Debunking Myths One Lie @ a Time: Blacks Only Support Obama Because He's Black

Today's Myth: Blacks who vote for Obama are doing so because he's black and it should be viewed in the same light as people who vote for Hillary because she's white and familiar along the political landscape of white Americans in power in politics.

Truth: This is complete malarkey and if someone is telling you this to your face and you buy it you should hand your wallet to your wife because they can easily sell you beanstalks and what other usless crap that nobody in their right minds would want to buy and by the end of the conversation you'll be broke.

It's not advantageous to present yourself to the American public and/or self-identify as black in a country that is 74% white on the whole. It's not an accident that white men have been on a 43 election win streak in America and that we just happened to not have any other demographic serve as commander in chief. Anyone who tells you different is lying or has agenda at play.

Black people have been voting for white people as long as they've had the opportunity to vote. In fact, black people have died, suffered through state-sponsored terrorism in opposition to their fundamental right to vote, and been openly intimidated at voting sites all in order to vote for white people (and I emphasize to vote for white people because it was never even a credible idea that they'd ever have the opportunity to vote for a black president to begin with at that juncture in time.)

Is there anyone who believes the Clintons themselves would be the Clintons as we know them and would have survived the witch hunts and vilifications of the 90's without they're most loyal constituency group, blacks. Blacks championed their cause when few others dared to. You might even chuckle at the notion NOW but we even fondly referred to him as the first black president we loved him so much. There's no denying the kinship between the two. Now this isn't some new revelation that we vote for white people historically, with the exception of 2008, I'd say that we've voted for white people to the tune of 95% of the time with the exception of Jesse Jackson in '84/'88 and I shake my head at what those guys were thinking wasting their vote on him, lol, but this is all lost when people bring up black support for Sen. Barack Obama.

Now to be sure, I am not arguing in favor of this candidate at this time as some sort of magnanimous gesture as a peace offering to blacks in electing Obama as the embodiment of a 'lifetime achievement award' for all they've gone through. I rail against that notion in sports when MVPs are bestowed upon undeserving athletes for a particular year they receive them when there are more deserving candidates and I reject that same notion in politics. That said, I don't doubt that there is a certain small amount of white liberals and black voters who have placed their votes with that in mind but to equate this in numbers or morality as a wash in comparison to what some white voters are doing is ridiculous.

Let me run some numbers by you. 221 & 37. If 37 people in a room of 258 started singing "Crank That Soulja Boy" and the rest started singing "Achy Breaky Heart" I guarantee if someone was walking by this building prevailing wisdom would lead them to think this was closer to a Country Ho-Down than a Hip-Hop club. The 37 people would be drowned out completely. Now lets flesh out those numbers a bit and assign values to them. The 37 is representative of the 37 million black people in America and the 221 is representative of the 221 million white people in America. Even if in the wildest most destructively imaginitive scenario you could think of where proportionately white angst about voting for the black candidate and black angst about voting for the white candidate (even though there has been very little proven that this has ever been the case) was an identical universal racial level as 30% of each group who voted that way it still isn't the same thing. The 30% of the white people would make their vote purely against the black candidate would amount to 66 million and the 30% of the black people who for whatever reason would vote against the white candidate would be 11.1 million. There's still an almost 55 million vote different that would probably swing the election one way rather than the other.

Apart from all the obvious things wrong with this scenario factually like blacks never having demonstrated a willingness historically to resist against the campaign of white candidates solely on the basis of race on almost all levels and how it's been seen time and time again the opposite way to the tune of there having only been three black senators in our nation's history since reconstruction and similarly only three black governors since reconstruction. Now to any fair minded person this is rooted in a racially polarized America unwilling to accept differences in the norm as fit to lead in a national government.

Now another interesting point to note that gets overlooked by people ready to perpetuate this myth about black people being monolithic and unable to be analytical and independent minded. Hillary was winning the black vote as recently as January of this year and had been consistently out polling Barack Obama by wide margins since they both declared. Things didn't even turn until this year (yes 2008) when Bill started getting out pocket and making loose comments and speaking in 'dog whistle' terms that were construed as racially loaded. He turned a lot of people off this cycle towards his wife alone not to mention Hillary herself having more than few WTF moments in there too (MLK Discounting/'I can get the white vote and Obama can't'/Obama was rolling with slum lords back in his 'hood in Chicago). So yes she tried to ghettoize an ivy league alumni and former member of the college professoriate and it looked bad.

To suggest that the racial element is a wash in this campaign is irresponsible and factually incorrect. Once again, anyone voting for Barack in the African-American community solely because he looks like them and against Hillary because she's white I say he doesn't need your vote and you should keep it. It's a stupid thing to do and it has no place in politics. There really are so many reasons as to vote for Obama and least of all of them should be his race. But the vast majority of his voters and I count myself among them aren't voting for him because of race but because of possibility.