Is Obama Too Black for Americans?

Brenda stands in front of her house in Oxford, Alabama. Heaps of junk that she wants to get rid off sit on old blankets. She is holding a yard sale. “But I think that I have chosen the wrong weekend,” she says, “because there are only a few customers.”

She has time to tell me in detail how fantastic she finds the Obama’s–Barack, and his cute daughters. “Soon I will hang a big banner for him off my roof.” Her birthday is on November 4th, and she would love to go to Washington to celebrate Barack’s (she pronounces it with a stretched-out second “a”)-victory.

Brenda, a single black mother, is an outsider in the predominantly white and Republican Oxford. “Yes, sometimes people are surprised that I live here, but they leave me alone. Most blacks live there,” and she points to a side street. “In the past, blacks were only allowed to live there.”

“There is nothing to see,” she assures me when I tell her that I am going to take a look, “just devastation.” And, indeed, from one street to another, there are only blacks and bitter poverty to be seen.

Welcome to Hobson City: 93 percent black, of whom 30 percent are poor, compared with 9 percent in Oxford.

Oxford and nearby Anniston are notorious for their role during the struggle for black civil rights. On May 14, 1961, angry white residents waited for a bus of Freedom Riders (human rights activists, who in the ‘60s traveled through the South in the struggle against segregation), set the bus on fire and beat the occupants so badly they had to be taken to a hospital.

Racial hate no longer takes on such a form. “But racism is alive and well in our society,” says professor Edna Green Medford of Howard University in Washington, D.C.

“Discrimination can be felt in all sectors of society,” agrees Michael Wenger of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, “in the labor market, in housing, in education, in the judicial system that sends more blacks to prison, you name it.”

Obama is half-black and half-white, so why then is he being called “the first black president?” “Anyone who has even one drop of black blood is seen in this country as black,” says Medford.

Race and racism have always been strongly felt in this election campaign. Wenger points to Bill Clinton’s attempts–during the primaries–to marginalize Obama as a “black” candidate, by associating him with Jesse Jackson, who in the ‘80s scared the living daylights out of white people.

Several Republican TV spots, Wenger believes, very subtly play on white fear of black sexuality–one of the forces behind segregation in the ‘60s. And, in recent weeks, Sarah Palin and a host of right-wing commentators have so relentlessly painted Obama as “different” and as “not one of us”, that it has created an alarming atmosphere of hatred.

However, as the economic news worsens, McCain drops farther in the polls. Obama now has an average lead of about 7 percent. The big question is whether those polls reflect the true intentions of the voters, or whether there is a “Bradley effect,” an over-estimation of the score because respondents do not dare to admit that they will never vote for a black candidate.

That phenomenon was named after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley who, during the 1982 California gubernatorial elections, had already ordered the champagne, because he was so far ahead in the polls. To the dismay of many, he lost. Professor Charles Henry of UC Berkeley, the discoverer of the “Bradley effect,” is of the opinion that Obama can only set his mind at rest when he has a lead of at least 10 percentage points. The Obama camp assumes that the polls reflect his true lead. An AP-Yahoo poll suggests that Obama would lead by an additional six percentage points in the polls if he were white. In other words: the polls already reflect the racism, which does not alter the fact that it creates a problem.

“In 1958, only 37 percent of white Americans were ready to vote for a black candidate. Today, that is number has increased to 94 percent. But that six percent that is not ready, can be the decisive factor, given that the difference between the two candidates in 2004 was only 2.5 percent,” says Karlyn Bowman from the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Yet, she thinks that Obama‘s problem with white workers has less to do with racism that with the fact that he comes across too aloof. “He is too much of a patrician.”

Professor Medford does not believe that Obama can win. “I think that whites are not ready to elect a black president. But even if he loses, Obama–the first serious black candidate–has given us a good feeling.