There has been a lot of talk about various ethnic breakdown of voter groups since Tuesday, and it is starting to get on my nerves. It is not that I dislike the empowerment of the Latino, or African American, or Asian American communities. It is that the juxtaposition of these communities against a more conservative "white" America -- which is being done as much by the right as the left -- strikes me as a false construct.
Okay, so the majority of "white males" in the US voted for Romney, we are told. But what does that really tell us? Vermont, for example, is the second "whitest" state in the US. And yet it was handily won by Obama. The reason I put "white" in quotes is because there are many different groups that fall under that umbrella. Do Greeks in New York vote the same as Anglos in Idaho, merely because they fall under this category?
The Vermont "whites" and the Idaho "whites" are probably not voting because of some racial affinity with the candidate, or shared Anglo political ideals. They are voting differently because Vermont and Idaho have different histories, different ideals, and the fact that most of the population is "white" doesn't tell us much because in most states the majority of the population is "white."
So before we start carving up voter preference according to ancestry, maybe we should look a bit more into the details. That's what I think.