Simon Balto: On Bernie, Biden, Black Voters, and Whiteness https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/03/on-bernie-biden-black-voters-and-whiteness: 'I want to discuss some things that Chris [Koski] raised in his post last night on Black voters and the Biden-Bernie matchup.... I don’t have any issues with Chris’s larger conclusion that Biden manhandled Sanders in attracting Black voters in the South. That’s clearly true and not up for debate. I also agree with the point that it’s patronizing to write off Black voters as voting against their interests, being ill-informed, etc. It’s also not borderline offensive. It is offensive. However, I think there is a lot of nuance that’s lost...
...The John McWhorter quote that Chris offers (“Trump’s racism is less important to probably most black people than it is to the minority of black people in academia/the media/collegetownish circles”).... McWhorter is dispositionally and professionally prone to denying the importance of racism in anything, so I don’t really think it’s worth putting stock in his opinions on this....
As the great Black Freedom Movement scholar Hasan Jeffries put it:
I’m only going to say this once, so listen up! It’s not that Black voters don’t trust #BernieSanders enough to vote for him in the primaries, it’s that they don’t trust white voters enough to vote for him over Trump in the general election. So #Biden it is.
I know from reader reactions to my postings on reparations last year and Erik’s postings on school segregation, etc. that there’s a true aversion within a lot of this community to thinking truly and hard about whiteness and its power. But people need to know that whiteness and the ways it works are routinely part of the political arithmetic for voters of color. They have to be. (It hardly needs reiterating that Trump’s base is white men and white women, in that order, but I’ll reiterate it anyway.) For the duration of this election cycle, Sanders has been more popular among people of color than he has been among white folks.... But there is also the reality that many nonwhite voters are suspicious, based upon experience and history, of white voters’ commitment to a politics explicitly premised on social, economic, and racial justice that might disrupt the privileges of whiteness. That reality weighs on what people think is possible, and thus influences how they primary. It’s obviously not the only thing, but it’s there. The voting calculations of nonwhite voters aren’t made in a vacuum. They’re made in a political landscape indelibly shaped (one might say mutilated) by whiteness...
#noted #2020-03-07
