It’s not their color. It’s not their gender or sexuality. It’s not even their policies or records that are holding them back with voters of color (their records are not great, but they’re still not Mike Bloomberg). It’s their unexamined white privilege, buoyed by their unearned status among the white media, mixed with their unnerving and incessant prattle about “Midwestern values” that has black and brown voters casting about for other options. It’s not that people of color haven’t “gotten to know” Buttigieg or Klobuchar. It’s that we know them all too well.
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Buttigieg supporters push back on the narrative that Mayor Pete wouldn’t be in the race, much less a front-runner, without his whiteness. And then they make the biggest mistake possible if their goal was actually to win over black voters: They compare Buttigieg’s credentials to Barack Obama’s.
It is an insult to black people when white people compare Buttigieg 2020 to Obama 2008. The mere suggestion that some 38-year-old mayor from the fourth-largest city in Indiana is in the same ballpark as Obama is infuriating and tracks with the casual way many white people dismiss or diminish the accomplishments of the first African American president. Obama was a state senator for Illinois’s 13th district. That district alone is roughly double the population of South Bend, Indiana. Then, Obama was a United States senator. Even Rod Blagojevich knows “that thing… is golden.” And that’s not all. Obama burst onto the political scene not during some janky CNN town hall, but with a keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Buttigieg is “well spoken”; Obama will be remembered as one of the great orators of the 21st century.
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For a candidate who constantly talks about voters getting ignored, Klobuchar always seems to forget that Midwestern white folks are doing pretty well compared to their black and brown counterparts. Minnesota, for instance, has a median household income of $68,000 and change. That’s higher than the national average. But for black families in Minnesota, the average household income is $38,100. Klobuchar constantly says the Midwest is not “flyover” country, but it’s black and brown people, more than anybody else, who have been passed over in this economic recovery.
People of color notice this. We notice when candidates juxtapose the Midwestern, rural experience against the urban, coastal experience and judge America’s small towns to be more valuable and important. We notice when Klobuchar gets an easy ride on her prosecutorial record while Kamala Harris was the subject of New York Times exposés about hers from the moment she announced. We notice when Harris or Julián Castro get in trouble for attacking Joe Biden, while Klobuchar attacks everybody yet consistently gets hailed as one of the debate “winners” by media pundits. Just because they’ve been campaigning in white states doesn’t mean people of color haven’t been watching. Black people do not pop into political existence only when spoken to.
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