Personally, I still prefer to know that someone is prejudiced rather than the more insidious "I am not racist... I have black friends" etc. This I believe is a more pervasive mindset where prejudice is disguised as a more benign form of tolerance rather than a true acknowledgment of cultural differences.

It is much easier to have a real conversation to dispel the ignorance once you know what the persons true feelings are. I am not sure that we can change the Jeremiah Wrights' and these openly prejudiced cats in KY who grew up during the heat of segregation, we can and we MUST continue to have these conversations.

Obama owes it to the country to go into these places where ignorance persists and show them that Blacks and whites have more common interests outside of the immediately visible issue of skin color. Through his conversations with them, maybe his message of unification can continue to heal these deep wounds that have caused such division. Remember, all it takes is one person to begin a revolution...

Good posts, I dont know what we can do about it, I have been mulling over this for sometime(years) and I just dont know what to say to people with this mindsight. Who just cant move passed it.

I am under 30, and I know enough about what was happening in the 60's and before that.

Anyways, well said, I liked the New Yorker too.

I recommend the New Yorker article in question, because it not only exposes the problem but suggests some ways Obama and his supporters might deal with it.

There is a vast area of discussion we as a nation haven't had yet, and it boils down to this: WHY are so many white Americans suspicious of black politicians? Democrats are so quick to shut down these discussions with words like "racism" and "bigotry" that we never allow the discussion that might work through some of these issues. We make people like the man quoted in the article feel squelched and ignored, which isn't going to open any minds or change any votes.

This Patrick takes us closer to the answer than we're usually willing to go: "we remember the '60s." Lower-income white people have felt marginalized and neglected since the Johnson administration; more specifically, they feel they've been in competition with black people and black-driven political movements. They might be totally wrong. They might be the victims of right-wing propaganda. But saying that among ourselves while shutting them up with words like "racist" accomplishes nothing.

Democrats have to be willing to HEAR these people and open our hearts to them, or we'll just keep losing them to the right.

Lesen Sie ein andere Zeit, bitte:

"Obama has argued that if we improve the conditions of all Americans, we won't have to worry as much about racial strife because prosperity breeds unity." That's exactly the silly comment that I questioned. You should know very well that increased prosperity by 1939 in certain countries did nothing to increase their racial tolerance towards several minority groups - quite the opposite. Nor are Japan and Saudi Arabia bastions of acceptance towards outsiders. Nor did it work in the increasingly prosperous America of the 1950's and 1960's. Money ain't no cure-all, hate to break it to you.

Methinks showing some respect and appreciation towards opposing views and finding points of commonality and shared humanity are more tractable building blocks for understanding than outright incomprehension or relying on false recipes to fix the situation.

Once again I have to point out that there are many white voters who would vote for a black man but will not vote for Obama because of his association with Jeremiah Wright and black liberation theology, his refusal to disassociate himself from Wright which he said was impossible, followed by his attempt to disassociate himself from Wright which appeared insincere and politically motivated, as well as doubts raised by Michelle's comments, Obama's use of the race card several times in this campaign such as the Martin Luther King flap, his attempts to duck the affirmative action question by trying to repackage it in socio-economic terms, his comment about his grandmother, and his attempt to explain that comment which resulted in him calling her a typical white person. Obama has created grave doubts in the minds of many white people who would otherwise have supported him. Calling them racists is unfair and only serves to turn more people off.

well, I would vote for an African-American, easily, if I had some evidence of their competence. Unfortunately, because of how affirmative action operates, I have to begin with a presumption that any black person is unqualified, because in the educational system they're are not subjected to the same standards.

Sorry, but that's a natural consequence of the system. And ask yourself, if your child needs surgery, do you want a well-qualified doctor, or one whose skin color or ethnicity is aesthetically pleasing to you somehow?

I am a Clinton supporter, but i think I can answer your question. The only way for some Americans to get over that hump - thinking they could never vote for a black president - is to have a black president. When the sky doesn't fall, some of their prejudices will ease. But don't forget, when polled there are more who say they would never vote for a woman president than say they would never vote for a black president.

Either candidate will face strong prejudices in the campaign. For some people, only the experience of having a black president or a woman president will help. Of course, some people, even that won't help.

