(AP) -- Are black people supporting Obama mainly because he’s black? If race is just one factor in blacks’ support of Obama, does that make them racist? Can blacks’ support for Obama be compared with white voters who may favor his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, because he’s white?
These questions have long animated conservatives who are frustrated by claims that white people who oppose Obama’s policies are racist. This week, when a black actress who tweeted an endorsement of Romney was subjected to a stream of abuse from other African-Americans, the politics of racial accusation came full circle once again.
Stacey Dash, who also has Mexican heritage, is best known for the 1995 film “Clueless” and the recent cable-TV drama “Single Ladies.” On Twitter, she was called “jigaboo,” ‘’traitor,” ‘’house nigger” and worse after posting, “Vote for Romney. The only choice for your future.”
The theme of the insults: A black woman would have to be stupid, subservient or both to choose a white Republican over the first black president.
Martin Luther King Jr. fought Jim Crow laws, which deprived blacks of political rights after Reconstruction, upheld by Southern Democrats. But black voters switched after Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the 1960s civil rights legislation and Republicans successfully pursued the votes of white people who disliked the civil rights agenda.
Since then, Democrats have persistently wooed black voters with programs and platforms that African-Americans favor, and the party has been rewarded every four years.
Clinton got 83 percent of the black vote in 1992 and 84 percent in 1996; the third-party candidate Ross Perot probably sliced away some of Clinton’s black support. Al Gore got 90 percent in 2000; John Kerry got 88 percent in 2004. Obama captured 95 percent in 2008, and 2 million more black people voted than in the previous election.
Sherrilyn Ifill, a law professor at the University of Maryland, wrote a column last week exploring why so many black voters are rejecting Romney. She said it has less to do with the candidate than with his party’s treatment of Obama, such as John Sununu calling the president “lazy” after the debate, a congressman shouting “You lie!” during the State of the Union address, claims that Obama is not a citizen and more.
In an interview, Ifill said that for black voters, such accusations feel like white people are attacking their own dignity. “In essence,” she says, “they are closing ranks around Obama.”
She noted that women were justifiably moved by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy and Catholics flocked to the polls to elect President John F. Kennedy. Comparing black pride in Obama to white pride in Romney is a “false symmetry” because of the history of black oppression, she says, and she asked for patience from America at large.
“There should not be this resistance to pride over the first black president,” Ifill says. “If we get to the fifth one, I’ll be with you.”