In Defense of Black Voters
It is odd that the accusation of racial solidarity would hang over the African-American community in particular, as black voters have extensive experience voting for white candidates, while the reverse remains unusual. After two and a quarter centuries of voting exclusively for white presidential candidates, when allowed to vote at all, black Americans have finally had the chance to vote for another black American; amazingly, they stand accused of racialism.
In historical reality, the black political tradition in America is deeply infused with pragmatism born of the necessity of being an oppressed minority. Black voters have always had to form coalitions with whites, and to accept small, often minuscule, progressive measures. Even the original, radical Republican Party of Lincoln did not propose abolition. Black voters leveraged their voting power, in the pockets where it existed, for small, symbolic victories (like the invitation of Booker Washington to Theodore Roosevelt’s White House) or for piecemeal measures to restrict lynching.
[…]
Republicans conceive of black voting as a kind of mass, unthinking act, something distinctly unlike the conscious thought process of white citizens. (“I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine,” admitted one Ohio Republican.) Envisioning voters as cogs in a machine, blindly following racial cues, is a form of self-deception necessary to rationalize their abuse.