electorate--went up, and dramatically so. He won the votes of 66% of Latinos, 61% of Asians, and 65% of people reporting "other race." As Chris Bowers points out, "[r]oughly 60% of all Democratic voters are now non-white and/or non-Christian."

We white folks need to stop patting ourselves on the backs. This wasn't about us.

White people didn't get enlightened. People of color got organized.