Racists for Obama

Plenty of white bigots will vote for Barack Obama on Tuesday. There are some things they fear more than black people.

By James Hannaham

Read more: Racial Issues, African-Americans, Economy, Opinion, Barack Obama, 2008 election, James Hannaham

Photo courtesy of Politico

A house in Indiana

Nov. 3, 2008 | Sean Quinn, of the polling site FiveThirtyEight, respected for its obsessiveness and eerie prescience, recently posted a hair-raising story about a pair of Barack Obama supporters. Quinn seems ready to verify its source, but only after the election. At any rate, it goes like this: A man canvassing for Obama in western Pennsylvania asks a housewife which candidate she intends to vote for. She yells to her husband to find out. From the interior of the house, he calls back, "We're voting for the nigger!" At which point the housewife turns to the canvasser and calmly repeats her husband's declaration.

Ah, racism. It's always a step ahead of us. Even before the majority of Democrats decided that Obama was electable despite being the first openly black presidential candidate, pollsters began gradually raising the level of speculation about the tide of bigotry that might overwhelm white voters once they got into that private little booth and faced the prospect of pulling a lever that suddenly seemed to read "Some Black Dude."

For the past six months, though, countless pollsters have shown that the so-called Bradley effect, named after African-American Democrat Tom Bradley, who lost the California governor's race in 1982 to a white opponent after leading in the polls, has ceased to exist, if it ever really did. Most likely, they say, it won't significantly affect the outcome of Tuesday's election. A recent Gallup Poll suggests that the number of all voters who would reject Obama based on his race, and the number more likely to vote for him because of his race, is about the same. (The numbers for those who would vote for or against McCain because he's white are about the same.) In other words, the Bradley effect is neutralized.

Those polls don't mean that racism still isn't alive in America. It is. But it's not as black and white as all the talk about the Bradley effect might lead us to believe. The couple in western Pennsylvania suggests that people can look past skin color while acting in their own best interests. For whatever reason or reasons -- the economy, healthcare, the Iraq war, Sarah Palin -- some racists are determined to vote for the black guy over the white one. A recent photo published in Politico (here and above) shows a Confederate flag proudly flying over an Obama sign in an Indiana home's front yard. Racists for Obama? It's a bracing contradiction and causes us to look deeper into what Obama's candidacy is telling us about race in American life and culture. People have criticized Obama for his willingness to reach out to America's international enemies, but they've seldom acknowledged that if he's elected, he's also going to have to deal diplomatically with haters in his own country.

The Pennsylvania couple's intended vote also suggests that we base our impression of what it means to be racist on a number of false assumptions. To be biased, you don't have to be a muscular guy with a shaved head and a swastika tattoo, or a late governor of a Southern state. You might be a radio personality, or even a liberal guy with a tendency to jam his foot into his mouth. In August, back before Obama gained his current lead, Jacob Weisberg worried in Slate that 5 percent of white voters telling CBS/New York Times pollsters that they would not personally vote for a black candidate "surely understates the reality," and that if you went by the numbers, racism would be Obama's downfall. It may seem like a logical conclusion, but actually there's no way of knowing whether that self-admitted 5 percent represents something called the "racist vote." Even if 5 percent of white voters claim they won't vote for a generic "black candidate," that's not the same thing as saying they won't vote for a specific individual named Barack Obama. (And the poll doesn't differentiate by party, so we don't know how many of those five-percenters are die-hard Republicans who wouldn't vote for a Democrat of any ethnicity.)

Furthermore, telling some stranger on the phone about how you're going to vote isn't equivalent to casting a vote. Nowadays statisticians have identified a complementary phenomenon to the Bradley effect, the reverse Bradley effect, in which a voter tells a pollster she won't vote for a candidate based on race and then votes for the candidate anyway, probably while feeling very, very naughty. Leaving us exactly nowhere in our quest to pinpoint the degree to which racism might hurt Obama at the polls. It leaves the media in a situation that black Americans are all too familiar with -- struggling in vain to identify and measure racial discrimination as it hides, transforms and eludes our understanding.

Next page: "If you say, 'Your house is on fire, and the firefighter happens to be black,' it's a different situation"