don't go grocery shopping when you're hungry, and don't write when you're angry

[rone]

I keep reading stuff about how Obama's candidacy increased African-American turnout, which in turn became a factor in Prop 8's passing, because 70% of African-American voters voted for it.  And today i thought to myself...

Hey, black voters!  Are you in favor of traditional values?  Prop 888: Bring back slavery to California!

OK, so maybe i'm just a little pissed off right now.

Comments

[thedarkages]

I would be much more inclined to blame the intellectual and financial authors of 8 than African Americans. I've been reading the same arguments you have, and, insofar as I can figure it out, African Americans may have added one percentage point, if that, to the mix. That still leaves a lot of white people holding the bag for the other four.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Well, sure, and Latinos, too. But i couldn't come up with any, er, black humor for them.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

The numbers I have (http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#CAI01p1) are that 10% of the vote was by African-Americans; thus, those in that group who voted for and against it would be 7% and 3% of the total, respectively. This, from here, looks more like a 4% difference.

Of course, it'd presumably be much easier to have picked up that 5% from the population as a whole, and were it not for the Mormons....

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I think the numbers break down like this. I got the raw numbers from http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#CAI01p1 and assumed (ass, u, me, heh heh) that the exit polls extrapolate well to the vote totals.

10,357,002 votes cast on Prop 8.
5,425,000 were yes votes.

63% of all votes (6,525,000) came from whites.
49% of those (3,197,000) were yes votes.

10% of votes (1,035,000) came from blacks.
70% of those (725,000) were yes votes.

So of all the votes cast, 31% of them were "yes" votes by whites and 7% were "yes" votes by blacks.

That's a lot more than one percentage point. That said, it's clear that the lion's share of votes against Prop 8 came from whites, and they voted against it only by a very narrow margin. If there's a lesson here about race, it's that we have seriously fallen down on outreach to working-class black, Latino and Asian communities.

[thedarkages]

Thanks for injecting some quantitative facts into a seat-of-the-pants calculation. (Block that metaphor!)

[stoneself.livejournal.com]

here's a pretty good visual (http://kynn.livejournal.com/887384.html)

if all the black voters had not voted, prop 8 would have still passed.

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

63% of all votes (6,525,000) came from whites.
49% of those (3,197,000) were yes votes.

10% of votes (1,035,000) came from blacks.
70% of those (725,000) were yes votes.

Those stats come from a single exit poll of 2,250. Since the total black population of California is around 6.7%, the sample was overestimating the percentage of black voters by a considerable amount.

The yes votes from black voters work out to 170 people, roughly. Extrapolating from that to blame an entire community is ludicrous.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Right. For those numbers to make any sense, you have to assume that the exit polls are indeed representative of the population at large, which is a highly questionable assumption.

My point is that even if we assume that the exit polls are accurate -- which is most definitely the assumption of folks who are insisting that we lost Prop 8 because of the darkies -- even then the numbers don't hold up to the claim. There's no meaningful way to say that black voters were somehow responsible for Prop 8's passing.

OT

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

This is totally off-topic, but...were you on Usenet, and soc.culture.african.american back in the day?

Re: OT

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Usenet yes, s.c.a.a. no! I spent most of my time taking out my undergraduate angst in soc.motss and alt.config.

[matrushkaka.livejournal.com]

Oh, and while we're at it ...

a] make it law that any man who impregnates a woman must marry her and support her & the child for the rest of his life
b] preserve the sanctity of marriage - NO DIVORCE! It is a sin!

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Um, I think I support divorce, but yeah. I get your point.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

Maybe, if we proposed the nullification of all their marriages, then the discussion might go somewhere useful...

[waider.livejournal.com]

In all seriousness, I had mentioned to someone in the office yesterday that I was wondering if all the efforts to get people out and vote had contributed to the passing of Prop 8. I hadn't bothered to consider race breakdowns, and I think doing so isn't the most useful thing in the world when everyone's busy running around saying how race doesn't matter, even a black man can be president, etc.

