How will black Americans react if Obama doesn't win

Whether black onlookers believe that this election was decided "on the real issues" and that Mr. Obama was "judged fairly" will be shaped in part by future developments, including the nature of the campaign in its closing weeks (will race-baiting intensify?) and the demographics of the final voting tally (will people who have traditionally voted Democrat vote differently this time around?).

I anticipate that most black Americans will believe that an Obama defeat will have stemmed in substantial part from a prejudice that robbed 40 million Americans of the chance to become president on the day they were born black.

But deep in their bones, they will believe and probably rightly that race was a key element, that had the racial shoe been on the other foot had John McCain been black and Mr. Obama white the result would have been different.

This conclusion will be accompanied by bitter disappointment, and in some quarters, stark rage.

Comments? Observations? Questions?

Some black conservatives columnist Thomas Sowell or former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell will undoubtedly be delighted by an Obama defeat; he is, after all, their ideological foe.

Very true. Also add Mr Anti-Affirmative Action, Ward Connerly to that mix.

But there are also black leftists who oppose him.

Writing in the Progressive magazine, Professor Adolph Reed of the University of Pennsylvania urges voters to reject Mr. Obama (as well as Mr. McCain) because he is a "vacuous opportunist" who, like Bill Clinton, moves the leftward end of the American political spectrum toward the center.

A close variant is the camp of blacks who will be relieved by an Obama defeat because they fear that his victory would misleadingly suggest that America is no longer in need of large-scale racial reform.

The opinions black leftist and communist are rarely defined or enumerated in the MSM. They were mainly responsible for generating the Obama isn't black enough rhetoric. And a lot of what Rev. Wright outrage from the pulpit was of the same genre. Cornell West could be considered as a member of this school of thought also.

There are blacks who'll be indifferent to an Obama defeat because they don't think the outcome of the presidential race will have any real effect on their miserable fates.

Others, protecting themselves against the pain of disappointment, have systematically repressed expectations.

This article is one of the first well written pieces that covers broad gamut of opinions within the African American political thought.