I ran across two sto­ries this week involv­ing race in this coun­try, and both made me think. So I thought I’d share them with you, in the hopes that you’d have some stim­u­lat­ing thoughts as well.

First is what has hap­pened to the opin­ions of African-​​Americans in the United States with respect to same-​​sex mar­riage. A recent Pub­lic Pol­icy Polling poll shows that sup­port for same-​​sex mar­riage in Mary­land has increased by 16 points in two months, where now a major­ity sup­port it. What hap­pened dur­ing that time? Pres­i­dent Obama announced his sup­port for same-​​sex mar­riage, and then the NAACP announced their sup­port as well.

This led me to pon­der a few things. Why did it take Obama’s state­ment to change their minds? Why did it have such a dra­matic effect on the African-​​American com­mu­nity and no oth­ers? If noth­ing else, this strongly sug­gests that, not only did Obama’s state­ment not hurt him with that demo­graphic, the tail wagged the dog here. How far could the Pres­i­dent take that power?

The other race story is how badly Obama did in the West Vir­ginia and Arkansas pri­mary elec­tions. Much hay was made about the num­ber of West Vir­ginia votes received by Keith Judd, a felon serv­ing time in Texas. In terms of coun­ties car­ried, Obama did worse in Arkansas, where attor­ney John Wolfe, Jr., won about half of the square miles of the state. Could this have to do with the President’s race?

Fre­quent read­ers may recall that I have often stated that, with respect to crit­i­cism of the Pres­i­dent, I think the cries of racism are overblown. Nonethe­less, we can draw upon some exit polling from four years ago. In 2008 in West Vir­ginia, 21 per­cent of Cau­casians — more than one in five — said that the race of the can­di­date was an impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion. Among that group, only nine per­cent voted for Obama. Sim­i­larly, in Ken­tucky, 18 per­cent of Cau­casians said that the race was impor­tant, and again nine per­cent of them voted for Obama.

This didn’t carry into the deep South — it was not any­where near as much an effect in Mis­sis­sippi, Alabama, or Georgia…and, obvi­ously, Arkansas had too much of a home-​​state effect to see any other effect in its 2008 results — it was con­cen­trated in the Appalachian Moun­tains, which resulted it a minor reflec­tion in Indi­ana and Ohio.

It does indi­cate, then, that racism isn’t a non­is­sue. It’s less dom­i­nant than it once was — Obama’s elec­tion is evi­dence for this — but clearly it’s not gone.

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