What I'm tryin' to say is that fucknuttery knows no boundaries. It's an equal-opportunities bigotry.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Essentially, ideologies are not fully parallel. Religious right-wingers can support a fully socialized economic structure, for example. The effort to get economic and political change into the national government isn't the same thing as the effort to change an unrelated law that affects social policy. (And which, in all honesty, materially affects few people who aren't gay, but which is something pretty nearly everybody is emotionally charged about.)

Something I read yesterday instead of sleeping

[oh6.livejournal.com]

Via kynn: Ballot initiatives provide a wake up call to the LGBT community about race (updated)

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

That "stuff" you're reading is crap. It's a bunch of unsubstantiated assumptions based on unofficial exit polls which don't factor in for religion, and the idea is being pushed by racists who are so upset that they want to blame blacks for anything they can.

According to the CNN exit poll stats here (http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#CAI01p1) every demographic voted for the prop except white women. It's not just an exit poll, it's one that had so few blacks polled that they couldn't even come up with stats for blacks in the Age and Race category. And it certainly didn't account for factors such as religion.

You should click oh6's link, which has this quote that you so obviously, desperately need to read:

It seems like the frame for the passage of Prop 8 is going to be "It's because Obama's candidacy caused increased black turnout, and the black community is homophobic." Never mind that it was voters 65 and over who put Prop 8 over the top, or that one of the whitest institutions in America--the Mormon Church--funnelled millions of dollars from Utah to California to make sure that 8 passed. The parts of the state that went solid for 8 were the inland areas, which are overwhelmingly white.

...It wasn't a black group that put Prop 8 on the ballot, and paid the signature-gatherers and bankrolled the ads. Nor is it fair to say that Obama's have-it-both-ways position meant that black voters were going to march sheeplike to the polls and vote as Obama dictated.

Writing off an entire race as hopelessly unenlightened isn't going to help.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

I'm disappointed too, but try to keep it in perspective. About 48% of voters voted against Prop 8 -- for gay marriage. That, my friends (sorry sorry sorry!), is huge. Even five years ago I think you wouldn't have seen anything like that.

The day's coming; it's just not here yet. Cue Asimov quote, and keep fighting.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Don't get me wrong... i don't think this stuff is accurate. I'm just injecting some dark humor into the situation because i'm cranky about it. I know who the real assholes are here.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

And it certainly didn't account for factors such as religion.

The allegation that black voters are more likely to have the kind of religion that leads them to impose it on others through the law is one I'd expect to see coming from the other side of this argument.

try to remember why LBJ got his 1954 deal in play...

[drieuxster.livejournal.com]

The tax rules that limits churches from PERSECUTING HIM for his, well, clearly GODLESS ATHEISTICAL AMERICA HATING AGENDA. Which was even more funnier in the sixties, when the so called 'conservatives' used that ruling to bash on anti-war churchs and civil-rights churches.

So at any given time, they are THEM, and we must STOP THEM!!!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

This Kos post (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/7/34645/1235/704/656272) pretty convincingly argues that you're right--the CNN poll oversampled black people, and they couldn't reasonably have contributed enough votes to be decisive in passing 8.

Which is not to say that homophobia in the black community isn't a problem; but homophobia in a lot of communities is a problem, it's just that those communities may not be primarily defined by race or ethnicity. There's also been an eagerness to single out blacks, as if they're somehow expected to be more enlightened than, say, the Mormons who paid for all those TV ads.

I liked what Ta-Nehisi Coates said about it, which ties in for me to some stuff Tom Scudder wrote a while ago about his own experiences in Lebanon: it's unfortunate, but being oppressed doesn't generally ennoble people, and it's kind of unfair to expect that it will. You stop oppressing them, and help them overcome oppression, because oppression is wrong, not because they're unusually deserving. If you want them to be tolerant it's not going to happen automatically.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Prop 888: Bring back slavery to California!

s/back //

California was never a slave state, but The Confederacy welcomes you...try not to secede on your way in, the Fed HATES when that happens.

back

[notr.livejournal.com]

Don't forget the three centuries of slavery there before statehood, and the thousand-odd insurance policies on slaves in California listed in the Slavery Era Insurance Registry.

