Post-racial officials finding it's difficult to hold gains

Houston Chronicle article "Post-racial officials finding it's difficult to hold gains" (September 23rd, 2010) concludes that "black is black, white is white," and denotes the end of post-racial relations. Corrections suggests it gives little data for its conclusion.

A mere four years ago, for example, Americans celebrated the rise of two hope-filled post-racial stars: District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty and Newark's Mayor Cory Booker. Each was touted as a young, energetic, post-civil-rights-era savior in the mold of then-Sen. Obama.

Multiracial coalitions of voters elected them both. Each managed to transcend race-based politics and make gains worthy of national praise regarding schools, crime, housing, economic developing and other issues that are either nonracial or should be.

Yet despite those successes, Fenty was voted out of office on Sept. 14. White voters still supported him almost two-to-one, but black voters in the majority-black city turned on him by a similarly wide margin.

What the article does not state is that Adrian Fenty lost to another black man, Vincent C. Gray. When one black man beats another black man in a Mayoral race, it's rather odd, without including more data, to conclude that skin color was a factor in the political race. Individual candidate race holds no predictive power in a simple regression (there is no variance in candidate race).