SanAndreasX said:
Because U.S. law has typically treated people differently based on skin color from the very beginning. When the Constitution was drafted, racial differences were actually baked into the main body of the Constitution. Black Americans were not citizens and did not have the right to vote until the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were passed after the Civil War. Blacks were counted as three-fifths of a person because the South wanted to use enslaved people to pad out their representation in the House of Representatives, and therefore the Electoral College, despite the fact that they were not legally citizens and had no voting rights. The North did not want the South to be able to count them at all because they were not legally citizens. The South was not as invested in becoming independent from Britain as the North was. Southern plantation society was their version of British peerage and aristocracy. The South simply refused to join the revolution unless concessions were made. The concessions ended up being the Three-Fifths Compromise. After the Civil War, blacks continued to not be treated as equals. The South openly passed Jim Crow laws which disenfranchised black voters and spent the next 100 years fighting to maintain them, despite the fact that the Constitution supposedly guaranteed equal rights for blacks. The same laws also denied educational opportunities for blacks for the purposes of forcing them into being cheap labor. That said, the North was marginally better, at best, in that regard. It took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to end Jim Crow, using the Interstate Commerce Clause to enforce it. Even then, it continued in subtle ways like redlining real estate to keep minorities out. Native Americans had their lands seized and were sent to reservations, and forced into tribal schools to Christianize and Americanize them. There is one of those tribal schools in my home city of Phoenix, which is now a museum, that has a major east-west road named after it. Tribal lands are sovereign and are subject only to their own jurisdiction and that of the federal government; they are outside the control of the states. That is an issue in Oklahoma, where the Oklahoma state government is frustrated that they can't exert control over tribal members in the eastern part of the state as per McGirt v. Oklahoma. Native Americans didn't receive U.S. Citizenship until 1924. Even the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause excluded Native Americans ("Indians not taxed") from citizenship. |
Thanks for the backstory. It explains the ethnic sensitivities. But I cannot help but feel that in the current day and age using ethnicity to analyze voter choice could be misleading.
Let me give an example: It's commonly known that in high population areas like inner cities, people tend to be politically left leaning. This is a world wide phenomenon.
Let's say a certain ethnicity lives above average in high population centers. When trying to explain the voter choice by ethnicity, this could result in a conclusion that this ethnicity prefers left leaning politics. But meanwhile it could just be a result of living mostly in inner cities.
