Fear: Behind the mild-mannered facade, Barack Obama is intent on “enslaving the white race.”

Fight The GOP Smears — GOTO: FightTheSmears.com — Support
Barack Obama @ BarackObama.com

Popularity: 29% [?]

Popularity: 28% [?]

By PHILIP OCHIENG

WHY IS THE WHITE MEDIA SO preoccupied with Barack Obama’s race? Is it because the young Illinois senator could become the first black person to be elected president of a predominantly white country? If so, then it is a sad commentary on white psychology.

   Barack and Michelle Obama
In the 1970s, the Anglo-American media showed little or no interest when an African country elected a white man as its president. To be sure, the Seychelles is as multiracial as the United States. But make no mistake about it. It is a black country.

Albert Rene is a Caucasian of French extraction — the Indian Ocean archipelago having once been a French colony. Yet his racial category did not bother the voters. They chose him only because, at heart, he was more African than most members of the OAU heads of state summit.

Detractors see nothing but racism in the excitement over Obama’s blackness. The white West seems electrified that the scion of an adventurous “tribesman” from deep inside the Dark Continent may become the most powerful man in a white-dominated world.

The question is: Is Obama a black man? There are, of course, two ways of answering that question — first by his attitude and then by his skin colour. Looking at how he habitually responds to social cues, some of his fellow black Americans are tempted to dismiss him as an Uncle Tom.

An Uncle Tom is the American equivalent of our Afro-Saxons — jet-black individuals so mesmerised by white bourgeois values that they fawn shamelessly on any white person they meet.

But, evidently, Obama is not an Uncle Tom. Therefore, we must say that, if he is black, it is only on the surface — that is, skin deep. Most people do not see how strange that statement is. By what figment of the imagination can Senator Barack Obama be called black even on the evidence of skin?

In my reading, I have met only one person struck by this absurdity. Indeed, Richard Dawkins, the outspoken Oxford evolutionary biologist, is germane here because he shares something vital with Barack Obama Senior and myself: All three of us were born in Kenya many decades ago.

But although Dawkins is as white as gypsum, he knows much more than most of mankind about mankind’s “raciation.” That is why he “lights no torch” — a phrase which I borrow from him — on the scourge of racism. That is why it appals him that Obama is called a black man.

Of his many books, Dawkins is best known for The Selfish Gene and, more recently, The God Delusion, a book which puts him in the same bracket as two other Kenyans — an equally controversial white evolutionary biologist called Richard Leakey and a charcoal-black man called Philip Ochieng.

I am still in the middle of “A Pilrimage to the Dawn of Life: The Ancestor’s Tale“, Dawkins’s latest work. But I have reached the page where he demands to be shown the logic of a system which makes you black even when your blood is 90 per cent “Caucasian” and only 10 per cent “Negroid.”

Writes Dawkins: “People who are universally agreed by all Americans to be ‘black’ may draw less than one-eighth of their ancestry from Africa, and often have a light skin colour well within the normal range for people universally agreed to be ‘white’.”

He draws the reader’s attention to a “…picture of four American politicians, two of whom are described in all newspapers as ‘black’ [and] the other two as ‘white’.” The picture is of Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. Dawkins asks an inevitable question:

“Wouldn’t a Martian, unschooled in our conventions but able to see skin shades, be more likely to split them three against one? Surely, yes.” Why? Because, in the picture, Rice stands out “darkly” against the other three, not to mention that her attire (female) would also strike the Martian’s eye as oddly out of line.

Dawkins goes on: “But in our culture, almost everybody will immediately ’see’ Mr Powell as ‘black,’ even in this particular photograph, which happens to show him with possibly lighter skin than [even] Bush and Rumsfeld.” What exactly can it mean?

Many members of the American intelligentsia would boast that it is a manifestation of “pluralism.” But many others have sneered at this claim. Carl Friedrich (in The New Belief in the Common Man) agrees that “The … United States [is a] ‘teeming nation of nations’.” He asserts: “Here all the nationalities of Europe have come together…”

But he hastens to point out that there is a great deal of phobia even between the white immigrants from Europe, saying that, “…while they are all Americans, it would be a great mistake to think that the different nationalities embrace each other in loving affection.”

