Obama’s Ascendancy and the Myth of "Racist" America

In the worldview of the American left, there is no article of faith more central than the notion that the United States is today-and always has been-infested with racism in every avenue of private and public life. This racism, we are told, makes its influence felt with particular force in the realm of politics, where the left’s conventional wisdom says that African Americans have no hope of ever garnering enough white support to ascend the political ladder to its highest rungs. This of course raises the issue of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, who trounced Hillary Clinton in the January 3rd Caucus in Iowa (where the population is 95 percent white), and was defeated only narrowly by Mrs. Clinton five days later in New Hampshire (where the population is 96 percent white). How can Obama’s strong showings in these races, whose purpose is to determine who ultimately will run for the highest elected office in the nation, be reconciled with the leftist paradigm?After Iowa, The New York Times printed “Daring to Believe, Blacks Savor Obama Victory”-an article that quoted blacks from across the United States expressing their “pride and amazement” that an African American actually might stand a chance of winning the presidency in 2008. Typical were the sentiments of a Brooklyn woman who lamented that Obama’s candidacy, which thrilled her, was probably destined to fail because “racism is as alive as it was 30 years ago.” In a similar spirit, an Alabama man explained that in America there is a “ceiling”-into which Obama inevitably would crash-designed to prevent blacks from achieving too much. Such pessimism does not exist in a vacuum.It echoes the pronouncements of countless high-profile politicos, academics, and activists who, for many years, relentlessly have drummed home the theme of America’s allegedly ineradicable racism. New York congressman Charles Rangel, for instance, has stated, “Whites don’t support black candidates to the same degree that blacks support white candidates. It’s unfortunate but there is a dramatic fallout of white votes just because of race.” According to Los Angeles congresswoman Maxine Waters, “Black people elect [both] black and white people to Congress. Whites, for the most part, elect only white people to Congress.”[1] In Al Sharpton’s estimation, “Blacks have voted for many candidates out of their race, but whites don’t.”[2] Claiming that “whites, by and large, remain resistant to the election of blacks to public office,” Swarthmore College political science professor Keith Reeves bluntly concludes: “Whites are not equal-opportunity voters.”[3]But the foregoing assertions, while consistent with the left’s doctrine of omnipresent white bigotry, are entirely untrue. And they have been untrue for many years. Examples of white voters electing black candidates in recent decades are legion. Here are just a few: Harvey Gantt broke into politics when he was elected mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, a city whose population was three-quarters white, in 1983. Edward Brooke was a senator in Massachusetts from 1967 to 1979 -- when only 3 percent of the state’s population was black. A majority-white Georgia district elected Andrew Young to Congress as early as 1972. A decade later, Congressman Alan Wheat received 65 percent of the white vote in mostly-white Kansas City, Missouri. In 1989 Douglas Wilder was elected the first black governor of Virginia, a state whose electorate was only 15 percent black. In the 1994 congressional races, black candidates J.C. Watts of Oklahoma and Gary Franks of Connecticut were victorious in districts that were 93 percent and 95 percent white, respectively. Two years later, nine black candidates nationwide were elected to Congress from majority-white districts, including several who received very strong white support.[4] In 1997 Paul Harris won a legislative seat in Virginia, whose electorate was 72 percent white. Even in the poorest rural district of the Deep South’s poorest state, Mississippi, the majority-white population proved it was capable of electing a black candidate when it sent Mike Espy to Congress in 1987. Much more recently, in 2006 Deval Patrick was elected governor of Massachusetts, which was then 84.5 percent white and 5.4 percent black.In Los Angeles, where just 14 percent of the population was black, Tom Bradley was elected mayor five times between 1973 and 1989. In fact, when he was first elected in 1973, he would have won even with no black support, but with white votes alone.[5] In 1989 Norm Rice became the mayor of Seattle, winning 58 percent of the vote in a city whose population was just 10 percent black. Kansas City, Missouri elected a black mayor in 1991, though blacks comprised only 30 percent of the city’s population. That same year Denver elected a black mayor with a population that was 12 percent black. Also in 1991, Willie Herenton was elected mayor of Memphis, which was 57 percent white. In 1993 Michael White won the mayoralty of Cleveland, which was less than half black, and four years later he was re-elected. In 1995 Ron Kirk garnered nearly two-thirds of the white vote to win the mayoral race in Dallas, which was 30 percent black. A year later LaMetta Wynn easily defeated four white male rivals, including the incumbent, to win the mayoral race in Clinton, Iowa, a town that was more than 95 percent white. In 1997 another black woman, Sharon Saylas Belton, was re-elected mayor of Minneapolis, where only 13 percent of all residents were black. Preston Daniels, meanwhile, became the first black mayor of 93-percent-white Des Moines, Iowa, and Lee Brown was elected mayor of Houston, where fewer than three in ten residents were black. Also in 1997, black Indianapolis Democrat Julia Carson took 53 percent of the white vote in her 69-percent-white district. Even Stone Mountain, Georgia, the town where the twentieth-century Ku Klux Klan was born in 1915, elected a black mayor, Chuck Burris, in 1997.In 1968 the entire southern half of the United States had only three black mayors, but by 1996 there were nearly 300. Between 1967 and 1993, black mayors were elected in eighty-seven American cities with populations exceeding 50,000 -- and in two-thirds of those cities blacks comprised a minority of eligible voters.[6] As of June 1995, thirty-four cities with populations greater than 50,000 had black mayors -- and in thirteen of those cities whites were a majority.[7] As of 1996, sixty-seven cities with populations exceeding 25,000 had black mayors, 58 percent of whom were elected in places where whites outnumbered blacks.[8]
By John Perazzo
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