Can Democrats Win Black Votes Without Republican Racism?

Ever since President Barack Obama took office, a pretty reliable pattern has emerged: On a regular basis someone will say, write or tweet something racist about the president and the media will cover it—including yours truly. Someone apologizes for the remark (or doesn’t), and someone else distances himself or his organization from the offender in question. Throughout most of Obama’s presidency, many of those making racially questionable, if not downright racist, comments have been conservative Republicans.

But not all of them. If you look across the aisle, you can find a number of instances—click here, here and here—in which Democrats have served up racial gaffes, too.

There have, however, been enough Republican gaffes to reinforce the notion that what was once the party of Lincoln—and that morphed into the party of Strom Thurmond—has remained the Grand Old Party of racists.

And the now almost routine coverage raises questions: Will Republicans ever free themselves from their image as a party that’s unwelcoming to African Americans? And if they ever do manage to move beyond that image, would Democrats be able to win elections based on their own policy successes—as opposed to Republican race failures?

Before you answer that question, consider for a moment the controversy that GOP racial gaffes generate, in cyberspace in particular, compared with coverage of what either Democrats or Republicans have done to address black male unemployment.

Does that mean I don’t care if someone makes a racist remark? No, but it really depends on who that person is. For instance, in the grand scheme of things, I probably care less about whether a city council candidate makes a comment steeped in racial stereotype than I do about whether a sitting member of Congress has said anything at all regarding ways to address racial disparities and discrimination in employment.

So why is it that we all—and I say “we” because I’m guilty of it, too—end up discussing the race flaps that may matter politically but ultimately matter very little in terms of policy, at the expense of the more weighty issues that affect our race much more than any individual remark?

Could it be that these racial comments are what those who play politics for a living want us to focus on because it’s better for them?

As I’ve previously written, the national poll I conducted with Suffolk University for my book Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence showed that more than a third of young black voters were registered independents. That’s a sizable number. Now, we know that President Obama won black voters of all age groups handily in the last two elections. But he won’t be on a ballot again.

Once he’s out of office, the Democratic Party may well find itself struggling to replicate the magic that his campaign experienced at the polls with black voters. Issues like charter schools—which, polls have shown, black parents in urban areas have tremendous enthusiasm for—may provide an opening for the GOP to make inroads with black voters.

I dream of seeing an election in which both parties fight as hard for the support of black voters as they fight every election cycle for white female voters in the suburbs.

If Democrats can’t successfully argue an issue like charter schools on its merits, then painting the entire GOP as racist may be the only Democratic path to victory in the post-Obama era. If that turns out to be the case, then it’s a sad statement not only on the party’s own platform and strategy but also on the state of politics in general. And it would be a sad statement about what both parties think of black voters: that the primary issue driving us in 2014 is race.

Black voters deserve more than that. I dream of seeing an election in which both parties fight as hard for the support of black voters as they fight every election cycle for white female voters in the suburbs. But that will start to happen only if we hold both parties accountable.

So the next time a notable Republican says something racially offensive, we should expect an apology and hold the GOP to that expectation. We should maintain the same expectation when a Democrat makes a gaffe. But we should also expect the elected official or operative who denounces someone else for a racial gaffe to tell us something substantive that he or she has specifically done in terms of policy or activism that week to make our lives better—besides simply denouncing a racist remark.

Keli Goff is The Root’s special correspondent. Follow her on Twitter.

Keli Goff is The Root’s special correspondent. Follow her on Twitter.