If we're going to continue excoriating the bigotry of blacks and talking about how much more bigoted they are than everyone else. Let's discuss where those numbers came from. What is an exit poll? According to CNN
Exit polls are surveys of a small percentage of voters taken after they leave their voting place. Pollsters use this data to project how all voters or segments of voters side on a particular race or ballot measure.
First let's look at how some exit polls are created via Forbes created. If we can't trust this link, we can trust Nate Silver's reasons for why we should ignore exit polls.
Now that we know what an exit poll is. Let's take a deeper look at how they are created. Nate Silver says
- Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls. This is because of what are known as cluster sampling techniques. Exit polls are not conducted at all precincts, but only at some fraction thereof. Although these precincts are selected at random and are supposed to be reflective of their states as a whole, this introduces another opportunity for error to occur (say, for instance, that a particular precinct has been canvassed especially heavily by one of the campaigns). This makes the margins for error somewhere between 50-90% higher than they would be for comparable telephone surveys.
With this in mind let's look at those numbers people are quoting for African American votes from CNN. CNN says they polled 2,240 people. Assuming they weighted those numbers proportionally, and took 10% of the entire vote, only 224 black people were questioned for the exit poll. Of those 224 black people about 158.6 voted for the marriage ban. So we have a situation where many people who are rightfully angry about having their rights taken away, are now blaming the results of 156.8 black people for the entire black voting population of California. These people do not even represent a percent of black voters, and yet they are being held up as proof of "homophobia and bigotry being worse in the black community." And how blacks are much more "bigoted" than any other group. Do you understand how narrow and short sighted this appears to people who are analyzing not just the percentages but the hard data.
Of the 78% of people who say they were not contacted by either initiative, 54% of those people voted Yes on the ban. Does this mean that Prop 8's outreach sucked? Not necessarily. If we use these same numbers we can also see that %5 percent of sampled voters were gay, which is an under-representation for the actual number of gay people in California. Does this mean that gay people didn't turn out to vote? No.
If you look at those numbers by income, it was overwhelming voted for by people between the 50k-150k range. Do we then decide that it was all the middle class people who are homophobic. You have a righteous anger, and an incredible struggle.. but these numbers don't prove overwhelming homophobia in the black community. We have homophobia in our community, we are not more homophobic than any other community. They don't prove blacks overwhelmingly denying you your rights and they certainly don't prove that black people in any way deserve the racist diatribes being written on the site.