As H. L. Mencken wrote long ago in his American Language, Americans have coined numerous derogatory terms for each European ethnic group — pejoratives like wops, chinks, limeys and yids.

In “The Evil That Men Do,” Brian Masters informs us: “In the First World War, the Germans were called Huns by the British and Boches by the French. The Vietnamese were called gooks by the [white] Americans, Jews are referred to as yids and almost any dark-skinned person is a wog to many Englishmen. While it may not be acceptable, except to a sadist, to tear a peasant lady’s head off as her children watch, the feat can be accomplished with ease if she is only a gook, a wog or a yid.”

THE QUESTION IS: SHOULD Americans be patted on the back for hurling these unfriendly tribal epithets at one another?

Is this the significance of what Daniel Easterman (in New Jerusalems) and Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg (in The Great Reckoning) brag about as “cultural pluralism” or John Naisbitt (in Megatrends) as “multiculturalism”?

In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom avers that “… anybody can become an American in an instant…” But Friedrich points out that America’s social groups, even ethnic whites, have to think twice whether they really belong fully.

If this were not so, America’s mega-cities would long ago have amalgamated their “Chinatowns,” “Polack towns” and the “spa-ghetto” in which New York City’s ethnic Italians languish.

They would also have banished from their vocabulary the word Wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), given its connotation of superiority over all other white groups and racial minorities. Even Naisbitt recognises that the American “melting pot” of races and white ethnic groups is a myth.

For him, there exists something much better than a melting pot — cultural pluralism. Writes Naisbitt: “We have moved from the myth of the melting pot to a celebration of cultural diversity.

“It is a far cry from the way the Americans handled ethnicity in the past. We seemed to put new immigrants through a metaphorical blender until they came out [as] homogenised Americans, with little remaining of their former heritage.” So what has replaced the melting pot?

His reply: “One key factor behind the increasing acceptance of ethnic diversity has been the rapid growth of two minorities in particular: Spanish-speaking Americans, who [in the mid-1980s] officially number l5 million … or about 6.4 per cent of the population, and Asian Americans, about 3.5 million or about l.5 per cent of the US population.”

“With three sizeable minorities now in the nation — the largest being the blacks, with 26 million or about one-tenth of the US population — the either/or world where Americans were either black or white is over for ever. That was a world structured to encourage uniformity rather than diversity.”

“Blacks, as the only recognised ethnic group, encountered racial and ethnic prejudice; whites, who were themselves ethnically diverse, tried to emulate (subconsciously perhaps) the Wasp ideal. With more racial and ethnic groups now (think of Asian Orientals and Latins, who are black, white and brown), uniformity is impossible…”

“And white Americans are identifying with their own ethnic roots to join the new game of diversity. Even major ethnic groups are diverse. Latins are Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Guatemalan, San Salvadorean, Columbian, and from a variety of Central and Southern American countries.”

Note this. By “Asians,” Americans mean Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Laotian, Indonesian and other Mongoloid immigrants. The word Asian has nothing to do with the British or East African “Asians” of subcontinental origin.

So, in Naisbitt’s account black Americans are just another “ethnic group” — indeed, even as “the only group recognisable as ethnic.” Why? Is it because they are recognisable by a common colour, their blackness?

But why can’t anybody else be seen as ethnic through his white skin? The truth is the opposite. Blacks are the only non-ethnic community of non-natives in the entire North American landscape. They are the only genuine nation in the United States.

For they are composed of all African (and, given Barack Obama and others of mixed race, even all European and Native American) ethnicities so well blended together that their various ethnic peculiarities (such as Africa’s Bantu, Hamite, Nilote, Bushmanoid or Luo, Wolof and Kongo) have long disappeared.

Slave conditions (and this may have been a blessing) forced them to unite under a single yoke, discarding their narrow original African (and European) costumes.

