Racism Stings Obama Campaigners

The Obama campaign doesn't talk about it much, but will admit when pressed that they started this process knowing that there was a small, but not insignificant, segment of the population that just will not vote for an African-American.

Running just below the surface in the campaign and in the media, is the undercurrent of racism still to be found in pockets around the country - rural, urban and suburban. While Senator Obama's message is inclusive and pan-racial, the workers on the ground have felt the sting that the campaign itself does not wish to highlight and the media has mostly ignored.

The Washington Post today has some harsh stories of field workers, phone bankers and surrogates having doors slammed in their faces, being called the most derogatory of racial terms and physically threatened.

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"

Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across "a lot of racism" when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."

The Obama campaign responded to questions about racial issues by saying, "After campaigning for 15 months in nearly all 50 states, Barack Obama and our entire campaign have been nothing but impressed and encouraged by the core decency, kindness, and generosity of Americans from all walks of life. The last year has only reinforced Senator Obama's view that this country is not as divided as our politics suggest."

But that doesn't do too much for the spirit of some supporters not even old enough to vote yet themselves and not used to the epithets thown their way like their parents and grandparents experienced.

Campaign field work can be an exercise in confronting the fears, anxieties and prejudices of voters. Veterans of the civil rights movement know what this feels like, as do those who have been involved in battles over busing, immigration or abortion. But through the Obama campaign, some young people are having their first experience joining a cause and meeting cruel reaction.

On Election Day in Kokomo, a group of black high school students were holding up Obama signs along U.S. 31, a major thoroughfare. As drivers cruised by, a number of them rolled down their windows and yelled out a common racial slur for African Americans, according to Obama campaign staffers.

The media has been very quiet about the campaign headquarters that have been vandalized and defaced by racist grafitti. The campaign honchos would like to keep it that way. After a recent break-in at a campaign office in Vincennes, IN, volunteer Ray McCormick took some pictures of the damage. When he asked the campaign about distributing his pictures to the press, he was asked not to make a big deal of it. McCormick did as they asked, but told the WaPo, "The pictures represent what we are breaking through and overcoming".