I have been reading small snippets about how Obama’s campaign workers have been accosted and campaign headquarters in certain states have been vandalized or threatened. This concerns me, not only because I find it shocking but because there has been little to no coverage of it.
I live in a pretty liberal area of a very odd western state. I used to live in the mostly unsouthern part of a southern state. I can see some of these incidents happening in parts of the south, but I suppose that part of me has never seen Pennsylvania or Indiana as very southern.
I never expect in 2008 to hear that workers had been told that Obama should be strung up or that campaign workers have been berated harassed and threatened. What surprises me the most is that these incidents were never highly publized. The Obama campaign has made it their policy not to make these incidents front page news.
Why? I suspect it is probably the worry that things like this would further widen the divide between black and white voters. It is possibly that it would but I think it is a bad move. It is a move towards the issues that now plague Europe, where it is common practice to ignore issues like this. Americans have a proud, if colored and none to pretty, history of talking about our problems.
I think the Obama campaign should not be trying to keep these issues quiet. People need to know that this kind of blatant bigotry is rampant in our country. I am not saying that they should go out and decry it to the heavens, but acknowledge it. There are people out there, in our country right now, that will not vote for Obama because he is black. The color of his skin has damned him. Hell, we have had people supporting Clinton that have openly said that if Obama was not black, he would not even have gotten this far.
Should a candidate be honest about the racism their campaign workers had confronted?
What does the color of his skin matter, except that it might be history making. It is not Obama’s skin color that appeals to me, but the image that the man conveys. Admittedly, I would never have been a supporter of Clinton. I have never found her appealing, but I did not shift to Obama because he was black or a democrat. I like what he has to say, but that is not the topic.
Topic for this week is racism.
A Certain Point of View 