Moreover, Naisbitt’s advocacy of racial and ethnic diversity in conditions of economic and intellectual injustice that themselves follow racial and ethnic lines is clearly amoral. It is not based on each group’s natural right to existence but merely on the fact that their presence in America is unavoidable.

He seems to say: “History has dumped us all here and since — because of our chauvinism and economic greed— we are unable to unite as races, let us celebrate our racial and ethnic diversity. Let us not worry about our material differences (even though they are based on these very racial differences).”

Naisbitt seems to say: “All the races and tribes of America are here to stay whether you like it or not. You gain exactly nothing — and even injure your own selves — by making so much noise about it and burning one another’s houses and churches.” Bully for him.

But it poses a good question for Americans that, if its ruling classes were longer-sighted, the country would have asked itself long ago to save its citizens and other members of the human family the unnecessary suffering that white racism has inflicted on other races as well as on the whites themselves for so many centuries.

Yet, by neatly avoiding the fact that self-interest underlies these tragedies, Naisbitt is able to make the simplistic claim that the American people are consciously making the choice against the “melting pot” and that the “game” now is “cultural pluralism.”

The fact, however, is that this trend is a result of Wasp chauvinism rather than of any choice freely and consciously made by “Americans.” It does not result from any realisation that such pluralism is better than a melting pot. One hopes, moreover, that Naisbitt is confining his statement to the US because others have made diametrically opposite claims about Europe.

But if Naisbitt is right to say that there is no such thing as a blend or a melting pot as far as the ethnic spirit goes, surely Allan Bloom, the respected Chicago educator, is also right. Fundamentally, all these European ethnic groups and other immigrants have, over a protracted period of time, become homogenised.

Yet this is correct only up to a point. Only in the liberal ideology of individualism — only in greed, in the go-getting spirit, only in the ferocity with which that quest is pursued — is it possible to become an American overnight — not in terms of essence, not in terms of ethnicity and race.

Bloom states that any immigrant can become an American the minute he or she lands on the Atlantic shores of that country. In other words, there is nothing easier than to become an American. But there is a racial element even in this. Bloom’s assertion is correct only to the extent that it refers to white individuals.

IT IS OF THEM THAT HISTORIAN Maldwyn Allen Jones speaks. In Made in America, Bill Bryson quotes him as saying: “Culturally estranged from their parents by their American education, and wanting nothing so much as to become and to be accepted as Americans, many second-generation immigrants made deliberate efforts to rid themselves of their [ethnic] heritage.

“The adoption of American clothes, speech and interests, often accompanied by the shedding of an exotic surname, were all part of a process whereby antecedents were repudiated as a means of improving status.”

Bryson reports that it was an immigrant from Western Europe who coined the phrase melting pot to describe this phenomenon of overnight Americanisation of what a detractor called “the dregs of Europe.”

“By the turn of the [19th] century,” Bryson writes, New York had become easily the most cosmopolitan city the world had ever seen. Eighty per cent of its five million inhabitants were either foreign-born or the children of immigrants.

“It had more Italians than the combined populations of Florence, Genoa and Venice, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than Kiev. As Herman Melville put it: ‘We are not so much a nation as a world.‘”

But, reports Bryson, it was a British Zionist called Israel Zangwill who, in 1908, wrote a play depicting this immigration avalanche. He called it The Melting Pot and thus gave the Americans and the rest of the English-speaking world an unforgettably expressive term.

THE QUESTION, HOWEVER, IS: has America ever really been a melting pot? How deep was this Americanisation of Europeans? When the Europeans left their ethnic settings to settle in America, they were quick to learn American ways — but only what it took to be accepted as Americans by mainstream Americans.

And we learn that what it took to do that was extremely superficial. Here is Bryson: “Once across the ocean, the immigrants tended naturally to congregate in enclaves. Almost all migrants from Norway between 1815 and 1860 settled in just four states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois.

