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While going over the exit polling from Mississippi for the Election, something jumped out at me when observing the cross-tabs for race and gender: the fact that the gender gap in voter turnout for blacks was double that of whites. The gender gap regardless of race exists likely for several reasons, including women’s longer life expectancies. With the 2000 Election debacle in mind (along with Gov. Crist’s rather surprising push to reform the law), I looked here to see which states have the most stringent (i.e., repressive and racist; see here) anti-felon voting laws, and the bulk of them are ex-slave states.

Anti-felon voting laws are part of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in this country because they disproportionately affect black men’s ability to vote. The following is a chart examining the gender gap for blacks and whites in selected states with the toughest voting laws regarding felons (note: each number listed represents the percentage of the total voter turnout for the state; women are listed first for each category):

ST/WHITES/BLACKS

AL— 33-32% 18-11%

AR— 45-37 7-6

GA— 32-33 19-11

KY— 44-41 7-4

LA— 36-30 19-10

MS— 33-29 21-13

MO— 44-38 7-5

NC— 37-35 14-9

SC— 37-34 14-11

TN— 42-42 9-3

VA— 38-32 10-10

So in Mississippi, for example, where “many” felons can never vote again in the state, black men made-up 13 percent of the total vote, eight points below that of black women. Although white women also made-up a higher percentage of the total vote than white men, the difference was only four percent. Meanwhile, the gender gaps in states like Louisiana and Tennessee were even higher. There are some disparities in the data, perhaps based on other factors (e.g., Obama’s time and money spent in the state, such as Virginia) or the variations in the anti-felon laws (e.g., the laws are less restrictive in the Carolinas than in Tennessee, Mississippi or Alabama).

Still, the important analysis put forth by Charles Franklin (see here) may shed light on the issue of white fear and its relationship to the percentage of blacks in the population. It appears that the higher the proportion of the black population, the more severe the anti-felon voting laws are in that state. Imagine if the gender gap for blacks had not existed in this election…in a state like Mississippi (where Obama won the black vote 98-2), perhaps that increased black turnout could have made the difference in the outcome. What do you think?

The National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) has an important story, “2008 Jewish Vote for Obama Exceeds All Expectations,” showing what has been clear for a century: Jewish Americans are the strongest group among whites in support for racial change and broad civil and human rights. Historically, Jewish Americans have provided the most white-group support for civil rights efforts for and by Americans of color–like the creation and sustenance of the NAACP and the Freedom Summer in the South in the 1960s. (See chapter 5 here) They have provided a disproportionate number of whites killed or injured in civil rights efforts. One reason for this strong support of racial change and civil rights is their own experience as immigrants to the U.S. who were not initially considered white, but were treated as a very “inferior not-white race” by north-European Americans. Jewish Americans still experience significant anti-Semitism, and some white supremacist groups still do not consider them “white” and engage in anti-Semitic violence of various kinds. (See chapter 5 in here, for example)

The NJDC story summarizes the election results this way:

When the general election campaign began in June of this year the consensus opinion among political pundits was that Barack Obama was going to underperform among Jewish voters. In the four presidential elections between 1992 and 2008 the Democratic presidential nominee averaged 79%. The Republican Jewish Coalition and other Republican spokespeople were quite confident that McCain would outperform past Republican nominees in the Jewish community. A few even predicted that McCain would surpass the 39% of the Jewish vote that Reagan received in 1980.

Yet, according to exit polls, the Jewish American vote for Obama was about the same as for those previous elections: Obama 78 percent; McCain 21 percent; others 1 percent. This nearly eight-in-ten Jewish voters was even higher than the percentages for Latinos and Asian Americans, who also voted very substantially for Obama. Indeed, the Jewish percentage seems to be one of the two or three highest percentages among major US racial-ethnic groups (after African Americans). Their lopsided vote was likely very important in several states.

