Black Senators

Like anyone else, I guess I was surprised to hear over & over this past week that once Obama goes to the White House, there will be ZERO black senators (depending, obviously, on how the Blago things shakes out.) But after thinking about it for a few minutes, I guess it's really not surprising - black people still only make up about 14% of our population, so across the board it's a bit of an uphill battle. And then when you see WHERE the black population is spread out, you see the political irony that 55% of the black population lives in the South. In fact, the states with the highest percentage of black people? Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama. So while, for instance, 37% of the population of Mississippi is black, do you honestly think Mississippi's electing a black guy to the Senate? And then throughout the country there's stretches of states where the numbers suggest the unlikelihood of a black senator (e.g. only 8% of the black population resides in the West), even if based purely on odds.

And while electing Obama has shown that we're turning a corner when it comes to voting for non-whites, it's not like we can all clap our hands and start over today - I just counted 25 senators who have been in office for at least 20 years. And there's 40 that've been in for at least 12 years, which would represent two terms. In other words, there's not a great turnover rate to begin with; once they're in, it seems that short of getting caught with heads in their freezer or saying "micacah," they're in as long as they want. So it would seem that for a black person to get elected Senator, he/she'd hafta come from a state that has as high a black population as can be without being in the South, and where the incumbent is stepping down. Otherwise, it still appears to be a very hard thing to pull off.