“In much the same way, two-thirds of the Dutch were to be found in Michigan, New York, Wisconsin and Iowa… In the first half of the 19th century, several German societies were formed with the express intention of… concentrating immigration in a particular area [so] that they could take it over.

“One German spoke for many when he dreamed of Pennsylvania becoming ‘an entirely German state where… the beautiful German language would be used in the legislative halls of the courts of justice’…”

We learn that “Pennsylvanian Dutch” nearly became the official language of that state, a language so called by corrupting Deutsch, the German word for “German.”

This was the beginning of the white ghetto system in America, and the increasingly rapid stream of immigrants from Eastern and Mediterranean Europe soon revealed the age-old arrogance of people of Northern European origin.

This Nordic conceit was not native to America. It was imported from Europe. In Africans and Their History, Joseph Harris, a black American historian, describes the attitude of one 19th-century European exponent of it: “Some critics have observed that Joseph de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’Inegalite (’Essay on Inequality’) was the most directly influential publication on racism in the 19th century.

“Gobineau, a Frenchman, extolled the racial purity of the Nordics and explained that as the Franks [Nordics] mixed with Gallic [Celtic] stocks, the former became weaker and more decadent, which eventually led to their overthrow by commoner elements, the leaders of the French Revolution.”

According to Gobineau, then, France’s alliance of aristocrats and priests ruled France by dint of their Teutonic (Frankish) blood. To disturb this arrangement — through the demand for justice that culminated in the great bourgeois revolution of 1789 — could only be the work of the “lower blood” Celto-Latin admixture extant in the French nation.

Harris reports: In his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Houston S. Chamberlain, an Englishman who later became a German citizen, expanded on Gobineau’s ideas. Chamberlain attempted to show that almost everything worthwhile in history [was] accomplished by Nordics.

“He combined ideas on the evolutionary struggle with the will for power and presented a doctrine of the master race similar to that later adopted by Hitler.” Both Gobineau and Chamberlain were writing at a time when immigration into the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe and the Balkans had become a flood.

According to Bill Bryson, “In 1907, to give vent to the growing concerns that America was being swept to oblivion by a tide of rabble [from Eastern Europe], Congress established a panel called the Dillingham Commission.”

Its 42-volume report concluded essentially that immigration before 1880 had been no bad thing — the immigrants, primarily from Northern Europe, were (by implication) industrious, decent, trustworthy and largely Protestant, and as a result had assimilated well.

“But immigration after 1880 had been marked by the entry into America of uneducated, unsophisticated, largely shiftless and certainly non-Protestant masses from Southern and Eastern Europe. It maintained that the [immigrant] Germans and Scandinavians had bought farms and become productive members of American society, while the second merely soaked up charity and acted as a [drain] on industrial earnings.”

It was the same Teutonic conceit that the world has since become familiar with.

And yet when a black man, Andrew Young pointed this out (when he was Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations), there was great uproar from Wasps in America and Europe.

An otherwise intelligent white writer makes this fatuous claim about the British, especially the English: “Although they often behaved tyrannically in their empire, the British are not by inclination a tyrannical people.” No statement can be more meaningless.

No race, nation or tribe is ever tyrannical or chauvinistic “by inclination,” that is to say, genetically. The British Empire was tyrannical in whatever way you look at it. But “inclination” had nothing to do with it. It is not the British people who are to blame — although all classes of British society were seduced into racism by the propaganda of the upper classes.

It was the economic interests of these classes that come into play. Such interests are what propel all empire-builders. Tyranny and empire-building are attributes of civilisation, culture and opportunity.

Moreover, it is a class question: Lower-class members of the same race, nation or tribe will equally suffer from it under the illusion that they are actually beneficiaries — as Kenya’s own elite Gema grouping seduced the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru masses into believing that their interests are identical even as their Kamatusa counterparts were doing the same to the Kalenjin, Maasai and Turkana masses.

