30 June 2009
Experts Re-evaluating Ideas on Racial Progress — Part I
Unexpected voter behavior puts optimists and pessimists on a new course
By Jonathan Freedman
Jonathan Freedman is a professor of English and American studies at the University of Michigan and author of Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2008). In a two-part series written for America.gov, he provides analytical and anecdotal observations on America’s increasing diversity.
(begin byliner)
The victory of Barack Obama is of tremendous importance for students of race and ethnicity in the United States. It challenges — and perhaps shatters — many beliefs previously held by sociologists, political scientists and American studies scholars.
Two lines of thought have characterized America’s racial progress in the last half-century — one seeing it as leading our nation to a post-racial dispensation; the other insisting that, for all the undeniable progress, white Americans remain politically and culturally dominant, the default mode of social authority and power.
TWO INEXACT VIEWS
This debate was reflected in divergent views of U.S. politics. One held that in some matters, the “color line” — as W.E.B. DuBois famously called it — was perdurable, that real political power never would be held by African Americans.
Optimists countered that black politicians have won mayorships — New York, Newark, Chicago and Gary, Indiana — and governorships — Virginia and Massachusetts — by building alliances among white liberals, blacks and Latinos, and these might presage a new coalition.
Nonsense, replied pessimists. White working- and middle-class voters, suburbanites, rural voters — none would support a black candidate for national office in numbers required to win. A seemingly successful appeal to white racism in the 1988 national elections cemented this belief.
A similar dispute has surrounded ethnicity. America never has had a foreign-born president, a Jewish president, an Italian-American president and only one Irish-American Catholic president among white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. This pattern seemed unchallenged and a sign of a latent nativism beneath America’s communal self-understanding (at least since the 1960s) as a “nation of immigrants.”
Pessimists pointed to other concerns: the wave of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment after September 11, 2001; hostilities evoked by attempts to reform U.S. immigration laws and pro-immigrant marches of 2006–07; and referenda to make English the country’s official language.
Optimists observed that this repression was far less serious than that sustained by German Americans during World War I and Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. They pointed to opinion polls showing that, while many Americans were troubled by immigrants, often in troubling ways — exaggerated beliefs that immigrants cost Americans their jobs — the majority viewed them favorably. Optimists also pointed to the failure of many referenda limiting immigrants’ rights to vote and be educated in their native languages.
Whatever their opinions, however, both camps agreed that nativism was an enduring fact of American political life, that it was next to impossible for someone not of white Anglo-Saxon stock to be elected president.
THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK
This election challenged both those beliefs. Before turning to the obvious way — the election of an African American — it’s important to note that few leading candidates comported to the model of previous elections. On the Republican side, one leading candidate was Mitt Romney — a Mormon, a religious minority persecuted as late as the mid-20th century. Another, John McCain, was foreign-born — in the Canal Zone. A third, Mike Huckabee, is an evangelical minister — also unprecedented in presidential politics.
Of the Democrats, the leading candidates included a woman, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Richardson, who proudly claimed his origins as Latino, American Indian, and of white forefathers and foremothers. The victory of a racially mixed man of partially foreign parentage reflected a larger socio-political phenomenon: the increasing diversity of the U.S. electorate and populace.
The figures, especially on race, are startling. White Americans are at the lowest percentage since the first census and are projected to be a minority by 2050, and this is showing in the electorate. In the Boston Review, political science scholars Stephen Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart III wrote, “Whites represent a dwindling share of the electorate: 81 percent in 2000, 77 percent in 2004, and 74 percent in 2008. Blacks, by contrast, increased from 10 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2004 to 13 percent in 2008; Hispanics increased from 6 percent in 2000 to 8 percent in 2004 to 9 percent in 2008.”
Although he increased the Democratic share of the overall electorate by 5 percent over 2004, Obama carried only 2 percent more of the white vote than did John Kerry in 2004 — not enough to swing the election. His victory was due to taking a great proportion of the extant nonwhite vote and augmenting its numbers.
Perhaps more startling is the lack of change in the white response to Obama compared with previous elections. It was a truism among prognosticators during the campaign that many older white working-class voters wouldn’t support a mixed-race American, much less one phenotypically black.
This was partially true, especially in a geographic band roughly from western New York through western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi to Arkansas and Louisiana — the only areas (other than McCain’s home state of Arizona) where Republicans improved their percentage of the vote. (According to recent figures from the Swing State Project, Obama lost the most votes for Democrats in Arkansas.) This band, roughly Appalachia and the Deep South, was the exception.
Obama increased the Democratic vote throughout the rest of the country, including places where whites are the majority: Iowa, Montana, even, amazingly, Utah. Whites may not have voted in substantially greater numbers for Obama than for Kerry, but outside Appalachia and the Deep South, they didn’t vote against him in large numbers either. White racism is the dog that didn’t bark in this election.
United We Stand, But We May Have to Agree to Disagree — Part II
(end byliner)
