I know every failed campaign looks for a scapegoat, but this is a New Day full of Hope and Change and Hypo-Allergenic First Puppy. I was kind of hoping for something more original than Blame Black People.

The proponents of the “black people passed 8″ theory rely on a parade of specious arguments, but the most facile is the reliance on a single exit poll of 2,240 voters showing 7 out of 10 African Americans voted yes on 8.

Let’s take a peek at how many black people were polled—224. 224 black people speak for the entire African American electorate in California? Note, the dashes in the “black men” columns indicate that with only 90 black men polled, they couldn’t even get a statistically relevant result.

But for the sake of argument, let’s accept this 7 out of 10 statistic. According to the US Census, African Americans are 6.7% of the entire California electorate–that’s 2.3 million people. White people comprise 43% or 22 million. Our single exit poll says white people were evenly split on 8. So that’s about 11 million white votes for 8. Our simple arithmetic reveals…whoa…way more white people voted yes on 8. Wait, that’s almost FIVE times the entire black electorate.

If we want to really use this non-reasoning and one poll in the Blame Game, the correct answer to who passed prop h8 is: White Republicans (82% for h8) and voters of all races who attend church on a weekly basis (84% for h8.)

Note, lest APIs think we can gloat about our “majority against 8” status. Puhleez, 134 “Asians” represent the ever mythical unified Asian America? Let’s be consistent in our demands for disaggregated data and not present ourselves as a blended happy SouthAsianFilipinoChineseJapaneseTonganSaomoanVietnamese family. We know there’s a lot of in-house work to do. Talk to your parents or born-again cousin about being queer lately?

So why blame African Americans? It’s lazy, easy and sells. If that were all, blaming black people for prop 8 is no less harmful than instant ramen. This knee jerk racism is more dangerous than your cup noodle because it focuses blame on a caricatured impenetrable “scary scary black peoples” who we can then fear, ignore and not engage. Shifting blame to some unknowable outsider breeds complacency and a self-righteous cocoon of All is Good in our non-scary house devoid of black people. And it erases the real lives, loves and struggles of queer people of color who create blended communities of Asian, Latino, black, haole and mixed race peoples.

So, as a dear friend often reminds me, it’s never ALL Good. Every community has its homophobes— 24% of San Franciscans voted FOR 8. That’s right, 1 in 4 voted for h8 in the gay Mecca. The wackness knows no bounds.

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