Some Republican-oriented groups targeted Jewish Americans with ads trying to generate significant fear about Senator Obama’s policies toward Middle Eastern crises and Israel. But an email from the NJDC also lays this notion of an ad impact to rest, at least on the East Coast:

Andrew Silow-Carroll, the Editor-in-Chief of the New Jersey Jewish News, refuted the Republican Jewish ad campaign in his column this week, noting, “Considering that Republicans actually lost ground among Jewish voters [there] on Election Day — despite some real qualms about Obama — it’s reasonable to assume that the ad campaign actually turned off voters who might otherwise have voted for McCain.”

CNN just did a nationwide poll on the reactions of Americans to the election of Senator Obama as president, which they only break out for white and black African Americans. A couple of their questions are rather suggestive, possibly deeply revealing, about the great gulf between the majorities of white Americans and of black Americans in the framing of this historic election:

For most African-Americans, the election of Barack Obama as president was a dream come true that they didn’t think they would see…. Eighty percent of African-Americans questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey said that Obama’s election was a dream come true, and 71 percent said they never thought a black candidate for president would get elected in their lifetime.

However, the white majority had a rather different reaction:

Among white Americans, only 28 percent said Obama’s victory in the race for the White House was a dream come true, with the vast majority, 70 percent, saying it was not.

A majority of whites also claimed that they thought this might happen:

Fifty-nine percent of white respondents said they thought a black president would be elected in their lifetime, but only 29 percent of black respondents agreed.

These survey questions are rather superficial and not the best one might have asked, but that first one on a “dream come true” does seem to reveal a huge difference in the positive emotional reactions and interpretive framing of this pathbreaking election across the old racial hierarchy. (Are many whites implying it is the opposite, a nightmare?)

Even those whites who have celebrated this election usually seem to be coming from a substantially different perspective and frame (certainly experiential history) than those black Americans who are dramatically celebrating a dream come true.

What do you think? Please add comments.

Bob Sackamento at mydd.com (HT/John) has a good overview titled, “Today, the US Senate lost another rising star,” on Senator Obama resigning his Senate seat, with an interesting biographical take on the five (and only five!) African Americans who have ever served in that political body, probably the most powerful legislative body on earth.

The first two black senators served during the Reconstruction era (see some history here and here), when this country’s whites had the chance to abandon this country’s racist foundation but did not do so. They were Hiram Rhodes Revels (1870-1871) and Blanche Bruce (1875-1881), both Republicans from, guess where, Mississippi. The only other black senators have been the Republican Edward Brooke (1967-1979), from Massachusetts and the Democrat Carol Moseley Braun (1993-1999), from Illinois. Braun is the only black woman to ever serve in that relatively exclusive, mostly white men’s, rather undemocratic political club called the U.S. Senate.

Now that Senator Obama is stepping down, there are no black senators in that body. This is yet another signal of how systemic racism still is in the United States. There is speculation that the governor of Illinois may appoint a black person as the new senator in Obama’s place. It is time, in my view, for another African American woman.

Timothy Noah adds a bit more to the important analysis that John offered today, titled “What We Didn’t Overcome: Why you can’t blame it all on the South”:

Obama won the white vote in 18 states and in Washington, D.C. All 18 states lie outside the South, and most are predictably liberal. (New York, Vermont, etc.). But Obama lost the white vote in eight of the states where he won the overall popular vote. That’s no great surprise in North Carolina or Virginia, the two Southern states Obama carried, or even in Pennsylvania or Ohio, where white working-class voters were known to be resistant. It’s a little surprising in Maryland, New Jersey, and New Mexico. All three states have Democratic governors and Democratically controlled state legislatures.

That is, Obama lost the white vote in 60+ percent (32) of the states. And, of course, whites are the largest group of voters, and Senator Obama lost them at about the same rate as Gore in 2000, by 12 percentage points.

— In the worst economic meltdown since the 1930s so far and likely getting worse, with many retirement pensions way down by 30-50 percent, with massively declining health care, and two disastrous wars–all substantially the result of the “white Republican” party’s (and especially its wealthy supporters’) decisions in its 8 years in power…..

