Obama in Black And White

[August 20th, 2008]

By the time the Democratic National Convention rolls around on Aug. 25, Sen. Barack Obama’s supporters would love to have chalked up blue Oregon as a lock for their candidate.

But while Democratic state party chair Meredith Wood Smith says Obama will win the state, she says the party also has braced for racial attacks in Oregon, which is 2 percent black. “Obama’s ethnicity does present some challenges,” says Smith, an Obama superdelegate.

Those challenges are not surprising, says Darrell Millner, a Portland State University black studies professor. Millner suspects Obama will be a great litmus test of how far Oregon has come—or hasn’t—since it had racially exclusionary language as late as 1926 in its Constitution.

“I’m still holding my breath to see if Obama will get the treatment he deserves, being possibly the only person who could walk the racial tightrope needed for this country,” he says. “All McCain has to do is sit back and see how the race relations play out.”

To see how they’re playing out in Portland, a city that’s 6 percent black, WW went door-to-door in two neighborhoods. We spoke with about 50 people in both the predominantly white Richmond neighborhood adjoining Obama’s state headquarters in Southeast, and in the Piedmont neighborhood in North Portland, which is much more African-American and home to Obama’s smaller volunteer outpost.

While many of the whites and blacks we spoke with are voting for Obama, it wasn’t hard to find swing voters who aren’t Democrats or Republicans and also aren’t voting for him. Their reasons in the “People’s Republic of Portland” may surprise you.

^Why they're not backing Obama

Moore believes Obama’s election would set off racial upheaval, so she’s voting for McCain even though she admits such a decision is unusual for a low-income African-American woman. Obama’s “flash popularity thing does not bode well for him enduring the challenges.”

Mary Ferguson 58
Independent

She considered voting for Obama earlier this year but swung to McCain in the wake of the backlash over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s remarks about race in America. “It’s really that Obama seems ready to lie when he’s under scrutiny that gets to me.”

Eric Greenwood (Age not given)
Not registered

“I honestly believe if we vote Obama in, he’ll be assassinated, and we’ll be back to where we started politically.”

Connie Pashall 56
Independent

A supporter of President Clinton during the 1990s, Pashall admits that conservative websites have given her pause about Obama’s heritage. “If there’s anything to his Muslim background, then we’d have al-Qaeda working on our country from the top-down.”