Tyranny over other nations can assume national proportions only to the extent that the ruling class of one race can turn a whole nation of a different race into a class targeted for exploitation. Racism becomes a national thought-habit only to the extent that the lower classes are deeply swayed by the prejudices, trappings, ideas and practices of the ruling classes within the same nation and race.

Only bourgeois Britain — and not the British in general — colonised and tyrannised, for example, Kenya, though, of course, British propagandists gave the British working class the illusion that they were also beneficiaries.

Ali Mazrui writes somewhere, “It is worth distinguishing between Germanic whites … on one side, and Latin whites … on the other. Germanic cultures encompass not only the Germans but also the Anglo-Saxons (British and mainstream United States) and the Dutch.”

“Latin culture embraces not only Italians but also the traditions of Spain, Portugal and France… On the balance, Germanic cultures have been more obsessed with separation of the races than have Latin cultures.”

“It may not be an accident that the most elaborate cases of segregation, and the most fanatical forms of racism in the 20th century, have been perpetrated by Germans (Nazism), Afrikaners (apartheid), Americans (the Jim Crow culture of lynching) and the British (with their segregated empire). All these racist traditions are culturally Germanic.”

“Of course, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Italians and the French have had their own versions of racism. But their brand of ethnocentrism has been less segregationist, less obsessed with the social and sexual separation of races. Latin whites have intermarried more readily with non-whites and mixed socially with other races with greater ease than have Germanic whites.”

By separating “the Germans” from “the Anglo-Saxons,” Mazrui forgets that the Angles originated from Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein and the Saxons from Germany’s Nieder Sachsen (Lower Saxony).

Among the Germanic peoples, Mazrui does not mention the Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and Icelanders (and a part of the Swiss), probably because the Scandinavians, being shielded from contact both with Mediterranean whites and with blacks and other races, have never shown very intense racist attitudes.

Nor does the professor mention the other great European culturo-linguistic groups, such as the Celts (Irish, Welsh, Scots and the Bretons of France), the Slavs (Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Serbs, Croats, etc.) He is also silent on the Basque, Suomi (Finns) and Magyar (Hungarians), who, linguistically at least, are not Europeans.

But he is right on two scores. Racism is a cultural phenomenon, not a genetic one. The apparent reason that white racism has been more intense among the Germanic peoples than among the Latins — despite what I have just said about the Scandinavians — is that the Latins have been contiguous with the blacks and browns for millennia.

Once upon a time, they even looked to black peoples — like the Danaans of Greece, the Copts of Egypt, the pre-Arab Libyans, the Moors of Mauritania and Spain and other “Ethiopians” — for intellectual, scientific and religious inspiration and guidance.

The Germanic peoples, on the other hand, have met with these brands of humanity only relatively recently, namely after the Germanics had taken over world leadership in technological and intellectual matters.

NEVERTHELESS, THE ASSUMPTION by David Lamb (in The Africans) that racist attitudes belong only to the uneducated lower classes of whites, is wrong. Racism, as we have seen in America, is more an economic expression than a question of skin colour.

Moreover, it should be patent that only the upper classes of the Germanic race — as opposed to the lower classes — had the opportunity to travel overseas to meet other races and form opinions about them, including racist opinions. Anybody familiar with the intellectual history of Europe will see that racism was not propagated by the lower classes — who, at any rate, had no access to the media.

The greatest apostles of racism include such highly educated intellectuals as Luis Agassiz, Cyril Burt, Havelock Ellis, GWF Hegel, Richard Herrnstein, David Hume, Arthur Jensen, Cesare Lombroso, J. Murray, Albert Schweitzer, Joseph Seligman, Hugh Trevor-Roper and HG Wells.

But in this way the Germanic peoples — especially the Germans, Dutch, English and Yankee — have brought onto the world (and onto their own selves) a great deal of completely unnecessary suffering, bloodshed and death.

It is through their colonies — intra-European as well as overseas — that the white dregs and other racial groups were taught to look down upon one another in a descending order and prevented from tackling the main problem.

