Call me naive, but how different are the policies that black voters favour? Don't good ideas merit enactment regardless of race, etc.? I wonder if the way forward is to focus policies that help everyone flourish, like access to education and universal health care.
It is fairly well documented that different demographic groups prioritize different issues and want different policies, the most thorough investigation of this is "Affluence and Influence", which the article obliquely references (the Gilens data). I don't know, off the top of my head, anything that looks just at how preferences differ across racial lines, but I would be surprised if they didn't. Also, you say that "policies that help everyone flourish, like access to education and universal health care," but the problem is that not everyone agrees that access to education or healthcare is a governmental problem and even among the subset that do they don't agree on how to accomplish this.
Thanks for adding some clarity. There are several stats connected to ethnicity that are more about poverty, education, and health than skin colour, heritage, etc. I wonder if looking at those issues and focusing on similar need rather than differences, if we would make progress for everyone. All of the above issues are certainly divisive, as you say, and apparently the skin colour of our leadership does not change that, especially if that is the primary descriptor of said leadership.