The Race Factor

In my previous post, I mentioned that over the course of speaking to about a hundred people in Lafayette, Indiana, I had come across 3 or 4 people for whom I suspected that race, i.e., Barack Obama's race, was the biggest issue by far in deciding which way to cast their ballot. But I felt that so many of my other conversations could not be properly understood without acknowledging the nuances of racism that exist in a relatively homogenous town like Lafayette. Nicholas Kristof's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times tells it like it is. Overt racism is one thing, but covert racism such as assigning lower credibility to an African American individual because of very deeply-imbedded biases can manifest itself in a variety of different ways. In a town where you see hardly any African Americans on the street or in the malls (this is a town that once prided itself on having such a "healthy" KKK that no African American passing through would ever spend the night there, and indeed held at least one KKK rally during the time I lived there), how does someone living there even imagine what an educated, professional African American looks like? That image is as foreign in Lafayette as that of a Chinese banker in Hong Kong (as opposed to a Chinese cook) or an Arab doctor in Dubai (as opposed to a turbaned terrorist).

This is of course not to say that there are no genuine causes for objection to a Barack Obama presidency, or even for an explanation as to why he isn't further up in the polls than he should be. There are those who feel, for example, that he is far too hesitant in a world that requires more immediacy. Or that he's far too professorial to be a president (and he's not even one of those lectern-banging professors). But I think that anyone who does not acknowledge that racism is a very real player in these elections is totally and completely out of touch with American people. It's been said before but it's worth repeating: Joe Six-Pack would never, ever even consider voting for an aging presidential candidate who, in terrible though characteristic judgement, chooses as his vice-presidential running mate a black man or black woman who openly owns guns, has an unmarried pregnant teenage daughter, took six years at four different colleges to earn a college degree, is politically inexperienced (despite some miraculous turn of circumstances that got him/her the governorship of a state eighteen months ago), confesses to not having kept up with the Iraq war or any other international (or national) news, and needs urgent last-minute tutoring to bring him/her "up to speed".