Black Voters

This campaign has taught me something profound about black voters. I had always been under the impression that black voters were less a voting bloc and more a group of individuals with a shared identity, who each held a unique set of values and issues that helped to determine their voting preference.

Wrong! Watching pundits- and not just on cable, but on "credible" network shows as well- has taught me that black people are very simple people when it comes to voting. Apparently, they were reluctant to vote for the black guy until he won a state that was majority white. Then they rushed to him. Evidently, black folks vote the way white people tell them to. I feel so foolish because I just never realized that was the case.

The other thing I've learned is that it doesn't matter that the facts don't support this theory. Black people in South Carolina supported Obama by a margin of 2 to 1 before he won Iowa (that's reluctance?). The percentage of black support rose for Obama only after the Clintons made some remarks that were deemed implicitly racist during the South Carolina primary campaign. The Clintons put down the source of the shared identity that connects black people with one another, which may help to explain the mass shift to Obama in the weeks before the South Carolina primary. Or so I thought.

Of course, I now know that even if the facts don't support the media's theories, as long as it's repeated enough, it becomes true. So, black people only voted for Obama because white people did so first.