Facts Belie the Scapegoating of Black People for Proposition 8

Hoepfully, this diary will help put all that to rest, and we can get back to work trying to beat back the hateful results of Tuesday's vote.  

Those white gay persons who have engaged in hateful, racist rhetoric and scapegoating here at DailyKOS may feel that they no longer need or want Black people, and if so, they can feel free not to read this.  But before they do, ponder this:  their Black gay and lesbian brothers and sisters do need them.  As much as they also need Black people.   And I can only imagine, what the rhetoric has been doing to tear the very heart out of Black gay and lesbian people this past couple of days.  

I know what it has done to mine, as a Black bisexual poly that nonetheless doesn't have to "deal" because I am in a heterosexual monogamous marriage.

This diary is organized around the myths that necessarily underlie the scurrilous claim that "Black people are to blame." If you're not a statistics person, you might want to read this other diary here, which says in far less technical language what I am trying to say here.

Factually Unsupported Myth #1:  CNN's 10% Black exit poll sample accurately reflects the actual distribution of voters on Proposition 8.

Each and every argument I've read since Proposition 8 passed that lays blame on Black people --- whether only like the worst of the haters or even primarily -- for the passage of Proposition 8 starts with CNN's exit poll statistics about Proposition 8 at its foundation.  Yet anyone who knows anything about the demographics of the State of California - or anyone who spent ½ as much time looking up actual data as ranting all over the free world about what "Black people" did "to gay people" (as if those groups are wholly separate, telling you a lot about the racism that underlies the argument) would know that 10% simply defies reality, unless a million or so Black folks snuck into the state just before the election so they could say they cast their vote for Barack Obama on sunny California shores.

But even if you are not like me, not an actual resident of the state and willing to do my homework before spouting off, it did not take any study to figure out what was the problem. Indeed, if you read CNN's own explanation of its exit polling/projection process, it is clear that CNN makes no claim that the distribution of folks which it exit polled about Proposition 8 was necessarily reflective of the actual racial percentages of the California electorate who voted, not even in those places that CNN actually exit-polled in.  From CNN's own website about its methodology:

The process of projecting races begins by creating a sample of precincts. The precincts are selected by random chance, like a lottery, and every precinct in the state has an equal chance to be in the sample.  They are not bellwether precincts or "key" precincts. Each one does not mirror the vote in a state but the sample collectively does.
The first indication of the vote comes from the exit polls conducted by EMR. On the day of the election, EMR interviewers stand outside of precincts in a given state. They count the people coming out after they have voted and are instructed to interview every third person or every fifth person, for example, throughout the voting day. The rate of selection depends on the number of voters expected at the polling place that day. They do this from the time the polling place opens until shortly before it closes.

What's missing from this picture?

CNN has left us without a critical piece of information necessary to establish the validity of its sampling on Proposition 8:  precisely where the network exit polled in California.  It simply says that "the aggregate sample is accurate" but has not provided they key piece of information necessary to actually prove it.  

This matters for a reason.  Specifically, in a state where different demographic populations are reasonably-evenly spread throughout a state, which does not also have dramatic divergences in political ideology which depend on where you live within the state, CNN's methodology might permit it to make a truly accurate statement about the percentage of voters in total who voted on a measure state-wide.  

That, however, is not an accurate description of the state of California, as anyone who lives here knows.

In California, virtually all of this state's Black folks live in just 9 of the state's 58 counties:

Alameda County (13.7% Black)

Sacramento County (10.5% Black)

Los Angeles County (9.6% Black)

Contra Costa County (9.5% Black)

San Joaquin County (8.0%  Black)

San Francisco County (7.2% Black - although this number has plummeted and will plummet more after redevelopment of the last "Black neighborhood", Hunters' Point)

Riverside County (6.6% Black)

Kern County (6.3% Black)

and

San Diego County (5.5% Black).

The vast majority of the counties in this state have a percentage of Black residents of between 1 and 2% (and several have far have less than 1%).  

When you know that about California, you know that CNN's "random selection of precinct" method doesn't seem to make a lot of sense if what you're trying to do is actually know what Black voters are doing at the polls.  

Frankly, in a state whose political leanings of the state are quite red/conservative except for a few pockets of population (which state unleashed Ronald Reagan on the nation again? Any guesses?), choosing precincts to exit poll "by random selection", and then selecting targets by simply counting either 1 out of 3 or 1 out of 5 - with no attempt to ensure that you are getting an accurate correlate by race -- is a recipe for statistical disaster if what you are trying to do is make a claim about not only how many Black people actually voted, but what those Black voters did, or did not do, on a particular matter.

