Why 85% of Black Female Voters Support Hillary Clinton (And Its Not for the Reasons You Think)

85% of Black Female Voters Support Hillary Clinton

African-American female voters are supporting Hillary Clinton at a rate of 85+%. We are neither the so-called "Establishment" nor are we being paid off by billionaire bankers to support Clinton. Sadly, Bernie Sanders is trying to turn back the clock on civil rights, while blathering about being a socialist, progressive, revolutionary. So, let me explain what "voter suppression" really is. It is Bernie trying to convince the superdelegates that he should be given the nomination based on the votes of "white" elitist caucus states, while the Southern primaries, where black voters helped to give Hillary sweeping victories, should be ignored.  Bernie's excuse is that he can convince the superdelegates that he would be a better general election candidate against Trump than Hillary. If the Governor of California and other Democratic officials really believed that, they would already have switched to Bernie.  They are politicians; their goal is to win elections.



The race is over. Bernie would be an unmitigated disaster in a general election, once the Republicans spent $500 million flinging his dirty laundry at voters? If you don't believe they couldn't swift-boat him, then see how well centrists (who are the core of American voters) embrace new programs that will cost taxpayers $33 trillion, a wife who might still be investigated for financial malfeasance at a college that has now been forced to close. Then there's prickly, thin-skinned, Bernie himself, who got his first job at the age of 40, wrote pornography, honeymooned in Russia, made speeches praising Fidel Castro, Communist Cuba and the egalitarian nature of bread-lines. These issues don't bother me. But they would disgust a majority of American voters.   And he still refuses to release more than a section of one year's tax returns, even-though Hillary has released two decades worth and he's the one promising transparency .


But why should so-called low-information black voters (according to Bernie Bros), especially women like myself support Hillary? In fact, that loyalty and high turn-out in the Super Tuesday, Southern primaries became a key component in the firewall that has sealed the nomination for Mrs. Clinton.  I had not taken the time to parse my fealty and that of my friends to Hillary, until a few weeks ago.  Sitting in the swivel chair at a friend’s beauty salon, I followed the election news coverage on a small television screen atop the counter.  Suddenly, my beautician friend leaned over me and asked: “Do you know why ‘they’ hate Hillary so much.”  I shook my head, more out of curiosity than an inability to supply a host of reasons recycled from media reports. “She’s a ‘n*gger-lover’” my friend said with a loving vehemence that took me aback. And within that instant, it all fell into place.  By “all”,  I mean, the feelings of intimacy that I too felt for this rich, white woman.  

For those, who do not live in the "deep South",  it might be hard to grasp the power of that label, which is not so much spoken at its target as spat.  A white southerner of the old school, would rather be called a child molester than a ‘n*gger-lover’. The social structure of the old South has never been defined purely by wealth.  Social standing in the racial hierarchy was so compelling a motivator, that during election time, poor whites preferred, and still do, to vote their color-elevated status rather than their economic interests.  In this social universe, you were in order of rank, a white person, a black person or a rock bottom, a n*gger-lover.

However wealthy the Clintons might be, they are in the culture of the white South little better than "trailer trash". Why? It is because of the political decisions they have made over the course of their lives. Hillary wasn't running for President as a college student at Yale Law School when she went down to Alabama, working undercover, to investigate school segregation on behalf of the Children’s Defense Fund or when she set up legal clinics for single parent families in Arkansas.  Over the course of the past 40 years, the Clintons lost their privileged position in Southern white society and were despised accordingly.

Yes.  This is why so many black women, especially in the South would never abandon Hillary, especially now that we’ve enjoyed the penultimate victory, which is having Michelle Obama as First Lady.  So, when Bernie supporters call the woman a whore, an evil witch, corrupt and unqualified, the accusations sound hauntingly familiar.   I am not suggesting that Bernie’s supporters are racists.  But I am saying that they are naïvely unaware of the cultural roots of these attacks.