Jackson was crying because Obama had been judged by the content of his character, and not the color of his skin. I would have thought that would be easy to understand.
Could be racism, but it’s pretty close to what the Democrats usually get.
I don’t know why some people are so pissed at the idea that it might be racism. People are racist. It’s in our nature as members of the species Homo sapiens. We have to struggle very, very hard to not be racist. Most people will never be fully successful at overcoming that tendency.
Rational self interest. The Republicans are heavily influenced by ( and probably outright dominated by ), and cater to white racists. Therefore, blacks tend to vote Democrat; they’d be fools not to.
We are not naturally racist, as race is an artificial construct. Naturally xenophobic yes; racist, no.
People aren’t pissed at the idea of possible racism. People are pissed at the disingenuousness exhibited in this thread.
The OP says, “CBS says Obama has 95% percent of the black vote in Penn. Could this be anything other than racism?” A carefully crafted statement, sans context, coupled with a wide-eyed-innocent question. Goodness! 95%! What a large number! And such an obvious posible reason!
Of course, that’s ignoring that a) the Democratic candidate has had 90% or so of vote in 2000 and 2004 (as you’ve noted), and b) Obama has improved numbers over Kerry’s 2004 numbers in nearly every demographic area.
So a more appropriate question might be, “does the near-halving of the African-American Republican vote, when the Democratic option is a Black man, indicate racism, a perception that the Black candidate is more attuned to the needs of individual Black voters, or simply a concentration of the overall appeal of the candidate?” Too bad no one asked that.
If Clarence Thomas were a running for the presidency on a Republican ticket and received 95% of the black vote, the OP might have a stronger argument. But Thomas wouldn’t get 95%. I dare say he wouldn’t get 25%, probably not even 15%.
The vast majority of black voters weren’t voting primarily for a black man, the were voting for a black Democrat. That the black demographic got a lot more fired up and voted in slightly higher numbers for somebody from the same general ethnic group with the same general politics isn’t racism. Rather it’s identity politics, which is not at all the same thing, whether or not it is laudable in of itself.
“Foreign” is a social construct, too. But technically you are correct. Racism is just one form of “groupism”, and we’re naturally inclined to distrust people whom we see as outside our group.
Good point. After all, nobody other than Jesse Jackson cried in Grant Park Tuesday night. :rolleyes:
Well, of course! Out-and-out religious bigotry that was, for sure! What possible other reason could any Catholic have for voting for JFK except for those people sticking together? How else could Kennedy have finagled nearly 80 percent of the Catholic vote?
Why, stands to reason, don’t it? You know how they are.
/snark
- He was in the middle of dicing some really strong onions when the results were announced.
- Tear gas attack. The sneaky kind of that only affects African Americans.
What most impressed me about the Pennsylvania vote is that after all those Republican pundits - including Senator Arlen Specter, who really ought to know better - claimed that the polls were misleading, and the Commonwealth would go Republican because Pennsylvanians are really all closet racists – after all that, the vote went just as the polls had predicted, and more strongly Democratic than in the last several elections.
The lesson the GOP should learn from all this? Do not piss off Pennsylvanians. We bite.
(None of which should be seen as denying the real race issues that do indeed exist in Pennsylvania, of course.)
dnftt
Certainly mate, taken with the history of the moment.
Given a very reasonable centre left candidate of their ethnic group (roughly), given their historical predilection for his party and roughly his politics (centre left, but relatively culturally conservative or at least highly centrist and non-radical), and given an opponent that could reasonably be perceived as moving to the hard right and race baiting [one can argue about that, but as an outsider, I can say that I found it highly reasonable to perceive that at the least]… a high level of voting by blacks need not call on racism at all.