So it seems I am not making a clear point when it comes to the black vote and prop 8, so I thought I would use an example we are ALL familiar with.

Imagine that you have a group of liberals who want people to vote a certain way on something. These liberals are the top of the privilege heap, white, educated, decidedly not poor or struggling. And they figure that with a few threats and comparisons they make their point perfectly clearly- voting the way I want you to is in your best interest, so you better do it.

Except, for a certain proportion of the population, that message doesn’t ring true. For many of us, it wasn’t good enough that Obama was better than McCain (marginally) on abortion when he was more than willing to use misogyny as a campaign tactic. For African Americans, perhaps the comparison to interracial marriage and equal rights wasn’t strong enough to overcome the pull of their churches and long held belief systems (that in fact have a very pragmatic reason for existing when you consider eugenics and slavery, etc).

For those of us who didn’t vote for Obama, the Roe V Wade arguments and the “stupid bitches don’t know what’s good for them” talk didn’t make us MORE likely to vote for Obama. Quite the contrary. So perhaps painting the entire black population of California as bigoted idiots who need to be schooled on human rights isn’t the best way to get them to come around to gay marriage.

We were all asked “What would it take for you to vote for Obama?” But we haven’t asked the black community what they need to comfortable with gay marriage. Do they need more liberal pastors, do they need more guarantees that their bodies and their children’s bodies will be safe from harm so that they don’t have to worry about attempts to wipe out their population (and we have tried to wipe them out, see crack, the fact that black women lose custody of their children to the foster system more often than white women, the schools to prison pipelines in black neighborhoods, the lack of living wage employment for black men).

Perhaps once we start addressing the black community as a whole, they will not feel so threatened by a part. Perhaps if Obama had addressed women as more than wombs with claws and crying streaks, we would have voted for him.