Attention mass media, you should do major stories on this: White racism is not dead in the US.

As you’ve probably heard or read about by now, many commentators and analysts (see here) have announced that there was no evidence of a “Bradley Effect” (or more accurately called the “white racism” effect). Obama’s victory was indeed monumental, and more whites supported him than John Kerry in 2004. Pollsters like Blumenthal at Pollster.com have declared the results “unambiguous” in the rejection of any Bradley Effect. Still, there were 22% of U.S. counties that increased their vote for Republican John McCain, and they are concentrated in places like my home state, Arkansas (see here). Obama actually did ten points worse among white women than John Kerry did in 2004. Some I’ve talked to here think that was due to a “Hillary Effect,” but I don’t buy that, given her endorsement and campaigning for him, as well as their policy similarities. See the following table, which breaks down the white votes for states in the southern/southeastern U.S. (McCain’s percent is listed first in each category):

WHITE MEN% /WHITE WOMEN% /WHITE TOTAL %


AL —– 88-9—– 88-12—– 88-10

AR —– 68-30—– 67-31—– 68-30

FL—– 55-42—– 57-42—– 56-42

GA—– 78-21—– 74-26—– 76-23

KY—– 64-34—– 63-36—– 63-36

LA—– 83-16—– 85-13—– 84-14

MS—– 90-9—– 87-13—– 88-11

SC—– 76-23—– 70-29—– 73-26

TN—– 64-31—– 63-36—– 63-34

As Blumenthal has noted, it’s difficult to tell if the Bradley Effect was a factor in these states, since so few polls were taken in these states—being considered safe states for McCain quite early during the cycle. However, the few polls I have reviewed do suggest that white support was higher in the polls than what occurred on Election Day. But regardless whether the Bradley Effect was involved or not, what explains such overwhelming support of McCain over Obama in these states? I think that there is a whitewash in effect for yet another slice (certainly an important one) of U.S. history, in which powerful whites interpret an event that credits whites for its successes (while often marginalizing nonwhites for the successes or even demonizing nonwhites for the failures; see the Prop 8 coverage, as Jessie discussed or atfor example ).

Obama’s victory in Florida, for example, was essentially due to his support from Latino/a voters. Second, I think there is yet another attempted denial of white racism, still alive and well in our society. This election certainly presented us evidence of regional—as well as generational, educational, community type, etc.—differences among whites and how it affects their voting patterns. White denials of racism require selective consciousness and attention to events. Now we have to listen to commentators discuss the “end of racism,” despite the evidence in the data that it indeed persists.

(Note from Joe: also see the correlational analysis by Charles Franklin of the black vote versus the total white vote. He concludes thus:

There is considerable variation in the percentage of whites who voted for Obama. Where African Americans made up less than 20% of the vote (according to exit polls), whites varied from 30% to 60% in their support for Obama but with no relationship to the size of the African American vote. As the African American electorate rose above 20%, white support for Obama fell sharply to barely 10%.

)

The Vanity Fair website has a short article by Bill Bradley (H/T. Jessie) listing probable racist incidents across the country, especially in the smaller cities and rural areas. These are of the white supremacist type and come from many different sources, such as these (they list others):

In Midland, Michigan a man paraded through an intersection in a KKK robe. [MLive]

A noose was hung from a tree at Baylor University. [Baylor Lariat]

In Loxahatchee, Florida, a family home was covered in racist graffiti. [WPTV.com]

In Stokes County, N.C., a man crossed his flag with a black X and hung it upside down. [Winston-Salem Journal]

In Apolacon Township, Pennsylvania an interracial couple who supported Obama found a burned cross in their yard. [Star-Gazette]

In Mount Desert Island, Maine black effigies were hung from nooses. [Bangor Daily News]

Will these incidents increase over the next year? There certainly is a lot of violent talk on various open websites across the web. And why do mainstream media ignore often violence-oriented white supremacist stuff? Clearly, this racist outburst does not fit their “ending of racism” and “healing the racial divide” versions of the white racial frame.

