Acting White: The Elephant Lives!

In between postings and my day job, I read and write about race. It is those efforts that barely have me lift an eyebrow when a poll, like the one undertaken by Stanford, suggest that Obama is pushing a racial boulder uphill to win the White House.

While it is amazing and a testament to progress that he has gotten this far, we see that this country has a long way to go in resolving issues of race, and with it his campaign for the highest office. Leaps of progress are great, as well as are persistent baby steps, which might in this case have to suffice. Obama’s nomination may be more on par with Deval Patrick’s gubernatorial win in Massachusetts, and may simply reflect the distance the country still has to travel around race. America may be ready to elect a black man to high office, just not the highest office just yet.

Now if the Stanford poll was saying that Obama faces a challenge on issues within his control that would be one thing. However, what the poll is saying is that it is not the man as politico, but the color of his skin that turns off a significant percentage of white voters. And turns them off to the point where they will vote for a white candidate whom they otherwise oppose, except for his skin color.

Furthermore, those whites who can’t pull the lever for Obama are haunted by images of blacks as lazy, complaining, and violent, among others. To vote for him would separate them from these images they live out every day through the disparities they see. Disparities they can only explain crudely and with historical bias and ignorance. Some of that disparity reflects their own complicity, while a good deal of it sits squarely on the shoulders of blacks themselves. But in any case, Obama the man-candidate, and his bid, gets to be today’s vessel of the message that we are not yet ready (perhaps) to declare knowledge of, or victory over, racism.

But, I think we all know this – so I keep reading and writing.

James C. Collier

HT: Field Negro

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