In some Nov. 8 editions, a photo caption with a Style article misidentified Massachusetts Gov.-elect Deval Patrick as Senate candidate Harold E. Ford Jr. of Tennessee. Also in those editions, the photo, which was taken by Charles Krupa of the Associated Press, was credited to another photographer.
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Red State and Blue, Reflected in Black and White
Ike Leggett, Montgomery County executive-elect: "You have to give credit to citizens who were prepared to vote across racial lines."
(By Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)
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But race is never that simple in America. Blacks, along with Native Americans, were assigned the lowest status in a nation that billed itself as an unfettered democracy. Black citizens became, in Albert Murray's famous phrase, the "omni Americans," the uniquely American population that was most vehemently denied participation in the body politic.
So to consider the full range of the electoral issue, let's take up a couple of theories.
First, the Geography Corollary. This holds that the vestiges of slavery and segregation are with us still, and therefore racial milestones matter more in the former Confederacy than in the North.
To wit: Black man elected governor in Massachusetts: Nice. Black man elected governor in Mississippi: HOLY COW.
Which is also why Ford's bid to become the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction took on such significance.
"It's sad we're even having this discussion six years into the 21st century, but the fact is it's still a big deal when former states of the Confederacy elect a black person to statewide office," says Melissa Harris-Lacewell, assistant professor of political science at Princeton University and author or "Barbershops, Bibles and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought."
Elsewhere, though, it's not much of a headline anymore.
To illustrate: Colorado, which is 4 percent black, has twice elected blacks as lieutenant governor, and Denver, the majority-white biggest city in the state, elected a black mayor. Like Leggett, it just wasn't a big deal.
Geography is a good theory, but maybe not quite all of it. This brings up the How Many Black People Does It Take to Make White Voters Nervous hypothesis.
This theory, which overlaps to some extent with the above, holds that race tends to matter in direct proportion to the percentage of black people present in the jurisdiction. The more black people present, the less likely they are to draw white voters. The fewer black people in the population, the less race is an issue in the election.
"The states with significant black populations -- Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina -- is where you see race matters most, where you have few or no blacks elected to statewide office," says Bositis, of the Joint Center. The states with black populations that are sort of modest, that's when it tends to matter least."
This is where you get into ironies.