The derelict mainstream media also mostly ignore the data showing landslide votes against Senator Obama in states like Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Georgia and much of the South among whites, especially white men. (Only nine percent of white male voters there voted for Obama; some 90 percent voted for McCain!) Why so few votes for Obama from white workers in much of the South, many of whom have economic interests in line with Obama’s economic plans?

The Washington Post accents this meme:

Can he be not only the president of the United States but also the racial healer that many in the country clearly believe him to be? It’s a tough task for one man.

Tough, indeed. In spite of such media implications and explicit calls for Obama to “heal the racial divide,” Obama’s election along obviously cannot end blatant white racism–or the much more common covert and subtle white racism that is everyday-ness across the United States. Only aggressive civil rights law enforcement (which would be new for this country) and continuing antiracist organization has a chance of doing that. And that does require national awareness of it, and attention to it.

Well, as predicted numerous white and other pundits in the mass media are using this election to do what they do best–that is to deny that there is still significant U.S. racism. The Wall Street Journal even calls on Obama to lead this effort:

While Mr. Obama lost among white voters, as most modern Democrats do, his success is due in part to the fact that he also muted any politics of racial grievance. We have had in recent years two black Secretaries of State, black CEOs of our largest corporations, black Governors and Generals — and now we will have a President. One promise of his victory is that perhaps we can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country. Mr. Obama has a special obligation to help do so.

The intensity of this white denial should be a dead giveaway that there is something going on just beneath the surface, like the continuing white-racist framing of society and discriminatory actions. (And the irony is lost on the writer too, as he/she admits that whites did not vote in the majority for Obama.) Even as African Americans are collectively celebrating a great victory against U.S. racism—one they can best understand and feel–only a minority of whites are also celebrating the victory (and usually with a different historical experience to bring to that celebration) and numerous whites in media are denying now that there is any significant racism left.

However, against this backdrop, a summer 2008 USA Today/Gallup poll of nearly 2000 adults finds that even a bare majority (51 percent) of white Americans still admit there is widespread racial discrimination targeting African Americans. The proportions among Americans of color agreeing there is widespread discrimination against African Americans are substantially higher– some 59 percent of Latinos and 78 percent of black Americans. The report notes

Americans also see racial discrimination as a major or minor factor in four specific problems facing the black community — lower average education levels for U.S. blacks, lower average income levels for U.S. blacks, lower average life expectancies for blacks, and a higher percentage of blacks serving time in U.S. prisons.

Not surprisingly, thus,

On all four issues, blacks are more likely than whites and Hispanics to see racial discrimination as a major factor. In fact, a majority of blacks say racial discrimination is a major reason each problem is occurring. Whites are more inclined to view racial discrimination as a minor reason in three of the four areas, but a plurality of 44% of whites believe it is a major factor in higher prison rates for blacks.

Assessing the implications, Gallup can only manage to add this:

As on most issues involving race in the United States, blacks are much more likely to see racism as a problem than are whites.

Could it be because they are daily targets of subtle, blatant, and covert racial discrimination? How quaint and feeble is this Gallup analysis? And Gallup finishes up, like most such assessments, with an optimistic and also quaint note:

However, other questions in the poll showed that Americans remain optimistic that race relations could improve, if Americans could hold an open national dialogue on race and if Barack Obama were elected as the first black president. (I blogged on some of these optimism items this summer.)

At least the latter happened. Now is there any chance for a national dialogue on race? Probably not. And it is indeed time for the media pundits like those at the WSJ to start paying attention to the empirical data like the large Gallup poll: Even a bare majority of whites think racial discrimination is still a serious problem in the United States.