In his Autobiography, Malcolm X has a fascinating report on this graduated intra-white stupidity: “[New York City's Harlem] hadn’t always been a community of Negroes. It had first been a Dutch settlement, I learned.

“Then began the massive waves of poor and half-starved and ragged immigrants from Europe, arriving with everything they owned in the world in bags and sacks on their backs. The Germans came first [to Harlem]; the Dutch edged away for them, and Harlem became all-German.”

“Then came the Irish, running from the potato famine [in Ireland]. The Germans ran, looking down their noses at the Irish, who took over Harlem. Next, the Italians; same thing — the Irish ran [away] from them. The Italians had Harlem when the Jews came down the gangplanks — and then the Italians left.”

“Today all these same immigrants’ descendants are running as hard as they can to escape the descendants of the Negroes who helped to unload the immigrant ships. I was staggered when old-time Harlemites told me that while this immigrant musical chairs game had been going on, Negroes had been in New York since 1683, before any of [the whites] came, and had been ghettoed all over the city.”

“They had first been in the Wall Street area; then they were pushed into Greenwich Village [south Manhattan]. The next shove was up to the Pennsylvania Station area. And then, the last stop before Harlem, the black ghetto was concentrated around 52nd Street, which is how 52nd Street got the Swing Street name and reputation that lasted long after the Negroes were gone.”

“Then, in 1910, a Negro real estate man somehow got two or three Negro families into one Jewish Harlem apartment house. The Jews fled from that house, then from that block, and more Negroes came in to fill their apartments. Then whole blocks of Jews ran, and still more Negroes came uptown, until in a short time, Harlem was like it is today — virtually all black.”

We know it cannot be genetic. It must have been some event remembered only in the subconscious that made the European so extremely intolerant of any but the closest relatives. This kind of behaviour is unknown among other ethnic communities in human history.

I reiterate that, in this way, the whites, especially the Germanic peoples, have brought totally unnecessary suffering upon mankind, including upon themselves. John Griffin, a self-liberated white man, once swallowed chemicals to blacken his skin in order to be able to experience firsthand how the Negro felt in the face of this white ferocity.

Griffin subsequently wrote a book called Black Like Me, in which he observes that whoever causes suffering to other people on the basis of such totally false assumptions as racial superiority causes an equal amount of suffering even to himself.

For racism is hatred; and hatred, self-evidently, is not a peaceful mental condition to be in. Racism is mental agony, a disease more acute than any bodily ailment. The white race in general and the Germanic peoples in particular continue with this degradation of human beings — and of themselves — at their own expense.

But nowhere is this self-consciousness of racial differences as acute as in the United States. This is perplexing because America is also the country in which science has made the most profound discoveries of the indivisibility of the human species.

In Origin and People of the Lake (both written with a white American called Roger Lewin), our own Richard Leakey repeatedly remarks that, although, externally, Homo sapiens is among the most raciated of all species, it is also, internally, probably the most homogeneous.

All evolutionary scientists I am familiar with — Dawkins, Dennett, Gould, Halacy, Morris, Sheppard, etc — affirm that raciation is good for a species because it makes it possible for it to put its survival eggs in many baskets (in case of an environmental holocaust).

This puts Barack Obama in a much better position than any “pedigree whites” or “pedigree blacks.” He is 50 per cent European and 50 per cent African. And, if he is conscious of this double heritage, he might serve America with a much keener sense of justice than any “pure Caucasian” or “pure Negro.”

Dawkins, then, is right in a double sense. It is the height of injustice to think of a person as “black” just because his blood is “tainted” with “black,” whereas, if “taint” is what it is, then his blood is equally tainted with “white,” in which case, he equally qualifies also as white.

The anthropologist Lionel Tiger — I learn from Dawkins — called it a “contamination metaphor.” It is perilous because it emphasises the inessential (external appearance) at the expense of the essential (the internal composition) of the individual, whatever his or her race may be.

In this way, the United States — a great country in every other way — has denied itself potentially excellent leadership for too long by putting a premium on such superficialities as race, sex and religion.

