Voting while black

There is still a lot of talk and writing about President Barack Obama’s win. People are still trying to explain just how a sitting president won re-election with the economy being so bad that many called it a recession. 

How could Obama win with the unemployment so high and the wages so low? Gas is high and home ownership low, but he won. He won for the very reasons people thought he would lose. Obama won because people believed he was the better of the two candidates to make things better for the poor and the broken.

There are too many articles out in the blogosphere saying he won because blacks voted based on race. The bloggers quote Jay-Z and Samuel L. Jackson and others that said openly that they didn’t care about looking like racists when they voted for Obama because he is black the same way whites voted for Mitt Romney because he is white.

The truth is Obama got 43 percent of the white vote, as well as the black and Latino vote, and it was that combination that gave him the win. John Kerry got only 41 percent of the white vote when he ran in ’04 and failed to win enough votes from other ethnic groups to win the White House.

Will Detroiters’ future votes be based on the skin color? That is what I was told today: That the rest of the world may have moved, but Detroit is still a city of us versus them or black against white. That there are more people in Detroit voting by race or skin color than anywhere else means that no white person can look to be mayor for a long time.

There is hope, a poll by Time/Bloomberg found that 3 percent of voters would not vote for an otherwise qualified black candidate. Hopefully, this means that blacks will vote for a candidate based on him representing their needs, not based on his color. After all, blacks would not have voted for Herman Cain just because he is black.