What's Race Got To Do With It?

Geraldine Ferraro's hasty exit from the Clinton campaign has given the media all it needs to spin a recurring story in the Democratic presidential campaign. Media, you see, needs several story lines to get it through this fallow period between the Mississippi primary and Pennsylvania's balloting on April 22nd. So race works fine.

Ferraro's comments about Obama not being where he is today if he were white are pretty hard to take. Yeah, I know about context, but then so does she. Yet Ferraro's comments don't explain the drumbeat coming out of Mississippi Tuesday night into Wednesday. Race, that is the 90% of black folks who backed Obama, was pretty much all there was to that primary if you watch the news. The people running America's newsrooms know quite well what this focus means. It makes Obama "the black candidate" in the minds of some (not all) of the whites who consume their product. That in turn makes him less attractive. So much for the color blind world of 21st century America.

For Pennsylvania, the racial pendulum will swing the other way. Black folks in Philly, Pittsburgh, and even Scranton and Altoona won't count for much. Disaffected working class whites will be the focus there. Which leads to the question, is the media simply reflecting America's racial divide, or helping to perpetuate it?

One thing is for sure. Neither candidate is well served by constantly shining a spotlight on the race, ethnicity, or gender of their supporters. For example, who were the 30% of white Mississippi voters who went with Obama? Or the black voters (around 10%) who stayed with Clinton? We'll never know. 

To those who cash in on racial calculus, it doesn't matter.