Race and the Race

By Rebecca Gordon

November 3, 2004

I watched the returns last night in the offices of Soltari, a progressive electoral campaign organization in New Mexico staffed and run almost entirely by people of color. It was a good place to be as we watched white voters re-elect George W. Bush.

Suffice it to say that the majority of white people, women and men, voted for Bush. There are at least two interesting ways of looking at the numbers.

First, The New York Times has provided a breakdown of each candidate's support along a number of axes. The racial breakdown is as follows:

In other words, 88% of Bush's support came from white voters, who made up 77% of the total voting population. 20% of Kerry's voters were black, compared with 2% of Bush's votes.

Another way to look at the numbers is to see how each ethnic group voted. Here it's interesting – if discouraging to this feminist – to include the parameter of gender in the analysis.

These are the results of CNN's national exit poll:

The majority of white people, women (54%) and men (61%), voted for Bush.

In New Mexico, a young indigenous friend had worked to register new voters in the five Indian pueblos of a place called Laguna. He'd arranged for a sound truck to remind people to vote in Navajo and English. On Election Day, his folks turned up at the polls in hugely unexpected numbers – only to discover that none of his 500 new registrants had been added to the voter rolls.

Republican efforts to suppress the votes of people of color were not misplaced in this election. In New Mexico, a young indigenous friend had worked to register new voters in the five Indian pueblos of a place called Laguna. He'd arranged for a sound truck to remind people to vote in Navajo and English. On Election Day, his folks turned up at the polls in hugely unexpected numbers – only to discover that none of his 500 new registrants had been added to the voter rolls. In two of the five pueblos, the voting machines didn't work. And the county clerk had failed to supply any provisional ballots. What should have been a day of triumph for this 22 year-old Native organizer devolved into a disaster of chasing around after voting materials and voters. Officials closed the polls at 7:00 p.m. while voters were still waiting to get their hands on provisional ballots.

In some ways, the worst of this situation is that it seems to have been less the result of malice than of sheer neglect. The Laguna pueblos were just the lowest priority for an overworked and incompetent country clerk. So they were disenfranchised once again. The difference this year was that people wanted to vote. (The Laguna situation is a fine example of what some Salvadoran leaders once described to me as “strategic incompetence.”)

The good news in all of this is that demographic changes we saw ten years ago in California are now sweeping across the country. Today the whole United States begins to look like California of 1994, the year that the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 passed. That year, and again in 1996, right-wing forces were able to harness the fears of white voters, convincing them that their accurate intuitions of economic and social precariousness were the fault of people of color. White people won, because although people of color were almost half the population of California, in 1994, they made up only 19% of the electorate. Two years later, when California approved the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, that proportion had jumped six percentage points to 25%, in part as the result of the work of organizations like Californians for Justice , who work to build political power in marginalized California communities. Six points in two years is pretty impressive.

I'm not going to write here about all the other implications of the elections – the consolidation of Republican congressional power, the implications for judicial appointments, the successful organizing of poor and working people to vote for tax cuts for billionaires, the role of religious fundamentalism in sustaining people's fears and prejudices — to say nothing of the horror with which the rest of the world has watched as this country gets ready to impose four more years of Bush Doctrine “pre-emptive” war around the globe. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

To my compañera/os of color, I can only offer a pledge to keep the global fight for racial, gender, and economic justice at the heart of my work.

To my fellow liberal and progressive whites, I say we must understand that we cannot expect both to win and to remain in charge. A white movement, a white-dominated movement, is of necessity a losing movement. And that's the good news.

Rebecca Gordon is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., and a member of St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in San Francisco. A long-time organizer for racial, gender, LGBT, and human rights, she worked for several years at the Applied Research Center in Oakland, Calif., which publishes ColorLines magazine as well as policy briefs on race and poverty. Rebecca may be reached by email at rebeccag@ix.netcom.com .