I was looking for news clips to show to my Race and Ethnicity class today and I remembered that a friend of mine had told me about some of Karl Rove’s comments during Tuesday’s election results on Fox News. Listening to them today, he does have a few positives to share about what these results mean…that is before he compares the Obama family to the Cosby show by saying “Well look, we’ve had an African American first family for many years in different forms. You know, when the Cosby show was on, it wasn’t a black family, it was an American family.” While that alone is worthy of a blog post, what was also concerning to me was a comment Rove made before that. He was asked, as a “realistic political analyst,” to talk about the degree of color-blindness in our country:

I think particularly among younger people, they are color-blind. Uh, you know, older people, people who grew up and remember the 60s and remember the 50s and the 40s and the 70s, they to varying degrees remain observant of the color of, of the color break in America. But you go on a college campus or you go be around younger people, and they are “post-racial.” You know, and just, the idea of race very rarely enters into their thinking.

While I think many of us will agree that things have changed in some positive ways since the 60s and that this election has been historic in a number of ways, I’m not sure anyone is ready to say that first of all, we live in a society where race isn’t a factor anymore and second that young people don’t think about race anymore. Rove’s comments seem to imply that once older generations pass on, everything will be fine in terms of race, because young people just aren’t thinking about it. In my research talking with Latino undergraduate students, I found instead that for many of them, race continues to be a salient issue on their campuses.

A student at Southern University talked about how some major racial incident seemed to come up on his campus a few times a month when I spoke with him in the Fall of 2006.

This is my 7th semester here. In all my semesters, I’ve never seen like racial tensions like I have right now. (Oh really? What’s going now?)…Like students in the law school had like a ghetto party. They dressed up as stereotypically hip-hop clothing, and they wore like nameplates of stereotypically black and Latino last names. Um, there was a black face incident during Halloween where a couple of students took some pictures and they posted them online on facebook.com. It was a couple of members from a historically white fraternity… Even I mean yesterday the Young Conservatives had an Affirmative Action bake sale…like their own way of protesting the affirmative action policies in this country…I mean…usually like every semester like one or two big things happen, like at the most, but this semester its literally been like one or two big things every month. (“Southern University” Latino Male, 22)

His statement, as well as the comments of others on this campus indicate that race in the thinking of young, white students on college campuses. And it’s not only in their thinking, but it is evident in their racist actions on this campus. Incidents like this one demonstrate that racism is still alive and well on college campuses.

Another student at Southern University talks about an encounter she had with some white students before a football game. Again, we see that the whites racialized the situation in a way that would indicate that they are not free from prejudice:

I just have heard and I got the taste of a kid, of boys came in for the “Southern Tech”- “Southern University” game and uh, we were listening to Shakira, some friends of mine. There was another Hispanic girl in the front seat with me and then a Bosnian girl in the backseat…But we were having so much fun and we needed to sell our tickets and so these guys had their windows open. And we asked “Hey, do you guys want a ticket?… And they said “Oh, we don’t speak Spanish.” And at first I was I like, “What did he mean by that? I wasn’t, did I speak Spanish?” Because I don’t normally speak Spanish. And then I was like “Oh, oh…that still happens? Like, people still are like that?” And so it was just kind of, I was taken aback. And my friend started crying actually. But I was just like, I didn’t realize that still happened nowadays. ( “Southern University” Latina Female 23)

When this woman asked in English if the men in the car next to her needed tickets, they immediately racialized the interaction by informing her that they don’t speak Spanish. The Latina students were shocked and hurt by this reaction. Perhaps initially they thought things were more positive between the races, as Rove seems to think, and then were disappointed and discouraged to find out that, in fact, these incidents still happen.
These incidents were not isolated to just Southern University, so we can’t make the claim that somehow racism only exists in the South. In fact, on each of the campuses (one in the South, one in the Southwest, and one in the Midwest), students faced discrimination when they spoke Spanish on campus. They faced assumptions that the only reason they were attending their university was because of Affirmative Action policies and not because of their own academic talents. One student talked about an experience he had a football game at Southwest University.