(In this case, the disaster has in fact occurred and unleashed hateful anti-Black rhetoric from white gay bloggers and others that is going to set the cause of gay people back a long fucking time in the Black community if it doesn't get in check.)

Finally, when was the last time you heard of an exit poll that measured voters by mail? In another state and in another election, not including votes by mail might not matter so much.  But in California? In this election? It is a huge omission of data.  Since an estimated  4,000,000 voters in California are registered as "permanent absentee voters.".  It is estimated by the No on 8 Campaign that 3,000,000 absentee votes were cast in California for Tuesday's election.  We are not even going to discuss early voters, since I cannot find a statistic on them right now other than to note that a lot of California voters cast their votes before Election Day.  So who knows how those two groups cast their votes on Proposition 8, their racial makeup, or anything else?

I don't.  Neither do you.

Factually Unsupported Myth #2:  There were enough Black people in California to have created, all by themselves, the 510,000 margin (as of tonight) of passage for Proposition 8.

(Yesterday, the measure was winning in the AM by only 400,000 and last night by 504,000 votes.  Today's numbers indicate that as absentee ballots continue to be counted the "Yes" votes are outstripping the "No" ones.  Sadly.  Depressingly.)

Let's now discuss the bottom line fact from which all of the seemingly never-ending "Black voters are the reason Proposition 8 passed" must necesarily flow:  the number of Black voters in California.  Exactly how many Black voters are there in California? Let's try and find out.

This is the math part.

As of the 2000 census, 6.7% of California's population was Black - 2,one time 6.depending on whether you go with the 2000 Census.  However, the more up-to-date ACS estimates indicate that in 2006, only approximately 2.26 million Black people lived in the state.  Just 6.2% of the entire state's population.

(This, attentive people will note, is far, far, below our national presence of around 13%.)

I'm going to repeat this for those who are twisting in the wind and keep repeating the false idea of a 10% Black electorate statistic like an emotional life raft in their grief over Proposition 8.

There are only 2.26 million Black people in the entire State of California.  We are just 6.2% of the entire population in this state.

Black people are the smallest minority in California other than Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, which come in at just under 7/10ths of 1% and 3/10ths of 1% respectively.

(We used to have lots more Black folks here -- as is evident in even the differene between the 2000 Census and 2006 ACS data, but there has been a reverse migration of African-Americans out of California for the past 15 years or so, the bulk of which has been in the past 5 years.  We are the only demographic in California whose population estimates are going down, not up, each year.  Rapidly going down, at that, due to the economic difficulties that poor and working class people have had surviving in this state since the dot-com boom.  Unfortunately, it's just going to get worse thanks to the California foreclosure crisis, which has devastated Black and Latino communities throughout the state, but it is too early to know new numbers just yet; the 2010 census will be telling.)

It is here that I note for the record that, in contrast to the 6.2% of California that is Black, non-Hispanic whites constitute 43.1% of the California population, Latinos 35.9% and Asians, 12.4%. (There is a 1.2% overlap, mostly between Blacks and Latinos since of course there are a bunch of Latino Black people although you'd never know it sometimes listening to the rhetoric.)

That means:

There are 7 times as many white people in California as Blacks.

There are nearly 6 times as many Latino people in California as Blacks.

And there are double the number of Asian people as Blacks.

Be sure to keep these numbers in mind when thinking about CA registered voters, and Proposition 8.

For the purposes of trying to set the record straight here on DailyKOS and elsewhere on Proposition 8, even though the Black population has declined between 2006 and 2008 and the 2010 Census will almost certainly show it is no longer accurate, let's use the 2.26 million figure for the purposes of the rest of this diary.    

Factually Unsupported Myth #3:  All Black people in California are old enough to vote.

It seems obvious, but at times when folks are writing diaries blaming "Black people" or "Blacks" or "Black women", without any qualification, for Proposition 8 - even though 1/3 of us voted against it by CNN's own poll  -- and when folks make choice comments such as 'Dad, I'm no longer a nigger lover!" (which earned my only troll rating of the entire two days), I guess it needs to be said:  Black folks are not hatched fully grown.  And, as we all know, in this country until one is 18 years old, one cannot vote.

