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The Blame Game Has Already Started: The Myth of the Depressed Black Turnout
With a week to go before Election Day, the narrative has emerged that Hillary Clinton’s failure to excite African Americans to Obama levels is coming home to roost in the form of lower than “expected” early-voting numbers from swing states, which will in turn cost her the election. This is wonderful click bait for stressed out Democrats, but this narrative is both empirically not true and plays into dangerous internal racial politics of the American left.
Racial scapegoating of blacks by the political left is not new, but that makes it no less problematic. In 2009, African Americans were blamed for the passage of California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 bill despite math that said otherwise. African Americans were chastised this spring for failing to rally around Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary. Now, we have preemptive finger-wagging at black voters if they don’t get their souls to the polls for Hillary Clinton.
It is this very notion—that African-American voters, who are often last in line for policy benefits from white progressive candidates, are somehow still saddled with the primary burden of getting those white progressive candidates elected—that is perverse, and contributes to the very “low turnout” problems that are being lamented.
African Americans had to literally die on camera in order to get the issue of criminal justice onto the plate of Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders for that matter). Voter-suppression policies targeting black areas have run rampant over the last 18 months. All the while African-American voters have watched an occasionally complicit media give an open platform to racists on the nightly news as well as endless fawning and empathetic think pieces on bigoted Trump supporters.
http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2016/11/the-blame-game-has-already-started-the-myth-of-the-depressed-black-turnout/
Racial scapegoating of blacks by the political left is not new, but that makes it no less problematic. In 2009, African Americans were blamed for the passage of California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 bill despite math that said otherwise. African Americans were chastised this spring for failing to rally around Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary. Now, we have preemptive finger-wagging at black voters if they don’t get their souls to the polls for Hillary Clinton.
It is this very notion—that African-American voters, who are often last in line for policy benefits from white progressive candidates, are somehow still saddled with the primary burden of getting those white progressive candidates elected—that is perverse, and contributes to the very “low turnout” problems that are being lamented.
African Americans had to literally die on camera in order to get the issue of criminal justice onto the plate of Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders for that matter). Voter-suppression policies targeting black areas have run rampant over the last 18 months. All the while African-American voters have watched an occasionally complicit media give an open platform to racists on the nightly news as well as endless fawning and empathetic think pieces on bigoted Trump supporters.
http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2016/11/the-blame-game-has-already-started-the-myth-of-the-depressed-black-turnout/
It's interesting (and disgusting) to see how Trump is pre-emptively blaming a loss on voter fraud in predominantly black precincts, and now the media is pre-emptively blaming a Hillary loss on depressed black turnout.
5 replies
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Black turnout may not be at Obama levels, but hell's bells, black turnout for Obama was historically high. Pretty high bar for a white woman to clear.
Pssst....from what I hear, that is all bullshit anyway. 
