Recently I was reading the Tulanian, my alma mater’s alumni magazine, when I came across a theory proposed by Melissa Harris-Perry, a political science professor at Tulane. Apparently, her area of “expertise” is electoral racism. She wrote an article less than a year ago in The Nation entitled Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama. I would strongly encourage you to read it, especially if you voted for Obama in the last election.
In summary, her basic premise is that because a black candidate sometimes loses to a white candidate, electoral racism is evident in our country. She had high hopes that electoral racism was on the way out the door due to two studies she conducted involving Obama’s races in 2004 and 2008. In 2004, she concluded that because voters were willing to vote in a race that involved two black opponents, they were not demonstrating electoral racism. In 2008, she concluded that since Democrats of all colors chose to vote for Obama and succeeded in electing him to office, they were once again demonstrating that electoral racism was a thing of the past. Because, “[f]or Democrats to abandon their nominee after eight years of Bush could be interpreted only as an act of electoral racism.”
Wow, how offensive is that?? She continues her current theorizing to state that since Obama’s white supporters have dropped from 61% in 2009 to 33% in Oct. 2011 (when she wrote this article) that a more insidious type of racism is becoming evident. She believes that since voters continued to support Clinton into his second term after accomplishing less that Obama (in her opinion) and they are no longer supporting Obama into his potential second term, that electoral racism is once again becoming evident. She is accusing white individuals who voted for Obama in the previous election and are now considering voting for someone else this time around for whatever legitimate, logical, well-thought-out reasons that they are racists rather than prudent voters. RACISTS. Because you are a thinking individual who has the ability to see when things have gone terribly wrong, and because you decided to help make a change in the direction this country is taking, she thinks you’re a racist. Talk about mindless hate speech…
The method she employs to support her claims is simply bad science. It’s a post hoc analysis of events shaped to support her already well-known opinions and conclusions about the concept of electoral racism. Times change, people change, America changes. We are not the same people that we were 4 years ago, and it is malarkey to assume that any change in our opinions that happens to go against a black candidate is racism. You can’t reasonably compare the reasons Democrats voted for Clinton with the reasons Democrats voted for Obama. Opinions in America change at an incredibly swift pace. We are not the same people we were in 1992 and 1996. Sixteen YEARS of additional voters have been added to the mix. And that’s an enormous amount of time for us to realize that we MUST lower our tolerance for incompetent government leadership. The fact that white voters’ support of Obama is decreasing is not evidence of racism; it’s evidence of a maturation of the American voter and a desire for better leadership in the White House.
Stand up for your opinions, and don’t let people like Melissa Harris-Perry accuse you of such heinous motivations without putting up a fight.
burningsugarcane 