The last, most desperate, line of criticism of Barack Obama for some has been that, although Obama has good ideas, he just wouldn’t be the right choice for the Democratic presidential nomination because he could never get “the white vote”.
I hate this idea of “the white vote”. It puts me into the same voting class as George W. Bush and Pat Robertson. There is no white vote.
Even outside of politics, the idea of race is full of holes. People of good sense have known that for generations, even before Mark Twain wrote “Pudd’nhead Wilson”. Lots of supposedly “white people” have significant amounts of ancestry from places like Africa, Asia or the Americas (before Columbus tried to make slaves out of everyone he could find over here). The reverse is true for “blacks”. Barack Obama is an easy example of that, but he’s certainly not the only one. And what is this idea of “non-Hispanic whites” or “non-Jewish whites”? It all makes no sense.
But do you want to play the race game? Do you want to try to make the argument that Barack Obama just can’t be President because he isn’t white enough to get the support of white voters?
Okay, let’s play. According to exit polls in Virginia yesterday, Barack Obama got the majority of support from voters who identified themselves as “white” – five percent more than Hillary Clinton did.
While we’re dealing with the idea of lumping people all together so as to discount them, the gender thing isn’t a factor either. Barack Obama got the support of 60 percent of female voters in Virginia.
Virginia is just one example of people forgetting about their ethnicity, forgetting about the ethnicity of the candidate, and just voting for who they think would make the better candidate.
White people won’t vote for Barack Obama? Yes we can… but can we stop calling ourselves white? Stop being white?
White supremacists have gone around calling people like me “race traitors”. I respond with this: If you think that the tone of your skin and the geographical location of your ancestors is the most important thing about your identity, you’re a brain traitor.
“White” demo primary voters are not really white. They are libserals.