The Prop 8 Numbers

It looks like the African-American and the Latino vote in California played important parts in getting Prop 8 passed. Vote by race from CNN:

Yes No
White 49% 51%
African-
American 70% 30%
Latino 53% 47%
Asian 49% 51%
Other 51% 49%

From Sebastian:

A few people seem to be interested in whether or not the black vote was decisive. If the following standard analysis assumptions are true the answer is probably a very close "no", but at least one of the assumptions seems very possibly false and with other fairly likely assumptions the answer looks like a "yes."

My assumptions are:
1.that the vote among black people was as reported (69% Yes on 8).
2.that black people make up 6.7% of the CA population
3.that black people represented a share of the votes equal to their share of the population

You can read a breakdown of all the number over at his site.

From this information, I think that, yes, as I have been saying over and over, Obama should have made a direct and overt appeal to African-American voters in California to consider gay marriage as part of the civil rights movement. But beyond that, these numbers provide an insight into the fracturing of civil rights into gay and African-American factions, and they tell us where we need to focus our attention. The numbers also to tell us that we need to push to make an appeal that recognizes and includes brown people as much as black and white.

This is a time to be careful, as well. There is no need for the battle for gay rights to turn into a battle against African-Americans. Dan Savage has written a post on his blog called "Black Homophobia" that is anything but racist, but it probably could have been worded a little more carefully. Right now, I think a little extra care will go a long way.

These are all, as my former employer used to say, "areas of opportunity." But we can braid all of our yet-to-be-realized civil rights into one enormous effort. And then we can all set our bags down.