I can't tell if Josh Green is making a real point here or just trying to be cheeky:
I'm sure someone has thought to point this out already, but Artur Davis's calamitous "post-racial" campaign to become Alabama governor was successful if viewed in a certain light. Davis got thumped, obviously, and he won't be governor. In hindsight, his decision to ignore the state's black power structure seems particularly ill-considered. On the other hand, Alabama's black leaders endorsed a white candidate, Ron Sparks, who drew more black votes that Davis did [UPDATE: the latter is not yet official, though the point holds]. That's an admirably post-racial result in my book, though certainly not the one Davis envisioned.
So either we already hit that post-racial milestone in 2006 when Ken Blackwell got trounced in Ohio by Ted Strickland, Michael Steele got housed by Ben Cardin and Ed Rendell sent Lynn Swann packing, or black people have never really had trouble backing white candidates who represent their interests over black candidates who don't, and the real question of Davis candidacy -- whether white voters in Alabama would back a black candidate for governor--wasn't really resolved here.
I guess what I find irritating about this post is that it blithely reverses the actual historical dynamic between race and voting, implying that the real threat to "post-racial" politics is black identity politics. The reality, as Ta-Nehisi Coates notes, is that while black people are certainly susceptible to identity politics, by virtue of demographics, such politics are useless outside the few majority black political spaces, and not necessarily even there. Conversely, white identity politics have and continue to dominate our modern political discourse in ways most people take for granted, from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton to Sarah Palin. This is part of why electing black candidates to statewide offices is so hard, and it's the dynamic Davis was trying to circumvent by becoming the third (that's right, No. 3) black American elected governor of a state.
-- A. Serwer
