Politics and Social Issues
Since the passing of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans are voting and being elected to public office in increasing numbers. As of 2008 there were approximately 10,000 African American elected officials in America. African Americans are overwhelmingly Democratic. Only 11% of African Americans voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential Election.
Social issues such as racial profiling, the racial disparity in sentencing, higher rates of poverty, institutional racism, and lower access to health care are important to the African-American community. While the divide on racial and fiscal issues has remained consistently wide for decades, seemingly indicating a wide social divide, African Americans tend to hold the same optimism and concern for America as whites.
An area where African Americans outstrip whites in their conservatism is on the issue of homosexuality. Prominent leaders in the Black church have demonstrated against gay rights issues such as gay marriage. This stands in stark contrast to the down-low phenomenon of covert male-male sexual acts. There are those within the community who take a different position, notably the late Coretta Scott King and the Reverend Al Sharpton, the latter of whom, when asked in 2003 whether he supported gay marriage, replied that he might as well have been asked if he supported black marriage or white marriage.
Read more about this topic: African-American Culture
Famous quotes containing the words politics and, politics, social and/or issues:
“Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.”
—Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925)
“It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)