RELATED ARTICLE: From Home Squared to the US Senate: How Barack Obama Was Lost and Found

About The Author: Philip Ochieng — is a Kenyan Luo, and an Editor with the Nation Media Group. Like Obama Senior, he too went to the US on the famous Tom Mboya Airlift of 1959 [when hundreds of Kenyan students were given scholarships to American universities]. He first met Obama Senior in Tom Mboya’s Nairobi office [Mboya was then the secretary general of the Kenya Federation of Labour]. Obama and Ochieng met up again on returning to Nairobi and remained drinking buddies for many years.

Popularity: 29% [?]

By: Paul Harris in Williamson, West Virginia

“Bigot” Democrats in rural strongholds refuse to give backing to Obama

The conservative Appalachian heartlands voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton - and will switch to McCain in November

Johnny Telvor was not happy about Barack Obama becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Not happy at all.

Standing outside the sturdy courthouse in the sweltering heat of a West Virginia afternoon in the small town of Williamson, Telvor smoked a cigarette and bluntly gave his opinion of Obama’s historic mission to be America’s first black president.

‘We’ll end up slaves. We’ll be made slaves just like they was once slaves,’ he said. Telvor, a white Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton in West Virginia’s primary, said he planned to vote for Republican John McCain in November. ‘At least he’s an American,’ he added with a disarmingly friendly smile.

Such racist opinions are a rough antidote to the giddy optimism that has swept through much of America’s chattering classes over the past week. Since Obama beat Clinton and finally became the Democratic nominee liberal pundits from New York to San Francisco have eagerly discussed how Obama’s unique candidacy will put America’s racially charged past behind it. The United States, they have argued, is finally prepared to elect a black president and absolve its historic sins of slavery and Jim Crow. But the uglier truth is that part of white America remains secretly - or sometimes openly - deeply distrustful of the idea of a black president.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the vastness of the Appalachian mountains that run from Maine through West Virginia and all the way down to Georgia. Here Obama faces his greatest problem in convincing poor white citizens to vote for him. They certainly have not backed him so far. In West Virginia Clinton trounced Obama by more than 30 points. It is a place of deep poverty and astonishing natural beauty - and it is overwhelmingly white. Outsiders deride it as ‘hillbilly’ country. But it is also somewhere that has a special place in America’s heart. Appalachia is where the TV series The Waltons was set. It is a place of deep family values, where clannish folk have created a vibrant mountain culture of God and guns. It is also a place not used to voting for a black politician. ‘McCain will win here,’ said Telvor. ‘No doubt about it.’

Williamson is a typical slice of Appalachia. The town of 3,000 souls lies on the banks of the Tug Fork River, overshadowed by the mountains that surround it. A railway runs through the centre of town, which has long been used to hard times as the coal industry faded away.

The town is in the heart of Mingo County in West Virginia. In last month’s Democratic primary, a staggering 88 per cent of people in Mingo County voted for Clinton - the highest number in the whole state - compared with just 8 per cent willing to put a cross by Obama’s name. Those are landslide numbers that even some third world dictators would be embarrassed to record. And, as went Mingo, so went the entire state. ‘This state is white, elderly and working class. This is not natural Obama country. People are not used to having black politicians on the ballot,’ said Professor Allan Hammock, a political scientist at West Virginia University.

The sheer scale of Clinton’s win in West Virginia - repeated from Pennsylvania to Georgia - took many pundits by surprise. But it did not shock people in Williamson, Jack Spence among them. The elderly retiree, enjoying the hot weather on a street bench, said he voted for Clinton and, now she has lost, he plans to sit out the November election. ‘I can’t vote for a Republican. My daddy would just roll over in his grave,’ he said. But nor can he bring himself to vote for Obama, though he insisted it was not because of race. ‘That does not matter to me. Though it might to a lot of folks around here,’ he said.

