Tradition & Transformation

Barack Obama is “lucky to be black”, Gerraldine Ferraro notoriously claimed:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position.

Ferraro’s pro-Clinton bias aside, this is an interesting question. I think we can safely assume that there’s some reluctance to vote for a black candidate; likewise, that there’s some reluctance to vote for a female candidate. So is it a worse disadvantage to be black, or to be a woman?

Let’s consider some data about the impact of racism on Obama’s candidacy. Here’s a table adapted from Steven Waldman at beliefnet.com:
 

 
There’s a clear correlation, as Waldman observes:  “The more white voters who think the candidate’s race matters, the better Clinton does.” Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, but the data are nonetheless suggestive.

Then there’s the anecdotal evidence. For example, this video from al Jazeera (who knew that al Jazeera had English features?) :
 

 
Or this anecdote from George Packer:

I spoke with half a dozen men eating lunch at the Pigeon Roost Dairy Bar outside town [ Inez, Kentucky ]. … They announced their refusal to vote for a black man, without hesitation or apology. “He’s a Muslim, isn’t he?” an aging mine electrician asked. “I won’t vote for a colored man. He’ll put too many coloreds in jobs. Coloreds are O.K.—they’ve done well, good for them, look where they came from. But radical coloreds, no—like that Farrakhan, or that senator from New York, Rangel. There’d be riots in the streets, like the sixties.” … Here was one part of the white working class — maybe not representative, but at least significant.

Coloreds?! That expression turns the clock back about 50 years, don’t it?

What about the other scenario? How has sexism impacted the Clinton campaign?
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