Minor Point Of Order...

[drieuxster.livejournal.com]

California, as a Territory, was under the laws of the United States, and Until the dredd scott ruling of the US Supreme Court was over turned by GOD HATING BIBLE BURNING BLUE BELLIES it was the law of the land, no matter what the scuff laws pretended.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm gonna have to go with "don't say that, because even if it were true and insightful, it's 100% guaranteed to be taken the wrong way and will embarrass our whole side".

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Eh, i like that people will come here and talk about whatever actual content is inside my cheap and cruel jokes. It's not like i'm going to go post this on some retard hive like Daily Kos or the Hufferton Post.

Progress

[butterflygenius.livejournal.com]

It is sad that ANY minority group would vote for prop 8, as they all must know what it's like to not have the same rights as others. But, as it stands in our country, Gays have no rights at all according to the US constitution, meaning basically that according to the constitution of my country, my life has no value. This is hardly the fault of Black ppl or any other minority race in this country, although it is sad that they support the views of the same ppl who oppressed them for years. This includes Latinos too, as both African Americans & Latinos have adopted Christianity, the religion of their oppressors. It makes me very angry as well, but it won't stand for long, this I am sure of! Things are changing for the better, even if there are some speed bumps along the way, they can't stop progress! All it can do is delay it for a while.....

[hwrnmnbsol.livejournal.com]

Dear liberal-minded Californians:

From now on, kindly avoid saying things along the lines of how bad us red-staters are. We don't get it right all the time, but you don't either. Until you can create a solid working majority to keep your narrow-minded neighbors from imposing their ideology upon you, you have no right to criticize us for failing to do the same thing.

Next time anybody says the words 'Red State', I'm going to say 'Prop 8', and you can stick it in your pieholes.

actually, there is great comedy here...

[drieuxster.livejournal.com]

Few americans want to recall that in california they elected LBJ, and re-installed the same discriminatory covenant practices that had been the center of the Pro-Zionist Propoganda Film Gentleman's Agreement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen's_agreement).

Which shows the importance of having some sort of Wedge ISSUE on the plate as the sort of "stay behind force" that will continue to work against whom ever takes office, until we can once again join the correct cult of personality...

It IS so the american way....

have you read about Proposition P?

[drieuxster.livejournal.com]

Clearly what we need to do is install the correct Prophets, and thus restore the TRUE True Religion based upon the correct Prophets...

Then we get the Capital Depreciation Tax credits.

On another side of the line, you may want to try to look at the other set of issues on the table for mainstream Afro-Americans. To help you may want to go back and review the discussions about 'Sorority Girl Feminism' - and how this was nice for the white girls in the burbs but it was not addressing any of the issues in the more 'down market crowd'.

So what will really need to be addressed in the long march, is how to get folks on the same level playing grounds so that they can get in touch with the same set of angsts.

[nyar.livejournal.com]

There is a lot of blame to throw around, but No on 8 deserves a lot of it. Their campaign was WEAKSAUCE until two weeks before the election. The first commercial which ran for a long time, with the two sappy women, was not effective. The Sam Jackson commercial about discrimination was quite good, but I am not even sure it went far enough. Still, it prop 8 did 10% worse than Prop 22 8 years previously, which is somewhat heartening.

[dpk.livejournal.com]

This wasn't my idea and I don't remember where I read it, but maybe next time around the anti-Prop-8'ers could make up a fake "Prop 9", calling for a ban on interracial marriages. Use the phrases "Traditional Values" and "Sanctity or Marriage". Be sure to print the sign in multiple languages.

[nyar.livejournal.com]

I prefer an ammendment to ban same-religion marriages. TAKE THAT MORMONS.