Cheryl Katz

Everyone’s a little bit racist….

Obama is leading in every national poll now by at least 8%.  FiveThirtyEight.com has his chance of victory at over 95%. I think many signs look optimistic for an Obama victory on November 4 (my birthday!  Guess what I would like for my birthday….)

So why am I (still) afraid to feel hopeful about this year’s presidential election?

Hate speech has become a scary but real part of the McCain-Palin rallies.  McCain made one reserved effort to set his supporters straight about Obama, saying he was “not someone to be afraid of as President.”  But supporters are still yelling, “Kill him!” at Palin speeches, and the incidents go unrebuked.

Race is clearly still a factor in this campaign.  I thought we had effectively moved on from it after the whole Reverend Wright saga of the summer, but it has come back, and uglier than ever.

I know that the people yelling slurs – hell, the people who attend rallies at all, especially to see Sarah Palin – are wingnuts who are coming out to see someone with views as extreme as their own.  Somehow, this doesn’t help me feel more settled about the whole thing.

I came across this idea of the Bradley Effect.  It hadn’t occurred to me, and yet makes some sense, that polls might not indicate the way people will actually vote, when race is a factor in a campaign, because who would want to admit out loud to a pollster that they are racist?  I really think that far more people have racist thoughts than are willing to admit to them – which in a sense is good; it’s good to have a filter on racist behaviour!  And yet, not so much at the polls.  However, a recent FiveThirtyEight blog post questions whether the Bradley Effect ever really existed at all.

Whether or not it is a real factor, it certainly does seem plausible.  People can be scary and unreasonable about issues like race.  And I am so scared that if enough people are lying, all the polls could be reversed.

I read a good piece in the New Yorker about Obama’s hard sell to working class white people.  It goes to show how far removed even I am from a working-class mentality that it would never occur to me to be suspicious of Barack Obama’s pledged policies because they seemed too good to be true.  The first case study featured is a woman who works two jobs to support herself and her nieces, for whom she is the primary caretaker.  She specifically was suspicious of his tax plan, saying that the $250,000 threshold for the higher tax rate seemed like “someone who had won the lottery” and that she thought eventually that threshold would be lowered.

At another section of the article, Packer quotes a lifelong Democrat and former Hillary supporter as saying, “I really don’t want an African-American as President,” he said. “I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion.”

I have never understood racism.  I wasn’t raised in a bubble, in a fantasy world with no biases, but I was raised to treat people with basic respect.  So I not only can’t fathom not wanting to vote for a qualified candidate who happens to be black, but I can’t fathom extending my fear to the possibility that he might seek retribution for previous generations’ grievances on behalf of an entire demographic of our country.

We don’t know anything for absolutely sure yet, I think, about the state of hatred in this country.  I want to believe, and I hope, that America is a country that can elect a black man to be President.  I’m a little petrified about what happens if we aren’t ready, and it’s McCain-Palin sworn in on 1-21-09.

So here’s hoping that the white working class can cast off any remaining doubts, if not that Obama is the perfect solution, then that he is by far more on their side than McCain is.  And here’s hoping that the polls outstandingly in Obama’s favor speak for real progress in American “race” relations.  (“Race” because… we are one human race.)

Come on, America – let’s do this one right.

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