Gates And Race Politics

The Following is posted on LaShawnBarber.com
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The last time I mentioned Henry Louis Gates, it was in reference to skin color preferences at Harvard University, where Gates is a professor. See this post.

In July, he and Lani Guinier (Bill Clinton’s “Quota Queen") wanted to commission a waste-of-time-and-money study to determine why black immigrants outnumbered and outperformed black Americans at the Ivy League school. Clarence Page, who is no conservative, offered a possible explanation: “Immigrant kids work harder.”

I don’t care too much for Gates’s ideas (that blacks need extra help to succeed), but I wanted to blog about his article, “Swallowing the Elephant.” He offers the usual explanation why blacks vote for Democrats and will continue to do so. From the New York Times (registration req.):

The moment when the Republican Party lost black America can be given a date: Oct. 26, 1960. Martin Luther King Jr., arrested in Georgia during a sit-in, had been transferred to a maximum-security prison and sentenced to four months on the chain gang, without bail. As The Times reported, John F. Kennedy called Coretta King, expressing his concern. Richard Nixon didn’t.

This is true. While doing research for a column titled “Why Courting the Black Vote Won’t Work", I found pretty much the same thing. I wrote: “So why did blacks switch from voting for Republicans in large numbers to voting for Democrats? Some say it was President John F. Kennedy’s perceived sensitivity to the oppression of minorities that endeared him and the party to black Americans, and they’ve been voting for Democrats in droves ever since.”