"It's a sensitivity," said Ronald Walters, a strategist for African American Democrat Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in the 1980s. Walters has criticized Democratic candidates in the past as sidelining black voters by ceding the South to Republicans. "You've got to have a black strategy, but it has to be a biracial strategy."

Oh, for a world in which we didn't have to put our hopes and dreams into compartmentalizing machines.