The Children Will Lead The Way
Obama and the White Vote
2008-02-06
By Eric Easter

If you’ve lived through the last few decades, you can’t help it. Even as people perceive themselves to have moved spiritually and physically into a new racial dynamic – mixed neighborhoods, mixed dating, mixed workplaces, mixed mega-churches – Americans of a certain age still harbor an inherent mistrust of the concept of racial openness.

Clearly TV’s anchors and pundits - Wolf Blitzer, Bill Bennett, Matt Lauer, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw and the entire staff of Fox News won’t let facts and evidence move their minds beyond racial division.

As the Georgia and Alabama returns came in, CNN, NBC and Fox were quick to point out the large African American populations in those states, even though Alabama’s population does not constitute enough of the electorate to secure a win without a significant shift of white voters.  

By the late evening, Barack Obama’s dramatically increased white vote – particularly among white males, coupled with his victories in places like North Dakota, Kansas, Connecticut and Idaho proved Obama’s ability to stretch beyond race, negating everything that had been said earlier.

Idaho? Location of the Aryan National Congress Idaho? FBI battle with racist/fascist Patrick Weaver Idaho?
 
Arizona Senator Clair McCaskill and California First Lady Maria Shriver have spoken eloquently about their switch to Obama. In both cases, they were pressed by their teenage children, who frankly, are living a different life than we are.

Even if there is an ultimate Obama victory as president, the cynic in me says that the openness to race that got him there will not trickle-down to the street level. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice didn’t keep the average brother from being stopped by cops without provocation. I have no reason to hope or believe that that will change if Obama takes the Oval Office. But that attitude is ingrained in me - not my kids.

The young people who influenced McCaskill and Shriver – all of our young people - are living in another place, in another time and we have yet to come to grips with what that means.
 
The question is will we learn from their example, or find ourselves unable to resist the urge to define their world under our reality – pushing greater racial cooperation yet another generation back.

Eric Easter is Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing Company. He writes about politics, culture and technology for Ebonyjet.com