Racism: the elephant in the US polling booth
Voters may not say it out loud but pollsters back it up: racism is a lingering, significant factor in the 2008 presidential race that could elect the first black American to the White House.
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama has consistently portrayed himself as the candidate of all Americans, not a champion of the African-American minority, even as he plays up how proud he is of his heritage as the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black father from Kenya.
The Illinois senator, 47, earlier this year said racism was an issue the United States could not allow itself to ignore.
But in the White House race it has been deliberately and carefully addressed in a limited way. That does not come as a surprise to many analysts.
"Race is a factor for those who would vote for and against him," said Gary Weaver, an American University professor who leads its Intercultural Management Institute.
"I think that there are some white Americans who will not vote for a black person. It is unlikely they would admit this publicly, but they might admit this in anonymous surveys," Weaver said.
"On the phone, racists will often deny that they are influenced by race because it is socially unacceptable. When they enter the poll booths, these people may very well vote against Obama."
According to a recent Stanford University poll, Obama could lose six points on election day due to his color -- a troublingly price to pay for prejudice.
The United States is more than 70 percent white. About 13 percent of Americans are black, census data show, mainly descendents of slaves from West Africa, although that is not Obama's case.
In cities and towns across the United States, however, Americans increasingly describe themselves as multiracial.
In California, for example, there is no one majority, but rather a mix of hefty minority groups of Asians, Hispanics, whites and blacks.
While many whites speak positively about blacks, the two often do not interact much and there are lingering bad feelings, the Stanford poll showed.
African Americans are statistically overrepresented among US poor. In US prisons, there are six times more blacks than whites. One African American man in 15 is behind bars.
"A very small minority of Americans would admit they are racists ... perhaps the few thousand who are Neo-Nazis or KKK members," said Weaver, referring to the white supremacist movement Ku Klux Klan.
Weaver, who is white and married an African-American woman 38 years ago shortly after mixed-race unions were legalized, noted that "the biggest gap is between older white people and young people in America.
"Young people are in support of Obama by large percentages and, if they vote, they will determine the election. Historically, the percentage of young people who vote has been lower than older white people. But, in the primaries they voted in large numbers," he stressed.
"They went to schools that were integrated and learned that the US is supposed to be a multicultural, pluralistic society where everyone is equal. Thus, they view Obama as the obvious representative of this society."
For Paul Herrnson, director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of Maryland, it is difficult to know how racial discrimination against a candidate may show up.
"Race could be an obstacle, although it is not a major issue for many Americans, it remains an issue for some, especially rural white Southerners," he said.
"Even voters who say they were willing to vote for an African American ... did otherwise in the privacy of the voting booth," he said.
Still, Herrnson stressed, "recent studies suggest that the numbers who say one thing in public and do another in private is declining."
Although the US government has made reparations to groups harmed on the basis of race -- such as ethnic Japanese held in detention camps in the United States during World War II -- it has not done so to the descendents of African slaves.
Some argue against the idea saying slavery was not the fault of the current leadership; others argue the government perpetuated slavery and denied millions civil rights for centuries, with longlasting social and economic fallout.
And in a sign of the lingering tensions, officials at a US Christian college in Oregon are investigating after a cardboard effigy of Obama was hung from a tree, recalling past infamous lynchings of African-Americans.
AFP
