[Marxism] A new NEWSWEEK Poll underscores Obama's racial challenge.

[Joaquín Bustelo]

The article on the Newsweek poll cited by Dbachmozart confirms what
I've stated repeatedly on this list: the claims about Obama's lack of
support among the "white working class" is a crock. The most important
stratification is generational:

"Who exactly are these high Racial Resentment Index voters? A majority,  61
percent, have less than a four-year college education, many are older (44
percent were over the age of 60 compared to just 18 percent under the age of
40) and nearly half (46 percent) live in the South."

That "many are older" tells us something about the majority that
didn't complete college, which is used as a proxy for class by the
media.

In reality, it isn't as much of a class marker as an age one: the big
expansion in U.S. higher education took place in the 1960s in response
to Sputnik and the changing character of capitalist production.

The other major thing to note about the 60-and-over demographic is
that this is the group that came of age before the big victories of
the civil rights movement, the 1964 Civil Rights Movement: the 1964
Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Those marked not just
a de jure change in the status of Blacks, but a change in official
ideology, where the ruling class made it socially unacceptable to say
openly that Blacks were inferior, and increasing number of Blacks
began to be elected to political office.

The Newsweek figures are entirely unexceptional. Anyone who cares to
look at the exit polls will see this pattern consistently: a huge
portion of Clinton's vote comes from white people of retirement age,
people who grew up when Jim Crow --American apartheid-- was considered
by ruling class ideology to be completely normal.

Nevertheless, the propaganda in the mainstream media that the issue is
class, not race, is relentless. For example, after citing explicit
evidence of racial prejudice (people who told exit pollsters race was
a factor in their decision and voted or Clinton), a May 5 Newsweek
article insists: "Those numbers, seemingly so telling about race, may
have as much to say about another ancient American struggle: class.
The idea that the black candidate is successfully being portrayed as
an elitist by the two white candidates is priceless, and may be the
truest indicator of how far African-Americans have come since the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 40 years ago. Perhaps
Obama does not represent the scary-black-man narrative so much as an
unfamiliar-class narrative."

On the face of it, the claim is absurd. The Clinton and McCain
families are multimillionaires many times over. The Obamas are doing
quite well (thanks above all to his book royalties) but are not --at
any rate not YET-- anywhere near in the same league. What this
"narrative" is about is legitimizing racist bigotry by pretending its
really about class, not race.

Joaquin