tofugoddess:

‘People’ Aren’t Divided on Kavanaugh’s Confirmation. White People Are.

“Here’s what you’ll find if you read those articles: CNN reports that 48 percent of voters say they tend to believe Ford, while 41 percent believe Kavanaugh. The Washington Post busted out the graphs, showing the difference in how Republicans and Democrats, men and women, felt about Kavanaugh in the past month. “The big change … was among women,” the Post concluded.

But which women?

Because what neither of these write-ups mention—what virtually no mainstream coverage of that poll mentioned, despite Quinnipiac highlighting it in their own summary of the data—is that there were steep racial divides in how people viewed Kavanaugh.

Those results would reveal that 83 percent of black and 66 percent of Latinx voters believe Blasey Ford, compared to a mere 40 percent of white voters. And that 80 percent of black and 69 percent of Latinx voters considered her honest compared to just 54 percent of white voters.

This gap persists even when you isolate out white women, a demographic some pundits believed would be outraged at how Blasey Ford was treated by Senate Republicans (her testimony—deemed “credible” by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee—was essentially thrown out once Kavanaugh began rage-crying).

According to the Quinnipiac poll, nearly half (47 percent) of white women considered Kavanaugh to be honest. The numbers for black and Latinx voters? Just 7 percent and 34 percent, respectively. A plurality of white women did believe Blasey Ford (46 percent)—but it was nowhere near the majority, as was the case with black and Latinx voters.

Parsing out this data matters, because if journalists don’t, they can misleadingly run with narratives like the one in a recent article from the AP, which boldly declared in the headline: “Many women line up in support for Kavanaugh.”

Not black women. And, as the numbers suggest, not Latinas either. And to suggest otherwise—to erase women of color or absorb them into this narrative—is incorrect.”