Of the 2.26 million Black people living in the glorious state of California, just around 700,000 (691,313 of them in 2003, the last number I could find) are under the age of 18, going by the census data.  Deducting those Black people leaves only 1.56 million Black adults in the state.  The maximum number of eligible voters taking into account no other factors, if every last one of us Black folk in California were registered voters.

(Those of you who have looked at these numbers and know that Proposition 8 lost by 510,000 votes know why I'm taking what will be 5+ hours to write this diary, since you can already see where we're heading numerically even if we stopped here.  This diary is not intended to educate you, because your racism doesn't cloud your judgment or common sense.  This diary is for those other folks.)

Alas, not all of those 1.56 million Black folks can vote.  

Factually Unsupported Myth #4:  All adult Black people in California are eligible to vote.

California is one of 47 states that strips voting rights from convicted felons, whether they are incarcerated felons or on parole supervision.  Rights are not automatically restored in this state when supervision ends:  one must apply for restoration (thank all those "victims' rights" and "tough on crime" propositions that keep turning up on California ballots if you want to blame someone.)  The impact of this on the electorate is not evenly distributed.  Instead, it disproportionately impacts Black people - a racist justice system yields racist fruit.  

As a result, approximately 13% of all Black men are ineligible to vote nationwide.  And approximately 114,305 Black adults in Cali are felony disenfranchised 7.6% of all Black adults in this state. (Hold your cursor over the state of California and the statistics will come up to the right of the map).  Whether or not they are in custody.

Importantly, that number does not include the additional who are in county jails who are not disenfranchised because they are serving misdemeanor sentences, awaiting trial, or awaiting transfer to state prison.  That number is large, but impossible to calculate quickly because it must be done county-by-county.  However, in Los Angeles County alone, jail inmates are 21,000 people, 1/3 of who are Black (6,300).  No one can argue with the reality that (a) most folks in jail do not make voting their priority since survival tends to take up much of their bandwidth; and (b) not a lot of jail (or prison for that matter) personnel make telling eligible folks in jail that they can still vote, or helping them do so, a priority.  Presently, 1 out of every 12 Black men in California is incarcerated.   Contrary to our progressive image, California is one of the nation's leaders in locking up Black (and Latino) people, but that's another diary for another time.

But for the purposes of this diary, even though it defies all rational sense, let's pretend that the locked up Black folks who aren't legally disenfranchised somehow managed to cast a vote on Tuesday anyway, OK? It probably will make some of the haters who want to pin Proposition 8 on Black people feel better.  And I do want them to feel better.  

I just don't want them to scapegoat my people while you do it.

So our 1.56 million adults are now down to 1,445,700 or so as the maximum number of Black eligible voters in California on Tuesday.  If 100% of them were actually registered to vote.

Which they weren't.

Factually Unsupported Myth #5:  Virtually every adult, non-disqualified Black person was registered to vote on Election Day.

It is not in dispute that Black voters have historically usually been represented in the electorate in reasonable parity with our share of the population.  There was nothing in advance of the election to indicate this had changed, and considering that voter registration was up for everyone, there is no evidence to say that our increases in registration could make up the difference between the 6% of the electorate we would normally represent and the 10% folks are assuming from misreading CNN's exit polling.

Black voters are presently also estimated to be about 6.2% of the registered voters in California, in relative parity with our representation in the general population, unlike Asians and Latinos who are both underrepresented in the electorate. (Whites are dramatically overrepresented in the California electorate, 63% of it or so).  

On election day, there were 17,304,091 registered voters in the State of California.  

Black folks, assuming they were in fact 6.2% of the electorate this year, in parity, would be only 1,072,653 of those voters.  This number would be not to far off what one might have guessed knowing only that in this country, approximately 61% and 69%, respectively, of Black adults in the US were registered to vote in 2004 and 2006.  Using the high percentage of 69% would normally yield 997,553 Black registered voters in California if normal trends held.