I was at a football game last week. . .And somebody said, one of the fraternity guys that were yelling “Immigration bus is here. It’s waiting for you. Get on it.” Even though [At the other players?] Yes, at [the other] players. “Juarez is not here. This isn’t Juarez.” They were calling them all sorts of bad things. . .And they were just being, real, real bad about it. Even though the make-up of [this] football team is hardly any Hispanics. . .And so it was kind of surprising to me that, why would you say such things? (“Southwest University” Latino Male 26)

Notably, Southwest University is almost 35% Latino and still this was the response of white students in the crowd. They heckled the other team by implying that because they were coming from a predominately Latino school. And ironically, whites were racializing a football team that was mostly white!
Even light-skinned Latinos who reveal their racial background faced discrimination:

You see the tone of their voice, how they look at you, what you’re gonna say. After they know that I’m Mexican and stuff, some are like “Oh that’s so cool,”. . .They’re like ‘Wow, you look Italian’ and I’m like ‘I’m 100 percent [Mexican]’. . .So they’re like ‘Wow’, a little bit shocked. They would not talk to me after that. And you feel it, but it’s their problem if they’re not accepting. ( “Midwest University” Latino Male 18 )

This student went on to say that sometimes whites respond that they feel like he lied to them by not revealing this information when they first met him. Somehow, he was under some obligation to reveal his racial background and by not doing so, he was being deceitful. So contrary to what Rove claims, college students are concerned about race in a variety of ways that are both overt and quite subtle. By proclaiming such things, Rove is distorting the reality of the pain that students of color face on a daily basis because of discrimination and mistreatment based on race. As these examples, and many more like them that I could have shared, demonstrate is that racism is not absent from our universities and college campuses or in the mind of white students. Our society has made history this week, but this does not mean we’re living in a “post-racial” utopia.

According to the CNN and ABC exit polls, white Americans overwhelmingly wanted John McCain to be the next US president. The white vote was lopsided for McCain at 55-43 percent. If the 2008 electorate had the same demographic character as any before about 1980 (that is being nearly 90 percent white), Senator John McCain would currently be the president-elect.

But as we know that did not happen, because the electorate this time was only 74 percent white, and those voters who were not white voted very heavily for Senator Obama. ABC News’ exit polls are reported this way, in terms of percentages for Obama/McCain:

White Americans: 43/55
Black Americans: 95/4
Latino Americans: 67/31
Asian Americans: 62/35
Other Americans: 66/31

Some high-density Asian American counties on the West Coast voted at even higher rates of 70 percent, and Shari’s (H/T) check of local sources on Native Americans reveals that their vote was lopsided too:

The Native American numbers I got from looking at the election returns in counties that have reservations in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado [show] the range of the Obama spread was from 62 to 87 percent.

The role of voters of color in electing Senator Obama the next president is in my view one of the most important stories of this historic election, yet I have not seen serious mainstream media analysis of this and of what it means about the rise of a multiracial democracy and the decline of white political dominance in the United States. Why is this story not getting major attention? Perhaps it is because the white-controlled, intensively white-framed mass media are all caught up in declaring this to be a “post-racial” or “post-racist America.” Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Another obvious fact about this election, which has also gotten little play in the media, is the continuing reality of the Republican Party being mainly the “white party” of the United States. This party gets very few African American voters and does not get even 40 percent of any other group of color.

I have seen a little media commentary on whether the Republican “southern strategy” is still viable, but no discussion of the fact that such a term is only another racism-denying euphemism for what is in fact the “white southern strategy” or “white racist strategy” of the Republican Party. (It is correctly called these latter terms because some 20-40 percent of “southerners” are not white, depending on the area of the South.) Since the 1960s this Republican strategy has been a “white southern” strategy but almost no analysts in or outside the mainstream media are willing to call it by its correct name–just as they are unwilling to call the so-called “Bradley effect” by its correct name (either the “white racism effect” or the “whites-lying effect”). The Republican Party currently has no Black members in Congress or in other high elected offices, and none in high party leadership. It has only a very few (token) appointed officials in high office and has indeed shown no significant leadership on or commitment to civil rights enforcement issues since the 1960s. (For more, see here. ) It is indeed still the “white party,” as this election dramatically reveals and as even Howard Dean let slip in August this year.