The narrative I'm seeing in some of the white progressive community regarding Tuesday's election results seems to be "High black turnout gave Barack Obama a landslide, but it also led to the passage of nasty homophobic ballot initiatives." Cable news pundits, who seem to draw on The Screwtape Letters for inspiration, have immediately jumped on this line of thought to tactically create another marginalizing division in the progressive movement. In the primary it was black vs. female (too bad if you're black and female); in the postelection it's black vs. gay (too bad if you're black and gay).

Here's why this line of reasoning is screwed up.

First, the data itself is misleading because exit polls ignore the impact of income level on voting patterns. Yes, African Americans tend on the aggregate to support anti-gay initiatives slightly more often than whites--71% supported Florida's Proposition 2, for example, relative to 60% of whites. But African Americans are three times as likely as whites to live in poverty, and have a median income of approximately $32,000 per year versus the median white income of $51,000 per year. While there has not been adequate study of the impact of income level on U.S. attitudes towards homophobia, a 2006 study of 38 nations found substantial correlation between levels of economic inequality and heterosexism. Is it any coincidence that Mississippi, the nation's poorest state, passed a ban on same-sex marriage by the highest margin of any in the country--86%? Or that Connecticut and Massachusetts, ranked #1 and #3 in per capita income, are the two states where same-sex marriage has been legalized?

Second, white support for LGBT rights isn't adequate either. If only white voters had voted on Proposition 2 in Florida, for example, then it would have still passed with 60% of the vote. You can't really blame that kind of number on African-American voters, and it makes no sense to blame African-American voters because the outcome is 62% instead of 60%.

Third, candidates whom black voters support tend to do much better on lesbian and gay rights than candidates whom white voters support--so any alleged damage that black voters might be seen as doing as a group by supporting anti-gay ballot initiatives is more than compensated for by the essential role that black voters play in electing pro-gay officials. In fact, the argument could be made that white voters are responsible for the fact that marriage equality has not yet been achieved. If black voters showed up to vote and white voters stayed home, it is likely that legislators would have made same-sex marriage a reality in all fifty states a long time ago. The national LGBT rights movement would have virtually no political clout if it were not for black activists and black voters, and it relies on black support for survival. Any LGBT rights activist who complains about African-American voter turnout is only revealing his or her ignorance of who the pro-gay legislators are and who is responsible for electing them to office. Likewise, any black civil rights activist who complains about the gay rights movement would be well served to imagine what would have been of the civil rights movement if it were not for gay black activists such as Bayard Rustin, the principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.

And fourth, the "black vs. gay" narrative is itself both racist and homophobic. As Darkrose writes on Pam's House Blend:

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; in fact, a lot of the rhetoric I've seen in the left blogosphere tonight is only going to serve to reinforce the idea that "gay" = "white", and that the gay community only notices people of color when there's a comparison to the Civil Rights Movement to be made. And the Blame the Brown People push leaves those of us who are queer people of color marginalized by both of our communities.

That's not the way to build a coalition, and it's not the way to win.

Relatively high levels of black support for anti-gay proposals send the message to antiracist people in the LGBT rights movement to increase outreach to African-American communities, and send the message to pro-gay people in the civil rights movement to more vocally support lesbian and gay rights. And it is a challenge to all of us to make integration happen--integration between gays and straights, integration between blacks and whites, and integration among all four groups. To do otherwise is to play into the hands of an institutional, heterosexual white power structure that gives little power to African Americans, gays, or gay African Americans. We must be prepared to challenge heterosexism regardless of the race of the speaker, and to challenge racism regardless of the sexual orientation of the speaker. We must be a coalition movement for social justice. We must all walk this road together, because we will only get lost if we walk alone.

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a hero and historian of the civil rights movement, indicted the McCain/Palin campaign last week:

As one who was a victim of violence and hate during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, I am deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign. What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.

During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.

Rep. Lewis later said: "I am glad that Sen. McCain has taken some steps to correct divisive speech at his rallies." So I don't really want this to be about attacking John McCain; this campaign will all be over in a little over two weeks anyway.  I'm more interested in defending him. (Sort of.)

Let's imagine for a moment that there was a pilot in Vietnam with a middling record and great expectations--an admiral for a father and another for a grandfather. Shot down in a war generally acknowledged by historians as a dismal failure of U.S. foreign policy, he was captured and tortured for five years and given injuries that would scar him for the rest of his life. His behavior during his captivity was, by all accounts, exemplary; he refused to be released early on account of who his father was, he refused to give information no matter what he was threatened with. When he came back, despite excruciating permanent injuries to his shoulders, he got himself recertified as a pilot. He tried working as an instructor; it didn't pan out. Realizing he would never achieve a rank remotely approaching that of his father or grandfather, he became a Senate liaison to the U.S. military, then settled down in Barry Goldwater's Arizona to become a member of the U.S. House, then replaced Goldwater himself to become member of the U.S. Senate, where he still serves today.

His policies, as is par for the course for the Republican Party with which he affiliated, have often had the effect of advancing institutional racism--denying education, health care, and other opportunities for advancement to minorities. He even initially voted against the establishment of a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. But his record has been searched many times, in vain, for any evidence that he holds a racist philosophy or is willing to use racist rhetoric to win elections.

