The McCain campaign’s depiction of Barack Obama as a mysterious ”other” may not resonate in the national polls, but it has found a receptive audience with many white Southern voters.
White voters in the Deep South make it clear that they remain deeply uneasy with Obama — with his politics, his personality and his biracial background. Being the son of a white mother and a black father has come to symbolise Obama’s larger mysteries for many voters.
”He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipefitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, Alabama. ”He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”
Whether Obama is black, half-black or half-white often seems to overshadow the question of his exact stand on particular issues, and rough-edged comments on the subject flowed, easily even from voters who said race should not be an issue in the campaign. Many voters seemed to have no difficulty criticising the mixing of the races — and thus the product of such mixtures — even as they indignantly said a candidate’s colour held no importance for them.
”I would think of him as I would of another of mixed race,” said Glenn Reynolds (74), a retired textile worker in Martinsdale, Virginia. ”God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry. You should be proud of what you are, and not intermarry.” Obama is ”a real charismatic person”, Reynolds added, ”in that he’s the type of person you can’t really hate, but you don’t really trust”.
Other voters swept past such ambiguities into old-fashioned Âracist gibes. ”He’s going to tear up the rose bushes and plant a watermelon patch,” said James Halsey, chuckling, while standing in a Wal-Mart parking lot with fellow workers in the environmental clean-up business. ”I just don’t think we’ll ever have a black president.”
There is nothing unusual about mixed-race people in the South, although in decades past there was no ambiguity about the subject. Legally and socially, a person with any black blood was considered black when segregation was the law. But the historic candidacy of Obama, who has said he considers himself black, has led some voters in the south to categorise him as neither black nor white.
While many voters said that made them uncomfortable, others said they were pleased by Obama’s lack of connection to African-American politics. ”He doesn’t come from the African-American perspective — he’s not of that tradition,” said Kimi Oaks, a prominent community volunteer in the Mobile area.
Bud Rowell, a retired oil field worker, said he was uncertain about Obama’s racial identity, and was critical of him for being equivocal and indecisive. But Rowell also said that personal experience had made him more sympathetic to biracial people.
”I’ve always been against the blacks,” said Rowell, who is in his 70s, recalling how he was arrested for throwing firecrackers in the black section of town. But now that he has three biracial grandchildren — ”it was really rough on me” — he said he had ”found out they were human beings, too”. —
