Charles Barkley Does Not Like Democrats or Does He?

Visual interest:

Picture Analysis of Charles Barkley

Meme: Charles Barkley, Google Images. 2018

In regard to help explain why poor black individuals and poor white individuals vote the way that they do, one can use pictures, memes and political cartoons.  These forms of visual art and expression can go very far to help shed some light as to why people of a specific category vote the way they do.

In poking around on the internet looking for meme, which is not very hard to do, I found this striking one of Charles Barkley, a famous basketball player.  What does this image portray?  The image is of a middle aged, well known, successful black man. He is smiling and portraying a positive image. The meme that is written on the picture is a quote from Charles himself.  It is actually a quote from Barkley in 2015 on the “Dan Patrick Show” (The Hill).

This brings up an interesting point, one would be led to believe that Charles Barkley is a true conservative, voting against Democrats, if taking this picture at face value.  What is presented here, as truth, is not the whole truth.  If one digs further into Barkley’s political beliefs it will become very clear that Barkley has stated that he has voted Democrat for most of his life.  He was taken out of context in the interview that he had given on the “Dan Patrick Show.” He does go further into detail saying: “Ah, well, I vote Democratic most of the time,” he said. “But the Democrats don’t have a candidate I really like” (The Hill).

This brings up another very interesting point, 87% of black voter voted Democrat in the 2016.  That is an overwhelming amount of people from one category to vote in a specific way. The question is this behavior institutional, is it a social construct that is enforce as soon as children are old enough to understand politics in its abstract form?  What is striking is that black people still are lagging behind in regard to income, life expectancy and education.  The out of context Charles Barkley quote is not necessarily wrong, nor is it what it implies after the “…”

This quote from Charles Barkley intrigued me, he seems to hold some interesting opinions.  Voting for Democrats, I would have guessed that he would hold the views of a conflict theorist.  Charles Barkley has some very interesting opinions and according to The Hill, Charles Barkley actually planned to vote for the Republican Presidential candidate, John Kasich. Then again, if one looks at the research, the more money people acquire and success that people experience in life the greater the chance is that they will start to vote Republican. So perhaps this is not so far off of the bell curve as I suspected it would be when I first saw this meme, floating on my screen on google images.

I think that the meaning of this meme is to reassure white people that even some black people agree with their sentiments that the Democratic Party does, in no way, any good for advancing people who are in the black category. The fact that they choose a successful black man and take his words out of context, provide somewhat of an insight to the idea that they believe that they only thing holding black people back is black people themselves.  This may also be true to a degree, however politics are a very complicated thing, as are the social issues that affect individuals who are in specific categories.

Works Cited:

“Charles Barkley Slams ‘Unintelligent Blacks’ on Philly Radio.” BIASBREAKDOWN, Biasbreakdown, 25 Oct. 2014, biasbreakdown.com/2014/10/24/charles-barkley-slams-unintelligent-blacks-on-philly-radio/.

Hensch, Mark. “Barkley: Voting for Dems Hasn’t Helped Blacks.” TheHill, The Hill, 28 Aug. 2015, thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/252181-barkley-voting-for-dems-hasnt-helped-blacks.

Maniam, Shiva. “2. Party Affiliation among Voters: 1992-2016.” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Pew Research Center, 13 Sept. 2016, http://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-among-voters-1992-2016/.