His first experience with racism in an election campaign may have come in 2000, when the Bush campaign used the fact that McCain and his wife had adopted a Bangladeshi orphan to make the argument that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock. The campaign, according to most observers, tore McCain up. The scorched-earth strategy also won the primary, and the nomination, and ultimately the presidency, for Bush.

Flash forward eight years. The man who condemned "agents of intolerance" on the Religious Right had to bow down to them in order to capture the Republican Party nomination. The man who risked his political career to advance humane immigration reform has had to condemn it in order to capture the nomination. And there was one more thing he had to do in order to capture the nomination: He had to, literally and figuratively, embrace George W. Bush--a man who had personally targeted McCain in the past with the lowest, most reprehensible sort of political attacks.

Now McCain has won Bush's imprimatur. He's the nominee. And this man who has never been known to utter a racial epithet or even a racially insensitive joke, this man who has for most of his career prided himself on his own decency, now faces crowds that shout of his young black opponent "Terrorist!" and "Off with his head!" and "Kill him!," that assaulted a black news cameramen with racial epithets, that called Obama "an Arab" (as if we were the sort of country that would never elect a person of Arab ancestry to the presidency, no matter their ideology).

Rep. Lewis compared the environment surrounding McCain's campaign to that surrounding George Wallace, but one important distinction between the two is that Wallace, unlike McCain, didn't have to suppress his decency during his presidential campaign (as he never had any to begin with). McCain reminds me a little bit more of Wallace's running mate, General Curtis LeMay. LeMay, a hero of World War II, became so disillusioned with Johnson and Nixon's positions on the Vietnam War that he agreed to join forces with segregationists and run for vice president in George Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign, despite the fact that LeMay had supported integrating the armed forces and had expressed no opposition to the goals of the civil rights movement. Although he had nobody to blame but himself for the decision, he found himself on a deeply racist ticket--and that's how history primarily remembers him.

Enter John McCain. Like LeMay, he was a decent man who made some unfortunate concessions in hopes of capping off what would have otherwise been a stellar career with a shot at the White House. But there's nothing in McCain's history to suggest that he would feel at home standing in front of a screaming mob every day, listening to racist prattle every time he walks the rope line, knowing that if he wins, it will most likely be because of the color of his opponent's skin, or his opponent's name, or something else that suggests to undecided white voters that Obama just isn't one of them. It's the sort of politics McCain has condemned in the past. And now those politics have been glued to McCain, marbled with him, stuck to him. They're who he is now, the epithets and the conspiracy theories and the dirty rumors.

So is it any wonder that he looks disgusted? That he blinks constantly? That he appears, at times, on the verge of breaking down? John McCain wanted to run a clean campaign. He wanted to run an above-board campaign. He wanted to debate the issues. Anyone familiar with his record should give him the benefit of the doubt on these points. But he found himself, as Hillary Clinton had before him, completely surrounded by the sort of people he would have crossed the street to avoid two years ago--and they have become, to a great extent, his base.

There has been a great deal of talk lately about prominent supporters of John McCain who crossed over to support Barack Obama--former National Review editor Christopher Buckley, for example. But the most prominent supporter of all may be John McCain himself. He's in too deep to simply walk away from his campaign, and leaving it in the hands of Sarah Palin (who seems to relish the energy of her most hateful supporters) would do nothing positive to the level of discourse. But it's becoming increasingly clear that this isn't the campaign he wanted to run, and that his heart just isn't in it anymore.

If Barack Obama wins on November 4th, we may well see "the old John McCain" emerge again at his concession speech--the wild eyes and rictus grin that have defined his candidacy in recent months vanishing, his voice returning to its normal timbre, his words more rational and conciliatory. But if he wins because of the Bradley Effect, if he wins knowing that his campaign represents the victory of everything about politics and racial identity that he has rejected for his entire political career, and if he wins knowing that he has won under the banner of George W. Bush and Karl Rove politics and the blessings of the "agents of intolerance," then he may be more disappointed in his victory than even the most dedicated Democrat.

John McCain is no George Wallace, and he deserves better than a victory that would please George Wallace. For the sake of his own legacy, his own dignity, and possibly his own sanity, it would probably be best if John McCain were to lose and lose decisively.

Barack Obama will have to confront more direct racism than any major-party presidential nominee in U.S. history, but that doesn't mean that this is the first time racism has reared its head in a presidential election.

In 1860, for example, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with only 40% of the popular vote--the rest of the votes being split between Southern and Northern Democrats--to become the first Republican president. His opposition to the expansion of slavery into Western Territories annoyed rich landowners in South Carolina, who began the process of secession and instigated the American Civil War.

And when a civil rights plank was added to the Democratic Party platform in 1948, Truman lost four reliably Democratic Southern states--and 39 electoral votes--to third-party white supremacist Strom Thurmond. Were it not for Thurmond, the election would not have been close enough to inspire newspapers to erroneously predict the victory of Republican candidate Thomas Dewey.

