The black-brown divide

A good case can be made that the Latino vote in Texas put Hillary Clinton over the top. Blacks broke heavily for Obama here, but they were only 19 percent of the overall Democratic electorate -- down from 21 percent in 2004. Latinos broke heavily for Clinton, but they were a whopping 34 percent of the overall Democratic vote total -- up 10 points from four years ago.

I believe that the black-brown divide is one of the more undercovered political stories of this season. Adelfa Callejo, the 82-year-old grande dame of Dallas Latino activism, and a Clinton supporter, slipped up and uttered a politically incorrect truth when she said just prior to the vote that Obama's problem (with Latino voters) is that he's black. Hillary Clinton quickly distanced herself from the Callejo gaffe, but what she said had a lot of truth to it.

In Dallas, the black-brown divide causes racial tension in the public schools, which are heavily black and brown, and majority Latino, and open warfare on the school board. You'd likely be scandalized by the anti-black e-mail some of us on the editorial board have gotten from Latinos. A lot of the hostility between the races is fueled by mass immigration, as Steven Malanga documents in the current City Journal, in a piece focused on the decline of the Rainbow Coalition idea.

It is impolite to notice all this, apparently. Black and brown political leaders do their best to downplay or deny it, and much of the news media coverage doesn't go much farther than this laughably bad Chicago Sun-Times column from Sunday, headlined, "Facts don't back black-brown divide in Texas." How does columnist Mary Mitchell know? She interviewed exactly two prominent Dallas Obama supporters, one black and one Hispanic, who both told her that there is no such thing as a racial divide.

It's interesting to contemplate what might happen this fall if we have a McCain-Obama contest. It's been taken as a given that very few Latinos will vote Republican for president given the collapse last summer of immigration reform in Washington, thanks to grassroots conservative efforts seen by many Latinos as racist. But what happens if the Republican candidate is the man who risked and nearly lost his shot at the presidency to stand up for Latino interests -- and his opponent is a black man? Will Latino anti-black racism benefit John McCain in a close race? It's unpleasant to think about, but there it is.