The importance of Hyde Park in the rise of Barack Obama

By Kathy G.

Nate Silver has written an interesting post about why there are currently no black senators, and why their numbers there are likely to remain low. Racism has obviously played a huge role, but Silver also points to another factor:

I suspect that a lot of the problem, however, is that as Congressional Districts have become more and more gerrymandered, leading to the creation of more and more majority-minority districts following the 1980 and 1990 censuses, the black political apparatus has become more and more 'ghettoized'. Black candidates have not had to develop a message that appeals to white voters, because most of them don't have very many white voters in their districts (about half the nation's African-American population is limited to the 60 blackest Congressional Districts). Nor do they have very many conservative voters in their districts, and so they have not had to develop a message that appeals to conservatives, even though the black population itself is far more diverse in its political views than is generally acknowledged.

Because they are not very representative of their states as a whole, moreover, these districts are also not likely to be very good launching pads for ascension to the Senate or to the governor's mansion.

Which brings me to the subject of our first African-American president. The other day, rikyrah of Jack and Jill politics wrote that Barack Obama "built his FOUNDATION in the Black community." But that's not entirely true. Yes, African-Americans have been an enormously important part of Obama's base. But Hyde Park, the Chicago neighborhood where Obama started his political career, is only 37.7% African-American. To be sure, it's considerably blacker than America as a whole, but unlike most districts represented by African-Americans in Congress, it's not even close to being majority black.

As was documented in Ryan Lizza's important New Yorker piece on Obama last year, Obama learned early on that white professionals were a crucial part of his base. Lizza reports that the first poll Obama conducted for his unsuccessful race against African-American Congressman Bobby Rush "revealed that the demographic he could win over most easily was white voters." In the redistricting of Illinois that occurred after the 2000 census, Obama's new district was one that was considerably more favorable to him than the previous one had been, and, says Lizza, it "was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated. It also included one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago."

The diversity of Obama's district helped to make him the politician he is today. It forced him to craft a message that had considerable multi-racial appeal, and this message proved to be resoundingly successful when he ran for the U.S. senate and later, for president.

It's no accident, I think, that of the three post-Reconstruction U.S. senators who have been African-American, two of them (Obama and Carol Moseley Braun) started their political careers in Hyde Park. Throughout the presidential campaign, conservatives tried to portray Hyde Park as a weird, elitist, out-of-touch, and not authentically "American." And while it is indeed a strange place, Hyde Park is far more representative of America as a whole than is, say, Sarah Palin's Alaska.

I believe that Nate Silver is correct when he identifies gerrymandering as one of the obstacles preventing African-American politicians from breaking into the mainstream. Ambitious politicians of all races would be well-advised to begin their political careers in places that are at least as diverse as their state, or their country, is as a whole. Such neighborhoods are likely to provide excellent training grounds for aspiring leaders seeking to craft an identity and a message that has broad political appeal in an increasingly diverse America.

Comments

[Melinda]

This is tangential to your core point, but unless things have changed a lot since I was in graduate school in Hyde Park in the 1980s, not only was Hyde Park not particularly black it also wasn't particularly integrated, with the university community being overlaid on the local community and not a lot of congress between the two. I've found that this tends to be typical of college towns more generally, but because the south side is otherwise predominantly African-American it's unavoidable to have race creep into that particular calculus. When I was there an African-American student in the College was arrested after buying a used television from another (white) student. He was carrying it out of her dorm and was stopped on suspicion of theft. He spent the night in city jail, the cops not even bothering to check out his explanation.

Also, I'm not particularly proud to say this but I think Sarah Palin's Alaska is probably more typically American than Hyde Park, at least in terms of class-related demographics.

Related, I read the two major Alaska papers online every day and the number of people from outside who post comments dragging every single issue back to Sarah Palin is really annoying. As a more extreme example, the Yukon Quest (dogsled race) didn't apply for a grant from the hotel bed tax this year because of a misunderstanding, and now they find themselves having to do unexpected fundraising. And commenters from outside followed up the article about that with crap about Sarah Palin. Don't be one of those.

But I think the basic point about gerrymandering and messaging is really interesting and seems to me to make a great deal of sense.

[Low Key]

Hang around on 53rd Street. Last time I was at Third World Cafe I noticed that of four groups sitting at tables, three were mixed-race.

[Low Key]

And the owners of that cafe, by the way, are a mixed race couple.

[Corvus]

Low Key, is your nom de blog a reference to the trickster god of fire from Norse Mythology, perhaps specifically to his portrayal in American Gods?