Twenty years later, another third-party white supremacist candidate--George Wallace--claimed five states and 46 electoral votes to give Republican candidate Richard Nixon a win over Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, despite the fact that Nixon only carried 43% of the popular vote. Four years later in 1972, Nixon's stonewalling of the civil rights agenda had given him so much support among white supremacists that no viable third-party candidate was fielded, and he carried the George Wallace states--and 44 others--to win a landslide with 63% of the vote.

By and large, white bigots have trended overwhelmingly Republican ever since in national elections, even white bigots who identify as Democrats for purposes of state elections. In Mississippi, for example, three-quarters of the state House delegation is Democratic despite the fact that Republicans have won the state by comfortable margins in every election since 1980.

So as we read the results of the new Stanford University study indicating that racism and racial resentment could cost Obama some votes, let's take these numbers with a grain of salt. Much is made of the fact that 17 percent of Hillary Clinton's primary voters will support John McCain, for example, but less is made of the fact that white Democrats in conservative states tend to vote Republican in national elections anyway, and would have voted for Clinton or Obama only because the Republican primary wrapped up relatively early, leaving the Democrats with the only interesting national primary.

This dynamic is reflected in the Newsweek racial resentment poll, which revealed (among other things) that:

... Obama trails presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain 40 percent to 52 percent among whites. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama's challenger for the Democratic nomination, also trails McCain among white voters but by a smaller margin, 44 percent to 48 percent ... Clinton's white support is unusually high: at a comparable point in the 2004 election, Democratic nominee John Kerry received the support of 36 percent of white voters, compared to George W. Bush's 48 percent, and in June of 2000, Bush led Al Gore 48 percent to 39 percent.

In other words, Obama has been doing better among white voters--a group that presumably includes white voters with high levels of racial resentment--than either Al Gore or John Kerry. This should come as no surprise; he's running against a less popular candidate. But it should put to rest any concerns that he might have a "race problem"--that his racial identity itself is a "problem" for the Democratic Party.

Could Obama fail where a white candidate in his position might succeed? Maybe. He might also succeed where white candidates in his position have failed. In any case, Obama has the same problem attracting voters with high levels of racial resentment that candidates with progressive civil rights agendas have struggled with for 60 years. This isn't really Barack Obama's race problem we're talking about. It's America's.

Related: History of the Civil Rights Backlash

To hear the L.A. Progressive blog tell it:

"So Sambo beat the b--ch!" This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama's win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

The quote is attributed to Palin by "Lucille," an unidentified Alaska waitress.  At first glance it sounds like an offensive, off-the-cuff remark--but there's a lot more to it than that. This year's election cycle was rife (at least among the punditry) with discussion of race versus gender.  Who would be the first to break the white male monopoly on presidential nominations: A black man, or a white woman?  We could have saved ourselves all this trouble if we'd just nominated Shirley Chisholm in '72, but never mind. The 2008 Democratic primary has been characterized as the oppression olympics, as a competition to see whether racism is worse than sexism, or vice versa. But there was another time in our nation's history when an even more fundamental question of race versus gender was being resolved: December 1865.  The American Civil War had just ended eight months prior, and talk was afoot of giving black men the right to vote.  White suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in a letter (emphasis mine):

The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the negro, and so long as he was lowest in the scale of being we were allowed to press his claims; but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see "Sambo" walk into the kingdom first. As self-preservation is the first law of nature, would it not be wiser to keep our lamps trimmed and burning, and when the constitutional door is open, avail ourselves of the strong arm and blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side, and thus make the gap so wide that no privileged class could ever again close it against the humblest citizen of the republic?

The term "Sambo" has fallen out of favor as a racial epithet in recent years, and so--considering the context of the current presidential election--the phrase "Sambo beat the b--ch" would almost have to be a subtle reference to Stanton's remark. Would a group of fortysomething Republican politicos from Alaska have gotten the reference?  Probably not.  But Sarah Palin might have; she self-describes as a feminist and belongs to Feminists for Life, a group that reveres the writings of 19th-century suffragists but has little use for later feminist material.  But it would have been strange to use it in a conversation with ordinary Republican political operatives, because they wouldn't have understood what she was talking about. McCain had famously fielded a "How do we beat the b--ch?" question (regarding Hillary Clinton) from a supporter months earlier, at a time when Clinton was the presumptive Democratic nominee.  When Obama defeated her, that rendered the supporter's crude question moot--so the statement would have doubled as a response to the McCain supporter and a wry reference to the history of the race vs. gender issue that dominated the news cycle during the Clinton-Obama primary.  The phrase is too succinct, too complete, to have been the invention of a shrill blogger four months after the fact.  I don't mean to sound like I admire the remark--it's offensive--but it encapsulates so many different controversies, so much history, that it's not something that an enemy of Palin would have created out of whole cloth as a smear because it's too complex.  If you're going to have Palin say a racial epithet, it makes sense to just have her say something crude and simple without all the subtle references.So I don't really know.  I can't see Palin saying it over lunch to a group of Republican colleagues, but I can't see it going unsaid either.  Somebody must have said it.  I don't pretend to know who, when, or where, but it comes with its own why.