We can agree, however, that even though there were still a quite few (8 million, just under 1/3 of our entire eligible Black population) unregistered Black voters just a couple of months before the election -- and that includes in California too -- this was not the year for normal trends, even in California.  Every demographic had higher registration for this election, but it seems none more so than Black people.  For obvious reasons.  Not all states keep track of this, but as was noted on sites like 538.com, in some states required to keep track of it for Voting Rights Act reasons, the increase was huge.  For example, in Georgia the Black electorate increased from 1,226,246 in January 2008 to
1,556,225 in November, 2008 - an increase of 26.9%.  However, that large increase was in a state where Black voters were historically well under parity in the voting population before this year.  Since California Black voters have always been registered in parity with their status in the population, let's say that because of the unique circumstances of this election (221 years in the making Hallelujah!) the number went up to 80% of all Black Californians were registered to vote.  (Only the Census numbers issued next year will tell us if our assumption is right.)  

Applying the 80% registered figure to our population of 1,445,700 gets us 1,156,560 Black California registered voters.  (A figure I have no actual factual basis for, but am using because in the end it both responds to arguments about extra Black folks voting and is just on the high end of reason -- since at 80% registration, Blacks would be well above the percentage of white voter registration!) Max.

This alone should give anyone spouting off about that CNN poll serious pause.  Since, of course, if Black folks were really 10% of the electorate, we would have contributed 1,730,409 registered voters to the pool.  This is a number which with 5 minutes of demographic research any of the haters spewing "Black people are the Reason!" would have realized exceeds the entire Black adult population in the state by more than 300,000 people, and the entire eligible Black electorate using generous assumptions about eligibility by 400,000, and the entire Black registered population even this historic year by 1/2 million souls.

(Which is why I said earlier that the only way that "Black people" alone could have been responsible for Proposition 8 is if a million of us Negroes snuck into the state just so we could claim to have voted for "Our President" (which someone in one thread actually seemed to argue through saying "Now they got theirs" to describe the election of Barack Obama on Tuesday, as if he felt folks gave "us" reparations or something they didn't want and need for themselves) on California soil.)

In other words, anyone who claims that Black folks were 10% of the vote on Tuesday is on crack.  Or something more hallucinogenic - mushrooms perhaps (very popular in this state.)  CNN at the top of the list, which did not make clear as it had a duty to do that the 10% figure it's posted on it's site represents only the percentage of folks exit polled through a random selection process that it tells you straight off may not have actually targeted where Black voters actually lived in California. and did not measure any votes that were not actually cast at a polling place on Election Day.

Repeating for the slow on the uptake: for African Americans to have been 10% of the California vote PERIOD they would have had to turnout in percentages not just dramatically disproportionate to their normal turnout - to the point of virtually 100% turnout; not just their percentage of the electorate, but nearly double it; and disproportionate to the actual turnouts everywhere we actually live in this state.

That only happens one way:  if the 16,000,000 white, Latino and Asian folks who were most of the rest of the electorate on Tuesday decided to stay home in large numbers.

Now, does ANYONE really believe that, even you white gay haters who have polluted this site with your anti-Black racism in the past 48 hours despite your legitimate grief over Proposition 8? Was there some memo about white, Latino and Asian folks not being safe at the polls on "Our Day" that I that caused all of y'all to not turn out at the polls to the point where the smallest minority in California other than Pacific Islanders could almost double its normal impact on the vote? I didn't get it, if there was.  My husband, who is white as a sheet, didn't get it either.

(Maybe 'cause he's an immigrant who has not chosen to be an American citizen and therefore can't vote - I dunno.)

Thus, stretching the truth as far in favor as those who need to blame Black Californian votes for Proposition 8 about as far as it can go, there were at the absolute outside 1,156,560 available Black votes in California to be cast on Proposition 8 - whether for or against, on Election Day.

But that number of 1,156,560 doesn't take into account one small thing:  the actual turnout on Election Day.

Factually Unsupported Myth #6:  There Were Enough "Black Votes" to be the "Deciding Factor" for Proposition 8.

Figures are obviously not final for turnout in California.  There is no evidence that anyone has found or cited that Black people actually voted disproportionately to the general registered voter population on Tuesday in California - the only attempt to claim differently is based on CNN's 10% exit poll sample, which as noted above has serious methodological problems when applied to California's unique Black population distribution.  

However, we do know that there are, so far, 10,325,615 total votes on Proposition 8, nearly 80,000 less than the total votes for the main event.   For Black people to have been 10% of that vote, they would have had to cast 1,032,561 votes on the measure, whether for or against.  In other words, Black Californians would have had to both had an electoral turnout at the polls of almost 90% AND have all voted on Proposition 8 (i.e, NONE could have been amongst the 80,000 who just skipped the Proposition on the ballot) to reach that number of votes.

