Will Black Women Support Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?

I just came across an interesting question posed on the Skeptical Brotha blog.  The question is, will black women be moved by their gender identification and support Hillary or will they be moved by racial identification and support Obama?

Political scientists have already done research that gives us insight into the answer to this question.  Harvard political scientist, Claudine Gay, and UC Irvine political scientist, Katherine Tate wrote a research paper in 1998, “Doubly Bound: The Impact of Gender and Race on the Politics of Black Women” that gives us some clues to what might happen.

They basically find that gender is very important to black women’s politics but race still trumps gender in shaping black women’s political attitudes.    They don’t look at actual presidential voting behavior, but they do look at political attitudes toward other policies.

Here’s the abstract from the article:

“Gender has been thought to be less salient than race among black women. Data from two national surveys of black Americans, conducted in 1984 and 1996, show that black women identify as strongly on the basis of their gender as their race, and that these gender and racial identities are mutually reinforcing. Nevertheless, among black women, their identification with their race more powerfully affected their political attitudes than did their identification on the basis of gender, except in instances where the interests of blacks directly conflict with the interests of women. These empirically based findings speak to the issue of why the attitudes of black women toward contemporary gender issues can sharply diverge from those of white women.”

I would venture to say that the support you see for Clinton now in the black community is simply due to the fact that a lot of black people still haven’t heard of Obama yet.

This doesn’t mean that Obama can take the black vote for granted.  He’s already said that he believes he has to earn the black vote just like anybody else.