Yilla = Milla, aren't you clever. Oh, and yes, pacify, duh, my mistake. Sorry Professor Spellcheck. and I think I've mentioned that dumb bunny once or twice, hardly an obsession.

The only obsession I have are girls half my age. Man, I am God's gift to little girls : )

Mammals are genetically designed to be suspicious of competitors. If the "other" doesn't look like me it's not part of my tribe. Tribalism goes so deep that the Enlightenment is still just a veneer, now 350 years later. It's gonna take a lot more centuries to make such a deep seated genetic change.

But, like my father (whose vocabulary for the "other" contained all those ugly words we try to pretend we don't know) individuals, once he got to know them personally, were exempt. And as he got older he squelched the words before they got out of his mouth because he realized how bad they made him look, and he cared about how he looked.

I'm quite certain he kept saying them to himself, however.

The voters are showing that they're more embarassed about being racist than they are proud of it. Mrs. Clinton is revealing their bigotry and making them uncomfortable. Mr. Obama's even tempered dignity is showing them that all of the "other" are not the same. He's bi-lingual, speaks whitespeak and blackspeak and knows which to use when, and this is confusing to these voters. How can a black person talk like white folks? What does that mean? It sounds so reasonable.

Some will change and some will not. But the children of my children will think differently than their grandparents and some of them will have the skills to converse with them when the families gather for holidays.

Our job is to figure out how to have those conversations.

Please don't feed the trolls.

As to the substance of bSerious' very thoughtful post, a few observations...

It indeed is jarring, albeit not surprising, that there are still people in 2008 who are still unwilling to vote for a presidential candidate just because they are black. But I think you'll find that as group, this is probably a shrinking voting bloc.

Cock-eyed optimist that I am, I suspect that 50 years down the road, that particular voting bloc may have shrunk so much that journalists may have trouble finding enough people to put together a story about such things.

That's not to say there isn't a long row to hoe. I got an insight into just how far a few years back when the woman who is now my wife and had to made a road trip through the U.S. Midwest (we're Canadians. Never having done such a roadtrip with a passenger who happened to be a few shades browner than me, I was quite taken by the extra-attentive treatment we received from Customs. Notwithstanding the thorough search of our car and interview by the two border guys, it was on the way back, when the big-assed pick-up truck with the license plate 'ARYAN' passed us in North Dakota that my travelling companion and I decided to dispense with our shortcut itinerary and turned north to the nearest border crossing. True story.

But here's another story--Having grown up in the '80s, I remember it as a far more racially polarized time than now. At least where I grew up, there was quite a bit less socializing, dating, etc. that went on between kids from different ethnicities. Nowadays, it seems like that's far less an issue for kids, and in a strange way, that sort of feeds back, as adults have to confront their own prejudices whenever their kids bring home their friends.

The point of these two stories is to illustrate I think there is progress, but still a long way go. With respect to Obama, the question becomes whether that particular portion of the electorate is significantly large enough and inclined to vote to swing the outcome.

It's interesting. Obama's early appeal to a lot of people was this notion of 'transcending' the identity politics of the Bush/Clinton/Bush era, and particularly the politics of race. Certainly that was something that I found very appealing about Obama. But race ended up coming back to the forefront.

I think the appetite among the electorate for that transcendence remains, but it's probably a tough concept to campaign on, because when you get right down to it, it's a time-consuming process, with progress measured over decades.

Depending on your point of view, the outcome of the general election may be one of those moments that determines whether the U.S. moved a hundred miles forward, or two hundred.

Then again, I am a cock-eyed optimist...

Thank you for raising the question, and it's a good one. We are already beginning to see change in America - since the majority of votes Barack Obama has received have been from whites (primary + caucus), even though the TM likes to spin it another way.

Die-hard racists will just have to die-off. A few have changed, slowly, but just as there are die-hard anti-semites, anti-feminists, homophobes - who are part of our political landscape - all of these "isms" and phobias will take time to eradicate.

The best way to eliminate them is to out-vote them. And once out-voted, begin to address institutionalized racism and classism in the society. On this point I agree with John Edwards.

Poverty in America breeds discontent, and in many cases fans the flames of racism. Education is also a key.

I was ready to take on the posts from the Y***a person, but won't waste the bandwidth.