Prometheus 6   

The Electorate

I'm a Black partisan, so you'd probably expect me to title this post "The Black Electorate," but I'm going to borrow (and promptly return) a page from Natalie Davis's book to make a point.

How to get Black folks motivated to vote for a candidate seems to be a great mystery. All this noise about low voter turnout. Well,I'm not going to tell you what to do because if you do it and don't mean it, I'll feel responsible. This will force me to track you down and kick yo' azz and we really don't want to go there. What I'm going to do instead is discuss why folks have a problem figuring it out.

White folks and I'm-As-Good-As-White folks look at black people like       . Y'all hear the ebonics, see the anger, check the hip-hop culture and come to the conclusion that you're looking at some kind of different sort of human. You're being fooled, sucked in, letting mere surface manifestations of variant cultural norms distract you from the fact that (if you'll pardon the expression) God only made one kind of human.

Folks are like, "what do those blackfolk want?" and never consider applying the basic equation: eatsleepshitfuckdie = life. Folks are like, "what do those blackfolk want?" and I'm like, why don't you try offering black folks the same thing you offer white folk?

Novel concept, ain't it?

You make promises to your white constituents and keep them. Try that with Black folks. I mean, even Strom Thurmond had that much sense.

I'm not really pointing a finger here, BTW. I got asked this a couple of times, so I figured I could annoy everyone at once, irrespective of how much I was annoyed (or not) by the question.