Now, I am the first to concede that Black folks did indeed turn out in heavy numbers on Election Day.  It was a thing of beauty.  I cried when I got to the polls that day and saw lines I had not seen in decades.  Honest I did.  The first of many sets of tears I have shed over the election, including those shed when I learned that Proposition 8 had passed, and those shed since as I have watched the white racist vitriol and scapegoating that has taken place here at DailyKOS - where folks claim to be liberal - ever since.

But only a fool would believe that 90% of any voting demographic turned out on Election Day.  Such a thing has never happened in our history.  And it never will, since even in a country that has mandatory voting like Australia (i.e. you can actually go to jail if you don't vote long enough) they don't get more than 95%.

And it did not happen on Tuesday, either, when only 60.9% of the entire California electorate bothered to cast a ballot.  

I can already hear folks saying:  But Black people turned out more than other voters!

Maybe that's true.  But not likely true.  You can confirm that merely by looking at the turnout in cities where Black people actually live in California (anyone who lives here knows that there aren't that many of them and for any who didn't, I've linked the numbers above.)

Just for fun, let's start my own little tiny hood, the City of East Palo Alto, the only place in San Mateo County where Black people live in any meaningful numbers at all.  We have 21% African-American population here (down from 69.7% when I moved here nearly 30 years ago.)  Our population is approximately 31,000 people.  In our city, we have just 10,034 registered voters.
Of which only 3,563 turned out to the polls - a turnout of just 35.5%.

How about Alameda County, as noted above the place where the largest percentage of Black people live in California?  It did a lot better than my little city - but still had a turnout of just 55.86% on Election Day.

Well, what about Sacramento, you ask? (Let's just travel through the lyrics of Dr. Dre's and Tupac's California Love while we do this shall we?)  Another big turnout there - of 58.79% of the electorate.

How about San Joaquin County - Stockton and Tracy, where many of us fled during the dot-com boom, driven financially out of the Bay Area proper from the cost of living? Even better: a 63.3% turnout.

Since I don't have time to do every county I've listed above, how about we end with Los Angeles County, which previously had more Black people in it than anywhere else in California (but now are down to just 9.6% of the county population since they're all being run out now - something about being targeted for racial violence in an increasing turf war and the police and liberals being so scared of the implications that they pretend the problem doesn't exist might have something to do with that)

(In the City.....of LA....Long Beach in the House.....In the City.....of good old Watts.  Even Hollywood trying to get a piece of this.....In the City....City of Compton.......Pasadena? Pasadena, where you at? Inglewood....Inglewood always up to no good?  South Central!)

(OK I'm trying to make myself smile while I write this because I've been in so much pain over what I've read all over the 'Net, particularly here at DailyKOS, I don't know what else to do.  But this shit ain't even funny.)

Los Angeles County had just 65.57% turnout on Tuesday. (You have to scroll down very close to the bottom to view the total) as of yesterday, reduced to 62.7%.

Now, these are counties where, as I have shown above, huge numbers of Black people (huge for a state that doesn't really have many, anyhow) live.  And yet the best turnout in any of them was 62.7% of the electorate.

As an aside, I wouldn't be me if I didn't note that someone here at DailyKOS, in discussing Negroes and Proposition 8, reached to the realm of the surreal and actually mentioned the increase of Black folks living in Imperial County as perhaps additional evidence that Black folks hurt the effort against Proposition 8's passage.  In Imperial County, the most recent estimate is that Black people indeed have started moving there - such that instead of the 3.95% of the county they used to be Black folks now constitute (approximately) a whopping 4.2% of all Imperial County residents.  All 161,867 of them.  By my math, that means that approximately 6,799 Black people live there.  Of that number, only 4,744 of them are old enough to vote, since if I go by the public estimates approximately 31.4% of Imperial County residents are under the age of 18.  

It's clear to any rational person when you look at these numbers that Black people moving to Imperial County was indeed a major nail in the 504,000 vote coffin of Proposition 8.  You simply can't overlook the power of 3,321 votes(70% of 4,744) Black folks to sway an entire city's electorate.  I don't see why we didn't all know that.

Maybe we didn't know that because Proposition 8 lost by 11,573 votes in Imperial County - more than double the entire Black voting-age population of the county. and more than 3 times the number of votes that would have been cast by Black voters if the 70-30% CNN estimate was accurate.

