'A Candidate Who Happens To Be Black'

Obama Can’t Sidestep Race

By Richard Martin, 8-13-08

	Less hand-wringing, please

Nov. 4’s 85 days away, the dog days are upon us and, like a dog worrying at an old sore, the presidential campaign has suddenly come down to one tired and tiresome issue: race.

In Colorado this November, voters will decide on an anti-affirmative-action measure that would ban the use of race in college admissions, government hiring and contracting. The presence of that referendum on the same ballot as Barack Obama’s historic candidacy, writes Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site, could generate “heated rhetoric” and “sharply divide the electorate along racial lines,” thus bringing Obama into full contact with the one issue he wishes to transcend, if not avoid: his blackness.

In a looong feature package in New York Magazine this week, John Heilemann contends that the post-race candidate is, racially speaking, damned if he does and if he doesn’t. “The truth is that ignoring race is not an option for Obama. Nor is simply changing the subject,” Heilemann opines. And the harsher truth is that many white voters—older, male white voters, mostly—won’t vote for Obama because of the color of his skin: “Obama has to make the country comfortable with the most unusual profile of any person ever to come within spitting distance of occupying the White House—while at the same time preventing the election from becoming a race consumed by race.”

And Christopher Dickey, in an eloquent and thoroughly reported cover story for Newsweek, roughly follows the track of General Sherman’s scorched-earth march through the South and finds, predictably, that “the past wasn’t forgotten or forgiven so much as put aside while people got on with their lives and their business.” And the Obama campaign, for all its high-minded rhetoric and emphasis on the candidate’s classic American story, is re-opening old wounds.

There’s an obligatory quality to all this hand-wringing—since the days of Faulkner, no subject has been able to engender soul-searching verbosity among white Americans like that of the racial divide. There are varying prisms at work, too: both Dickey and Vanessa Grigoriadis, of New York mag, attended an Obama event in Powder Springs, Ga. (two white Northeast liberals, by the way), and they described it very differently.

And there are logical fallacies, as well: does it really follow that, if there’s a race-related measure on the ballot, that’s a bad thing for Obama? Brown notes that roughly two-thirds of voters in Colorado support the affirmative action ban, and less than one-fifth oppose it. He also asserts that Obama supporting the measure “might hurt him with his core constituency”—but if so few oppose the measure in Colorado (with an electorate that’s 4% black), it’s hard to see who that “core constituency” might be.

I have no doubt that a significant percentage of white voters—“15 to 20 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents,” according to commentator John Judis, quoted by Heilemann—will vote against Obama simply because of the color of his skin. And I have no idea to what degree the more outlandish Web-fed rumors of his ancestry—Muslim, African, Laplandian, who the hell knows—will weigh on the minds of these mythical independents.

But I do know three things: a) in the West, for certain, the biggest racial divide is not black-white but white-Hispanic; b) a lot of older, Caucasian males in Colorado and Montana and Utah are just as fed up with the country’s current direction as any black liberal from Chicago; and c) Obama has already made the most eloquent and forward-looking statement on the state of race relations in this country since the death of Martin Luther King.

Look, the U.S. black population of voting age is about 25 million, or 11.5% of the total. Let’s assume 90% of voting-age blacks vote for Obama. And let’s say out of the 180,000,000 or so total white voters, 10% vote against him because he’s black. If anything those numbers tip in Obama’s favor. No doubt the state-by-state calculations are less forgiving. But most likely we’re looking at a bell curve: the two extremes (people who cast their vote based solely on race) more or less cancel each other out, leaving, as always, the vast middle.

Can we talk about something else now?

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