After over a century of attempting to keep Black people out of politics through voter discrimination practices like poll taxes, literacy tests, and racist gerrymandering, the political establishment now attempts to manipulate and misrepresent the choices of Black voters in ways that reduce their humanity, intelligence, and agency.

But there is no single Black vote. There’s no one state or group of Black voters that can determine the political actions of the entire race across the country. The idea of an entire racial group behaving and thinking the same is inherently racist, but it’s also misleading.

Black voters are not a monolith. No racial or ethnic group votes in predictable ways across the board. And while race is often an indicator of political leanings (Blacks are more likely to be Democrats, for example), race is almost never an accurate indicator of candidate preference.

That’s because just like in the White electorate, Black voters span the entire political spectrum — including independents, Libertarians, and, yes, Republicans. Black voters are divided on issues based on generational, class, and religious differences just like White voters are. By suggesting that Black voters in deeply conservative Southern states are representative of the 42 million Black people in this country, media pundits satisfy a perverse nostalgia for the racial ghetto of the American South.

The mainstream media, which is overwhelmingly White and male, desperately wants to believe that this is what the Black electorate looks like — rural, conservative, uninformed, and well-behaved. This reductive, racist label obscures the facts of how Black people actually vote and, more importantly, which demographics are actually propping up Biden’s candidacy.

Spoiler alert: It’s not Black people.

There is a generational divide within the Black electorate, not a racial divide on candidate preference.

For the past several days, the media establishment has tossed around statistic after statistic claiming to show that Biden is an overwhelming favorite of Black voters in South Carolina. And in terms of raw numbers, they’re correct. According to an NBC exit poll, Biden won about two-thirds of the state’s Black Democratic voters.

But those numbers don’t tell a complete story.

According to data from the South Carolina Election Commission, the state has one of the largest percentages of registered voters over the age of 45, a demographic that Biden does exceedingly well in regardless of race.

According to that same data, Black voters over the age of 45 made up approximately two-thirds of the Black electorate in the state. Bernie Sanders, a candidate who does notoriously well with voters under 45, earned a little over one-third of the total votes by Black Democrats under age 30 according to the same NBC exit poll. This exercise can be repeated for Alabama, which showed that while White and Black voters were evenly split, 69% were over the age of 45. And for those under 30, Sanders was the overwhelming choice.

This signals a generational divide within the Black electorate, not a racial divide on candidate preference.

The reality is that Biden didn’t overperform with Black voters in South Carolina — both he and Sanders did just as well as expected within their respective popular demographics. Biden gets old people; Sanders gets young ones.

What these polls actually show is not that Biden wins with all Black people, it’s that he wins with older White moderates and conservatives.

Media and party establishments on all sides have pushed the false, moderate narrative of “Blackness” in South Carolina. This narrative ignores the existence of nonmoderate Black political movements within a state that is overwhelmingly White, Christian, and conservative. Out of the over three million registered voters in South Carolina, Black voters only make up about a quarter.

An NBC poll released on the evening of Super Tuesday found that while 62% of Black voters in southern states leaned towards Biden, that number shrank to 33% outside of the South. And that’s because the lived experiences and political realities of Black people across this country are diverse and complicated.

A stark look at the issues that Black voters face should offer some clarity as to which campaigns and which candidate different Black voters actually care about.

Not every Black voter identifies with the unanimous “Black vote” narrative that pundits are pushing. When you move beyond the myth of the Black vote to look at the issues that affect Black people’s lives across the country and across generations, you find a very different story than the one that’s being touted around cable news and mainstream media outlets.

You’ll find that Black people are disproportionately uninsured and underinsured when compared to their White counterparts.

You’ll find that health outcomes among Black people are markedly worse than that of Whites. That Black women are up to four times more likely to die during childbirth than their White counterparts, even when income and education are controlled for.

You’ll find we are disproportionately affected by student loan debt. That those of us who enter the middle class are less likely to remain there than Whites. That we are among the most affected by the climate crisis. That our elders are more likely to rely on Social Security as their sole form of income and that they’re less likely to ever reach retirement. That we are less likely to become homeowners. That during the 2008 financial crisis, Black families were hit the hardest by the corruption and abuse of Wall Street executives, who made billions in profit with impunity.

While the idea of the “Black vote” rests on racist assumptions and manipulations, a stark look at the issues that Black voters face should offer some clarity as to which campaigns and which candidate different Black voters actually care about.