Are Black Obama Supporters to Blame for Proposition 8?
Here are the numbers: 10 percent of Californian voters this year were black. 94 percent of these black voters voted for Obama. 70 percent voted for Proposition 8. Assuming that 100 percent of black voters who voted against Obama voted for Proposition 8 (this is probably giving black Obama supporters more credit than they’re due), 64 percent of black Californian voters voted both for Obama and for Proposition 8. Only 36 percent of California Democrats overall and 22 percent of self-described liberals voted for Proposition 8. This gives us a figure of something like 3 percent of California voters who, if not for their blackness, would have voted against Proposition 8. Had these voters instead voted against Proposition 8 (i.e. had black Obama supporters voted for Proposition 8 at a rate equal to that of Democrats in general), it would have failed, 49.2 percent to 50.8 percent. Had black Californians simply not shown up to the polls at all, Proposition 8 would have failed by a narrow margin, with 49.87 percent. (Obama would still have won handily.)
If anyone wants to double-check my math, I got all these numbers from CNN.com.
I realize that there’s plenty of blame to go around, and I’m not going to editorialize except to say that it’s a damn shame that we as Americans saw such a civil rights milestone yesterday on one front and we as Californians saw such a regression in civil rights on another front.
(I guess this blog entry isn’t showing up because there’s a minimum word count of 300 words, so I’ll just add that I literally cried with joy when Obama won Ohio, but there are many points on which I disagree with his politics. There was one candidate who supported marriage equality for all Americans, releasing non-violent drug offenders from prison, and commiting ourselves to renewable green sources of energy like solar and wind (not nuclear, oil, and “clean” coal a la Obama), but he got something like one percent of the California vote. Obama’s a step in the right direction, and I hope that his concessions to the right were just political posturing, but I think we liberals still have a long way to go.)
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Blacks want to have a monopoly on discrimination and that is why those people refuse to support any other minority.