I didn't know we niggers had that much pull.  Wish someone had told me years ago.  We'd have had a Black president long before 221 years of nationhood and 389 years of internal colonization and genocide had passed on these shores, I bet you that, if only we'd known.  Or at least have had a nominee......

So to sum up.  Let's be even more generous to folks wanting to blame Black folks, since again the point of this exercise is to show that mathematically, you cannot lay blame for Proposition 8 at the feet of Black people alone.  Let's say that throughout the state, Black people turned out in as high a percentage as Los Angeles voters generally - 62.7%. (Unless you're contending that less of everyone else turned out?)

That means that out of our deeply inflated pool of 1,156,560 Black voters in California, if I bump up the turnout to the highest level where we actually live, at most 720,536 Black people actually made it to the polls or cast a ballot.

Even though we know that number was not that high in the place where more of us live than any other  Alameda County (which, by the way, defeated Proposition 8.)

It is only with these puffed-up numbers you even come close to supporting the claim that Black people are to blame.  And even then, under our hypothetical, and giving full credence to CNN's 70-30 exit poll split, at most 504,000 Black votes were cast for Proposition 8, versus 216,000 against it.  (378,000 of those votes, if I believe CNN, would have been cast by women, with only 126,000 cast by Black men - a 3 to 1 ratio on this issue which nobody who knows any actual Black people would believe in a million years - but which a lot of folks here on DailyKOS and the 'Net just repeated the few times Black women were pontificated about separate from Black people generally.)

Right now, as of 7:00 PM on November 6, with still more than 2,000,000 votes to be counted, Proposition 8 is already 510,000 votes ahead - 110,000 more votes than it was yesterday morning.

Utterly Supported Fact #1:  There Were So Many More White, Latino and Asian Votes in Favor of Proposition 8 That Blaming Black Folks is Both Bad Math and Racist Scapegoating of the Highest Order

I'm going to end by doing one other thing:  showing you the number of votes that non-Black people cast on Election Day in favor of Proposition 8, if I believe CNN's exit polls (which as I noted when I began, is the foundation for each and every anti-Black argument I've read on this site in the past 2 days.)  You compare those numbers to the TOTAL maximum number of Black votes -- women AND men -- in this state if I give the racist haters every benefit of the doubt as I have done mathematically above -- of 504,000 votes.  And then you make the argument to me that our segment of electorate is more to blame for an outcome in which we contributed -- even under the hateful math, only 4.9% of the votes.  Please.

Non-Black Votes in Favor of Proposition 8:

White Men:  51% of 31% of 10,325,615 votes:  1,632,480 Yes
White Women:  47% of 32% of 10,325,615 votes:  1,552,972 Yes
Latino Men:  54% of 8% of 10,325,615 votes:  446,067 Yes
Latino Women:  52% of 11% of 10,325,615 votes:   592,170 Yes
Asian/Native:  51% of 9% of 10,325,615 votes:  473,946 Yes

Total:  4,697,635 (9.3 times the maximum TOTAL number of Black votes in California.)

Now who did all y'all say was at fault, again? Answer - it wasn't us, unless you were contending that even if we went against Proposition 8 in the same proportions as everyone else it would have failed.

BTW, it wouldn't have:

Black Votes if We'd Voted Like Other People Did:

Black Women Voting Like White Women::  47% of 6% of 10,325,615:  291,182 Yes (a reduction of only 86,816 votes for Proposition 8 from our hypothetical maximum of Black votes cast)

Black Men Voting Like White Men::  51% of 4% of 10,325,615: 210,643 Yes (an INCREASE, if you believe CNN's poll even though Black men were reduced to a pitiful "N/A", of 84,643 votes, almost cancelling out the change in Black women entirely)

Black People Voting Like Asians/Natives:  49% of 10% of 10,325,615:  505,955 Yes

Adding the "enlightened" Black vote to the exising totals above for everyone else we get 5,203,590 Yes votes.  

Out of 10,325,615 votes.

In other words, Proposition 8 would have still passed by 81,565 votes, if Black voters had done no more than reflect the rest of the state's will on the matter.

Now.  With this out of the way, can we now please redirect our energies to actually putting the "blame" somewhere it makes sense to put it and, more importantly, mobilizing together to defeat this hateful thing in the courts, and can those that have been going to the anti-Black well over this thing just shut the fuck up? (I don't expect you to be man enough to apologize.)