Election08 News Flash: Caucasian is a "Race"; Male is a Gender

By Kevin Tillman, AlterNet. Posted January 26, 2008.

All this talk of women only liking Clinton because she's a sister and African Americans only supporting Obama because he's a brother is making my head hurt something terrible. There's a kernel of truth in there, of course, but the implication that it's only blacks and women whose votes are influenced by gender and race is really nothing short of idiotic.

Here's the crux of the matter*:

Caucasion is a race. White people's votes are influenced by issues of race all the time. Were it not so, we wouldn't have just one African-American in the senate and Barak Obama would not be trying to become the first black to head a major party's ticket. We have the "Bradley effect," the Southern Strategy, etc., all of which illustrate quite clearly that many white voters are and always have been heavily influenced by identity politics.

Another news flash: male is a gender. Men are influenced by gender issues in making their political choices to no lesser degree than women. If it were not so, there would be no novelty in Clinton's campaign; she wouldn't be vying to become the first woman to head a major party's ticket.

Consider all the blather we've heard about women and blacks in the upcoming South Carolina Dem primary. Earlier in the week, toe-sucking pervert and frequent Fox News analyst Dick Morris warned: "if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton." So, in Morris' view, blacks are "bloc-voting." But according to a poll released this week by MSNBC and McClatchy Newspapers, 25 percent of SC blacks are supporting Clinton -- about 40 percent less support than she gets nationwide -- while just ten percent of white South Carolina Dems say they'll vote for Obama -- fully 70 percent less than his nationwide support. So, who's "bloc-voting" according to race? Are we supposed to believe that the 90% of South Carolina whites who won't vote for the negro are really just unimpressed with his message of hope? You can, but I'm not buying.

And what about gender? Whites may be "bloc-voting" against Obama, but it's a good bet that white men are not breaking the same way as white women. John Edwards, with 13 percent support across the country, is leading among South Carolina whites with 40 percent in the MSNBC/McClatchy poll -- triple his nationwide numbers. White is a race, male is a gender, but Dick Morris and the rest of the punditocracy seem unperturbed by the possibility that those silly, emotional white guys are casting their votes for Edwards based on nothing more than group identity. That's because, unconsciously at least, most people think of white folks as the default humans, while people of color belong to a "race"; male is the standard model, and only women belong to a gender.

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Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

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