Prometheus 6

I think Is Obama the End of Black Politics? should be read with The Race Isn't About Race in mind. Unfortunately, The Race Isn't About Race was written last.

After showcasing their new ticket at their convention in Denver this week, Democrats may well see, at long last, the significant boost in the polls for which they have been waiting. But if Joe Biden’s selection does anything to help break the stalemate, it will be because he is a serious foreign-policy thinker and a voice of experience, not because he is somehow reassuring to narrow-minded white voters.

There are plenty of reasons to think Mr. Biden will make a strong running mate. Rampant racism, real or alleged, isn’t one of them.

I'm assuming, given the nature and intensity of the responses to Mr. Bai's previous article, there is an element of self-defense in that closing plaintive cry.

I think reporting on race issues is new to Mr. Bai. His earlier stuff having been quite good, I myself am assuming the errors in approach that shaped Is Obama the End of Black Politics? were the result of what I will call culture shock. In that spirit I will suggest

While it’s entirely possible that Mr. Obama’s race is costing him some support, it’s also true that the electorate that voted in the last two presidential elections was almost symmetrically divided between the two parties. It would defy the laws of politics if, at this early stage of the campaign, moderate Republicans and conservative independents were to reject Mr. McCain (a candidate many of them preferred back in 2000) simply because they don’t like George W. Bush.

...he should have stopped there.

It would be naïve to suggest that race won’t figure in the election. But the danger for Democrats is that dark prophesies of prejudice could be self-fulfilling.

Here's the problem. I see nice, reasoned explanations of possible supporting reasons for the appearance of racism in folks' actions. Always. That's all I ever see.

(If older white voters recoiled at Mr. Obama when he exchanged a fist-bump with his wife, were they reacting to his youth or to his race?) There are legitimate reasons that some older white voters might reserve judgment on Mr. Obama without being closet racists.

Sure there are legitimate reasons. But what are the odds?

A sundown town is any organized jurisdiction that for decades kept African Americans or other groups from living in it and was thus “all-white” on purpose. There is a reason for the quotation marks around “all-white”: requiring towns to be literally all-white in the census—no African Americans at all—is inappropriate, because many towns clearly and explicitly defined themselves as sundown towns but allowed one black household as an exception. Thus an all-white town may include nonblack minorities and even a tiny number of African Americans.

It turns out that Anna and Jonesboro are not unique or even unusual. Beginning in about 1890 and continuing until 1968, white Americans established thousands of towns across the United States for whites only. Many towns drove out their black populations, then posted sundown signs. (Portfolio 7 shows an example.) Other towns passed ordinances barring African Americans after dark or prohibiting them from owning or renting property; still others established such policies by informal means, harassing and even killing those who violated the rule. Some sundown towns similarly kept out Jews, Chinese,Mexicans, Native Americans, or other groups.

Independent sundown towns range from tiny hamlets such as De Land, Illinois (population 500), to substantial cities such as Appleton, Wisconsin (57,000 in 1970). Sometimes entire counties went sundown, usually when their county seat did. Independent sundown towns were soon joined by “sundown suburbs,” which could be even larger: Levittown, on Long Island, had 82,000 residents in 1970, while Livonia, Michigan, and Parma, Ohio, had more than 100,000. Warren, a suburb of Detroit, had a population of 180,000 including just 28 minority families, most of whom lived on a U.S. Army facility.

Outside the traditional South—states historically dominated by slavery, where sundown towns are rare—probably a majority of all incorporated places kept out African Americans. If that sentence startles, please suspend disbelief until Chapter 3, which will show that Illinois, for example, had 671 towns and cities with more than 1,000 people in 1970, of which 475—71%—were all-white in census after census.6 Chapter 3 will prove that almost all of these 475 were sundown towns. There is reason to believe that more than half of all towns in Oregon, Indiana, Ohio, the Cumberlands, the Ozarks, and diverse other areas were also all-white on purpose. Sundown suburbs are found from Darien, Connecticut, to La Jolla, California, and are even more prevalent; indeed, most suburbs began life as sundown towns.

Sundown towns also range across the income spectrum. In 1990, the median owner-occupied house in Tuxedo Park, perhaps the wealthiest suburb of New York City, was worth more than $500,000 (the highest category in the census). So was the median house in Kenilworth, the richest suburb of Chicago. The median house in Pierce City, in southwestern Missouri, on the other hand, was worth just $29,800 and in Zeigler, in southern Illinois, just $21,900. All four towns kept out African Americans for decades.

Do you understand what it means that this practice was only declared illegal in 1968? That doing so was the "intrusion on property rights" Conservative Confederate Councils rebel against? Can you understand how deeply ignorant we find things like this?

As a white South Carolina man told CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds last week, "I don't want to sound prejudiced or anything, but for one, I am not going to vote for a colored man to be our president."

And things like this

...in which obvious fear of being pushed down the hierarchy based on physical phenotype provides evidence of the caller's strong belief in hierarchical placement via physical phenotype.

Black people stare the reality of white politics in the face pretty much daily. Within that paradigm, Mr. Bai performs well enough but I think when it comes to race politics he should be a spectator for a while.