Was there anything Obama could say during the coming campaign to convince him? ‘Nope,’ Spence replied. Then he broached the one issue many Americans consider off-limits: the potential security threat to Obama. ‘Look, someone will kill him. Whoever Obama picks as running mate will end up being president.’ Spence’s ready smile and chatty manner on the thorny issue of Obama’s possible murder gave little clue as to whether he thought it would be a bad thing or not.

   An Appalachian HillBilly — Clinging To God, Guns, and “MoonShine Liquor!”

Often such sentiments are dismissed as the ramblings of a few diehards, carrying with them the prejudices of a by-gone age. After all, Iowa, a very white state, was the place Obama first won. But the fact is Obama’s Appalachian problem is very real.

Williamson and West Virginia are far from alone in rejecting Obama. Take Pikeville, Kentucky. It welcomes visitors with a cheerful sign that boasts it is one of ‘the 100 best small towns in America’. But it is not friendly country for Obama. On Pikeville’s main street, just outside a now abandoned Obama campaign office, Stanley Little laughed when asked if he could support Obama. ‘I will vote for McCain,’ he said. Little, a maintenance man for local offices, had one simple reason why he too was rejecting his long family history of voting Democrat. ‘McCain is one of us. Obama ain’t,’ he said, leaving little doubt as to who he meant by ‘us’.

Pikeville’s rejection of Obama in Kentucky topped even Mingo County’s. Pike County, a huge stretch of forest and hills in the east of Kentucky, voted for Clinton by a thumping 91 per cent versus a mere 7 per cent for Obama. Only nearby Magoffin County (where Clinton scored 93 per cent) is even less friendly to an Obama candidacy.

It is not just an Appalachian issue. There are pockets of this sentiment across America from the working class white suburbs of Philadelphia to the rust belt towns of Ohio and Michigan. Many poor, white Americans are prepared to flock to McCain rather than face a black occupant of the White House. No public courtship between Obama and Clinton - carried out on the nation’s TV screens - is likely to change that. In Georgia a local bar owner has been selling T-shirts featuring Obama being endorsed by a cartoon monkey eating a banana. The sale prompted outraged coverage in the local media but the T-shirts quickly sold out. In Vincennes, Indiana, an Obama campaign office was vandalised on the eve of the state’s primary, its windows smashed and its walls spray-painted with the words ‘Hamas votes BHO’ (for Barack Hussein Obama).

The difficult truth is that Appalachia is unusual mostly because many people here are willing to openly talk about what some of their fellow citizens are secretly thinking. In exit polls of the recent primaries in Kentucky and West Virginia, one in five Democrats confessed to pollsters that race was a factor in their voting choice. ‘West Virginia and Kentucky were just more honest than other parts of the country. A lot of other people know it’s not socially acceptable to mention that sort of thing,’ said Professor Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University and expert on racial politics.

Indeed much of America’s media has been resolutely focused on a ‘post-racial’ vision of America despite the clear evidence that race remains a huge divide in American life. Obama’s own bi-racial background and his campaign’s language of inclusivity have conjured up a beguiling image of a race-free America. It has built on other recent black political successes in America, such as Newark mayor Cory Booker and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, who have won on the back of black-white voting alliances. There is truth to it too. Obama has run a remarkable campaign, winning many white states such as Kansas and Montana. He has attracted vast, racially diverse rallies, especially of young people who seem open to putting racial divides behind them. And indeed there is much hope that Obama can change things. Gillespie points out that recent studies have shown that white voters in US cities that have elected a black mayor for the first time prove far more willing to elect one for a second term. ‘They realise the sky has not fallen in. That life went on,’ Gillespie joked. If Obama does win the White House, that experience could be repeated on a national scale for all Americans. Few things could be more important in finally drawing the poison of racism out of American life.

But behind such optimism, another America looms. It is an America far from the headlines that have proclaimed Obama’s candidacy a revolution that will atone for a race-tinged history. This is the America where outrageous rumours that Obama is a Muslim are readily believed. It is the America where Telvor is able to voice a sentiment that ‘Obama might actually be the antichrist‘ without apparent irony or fear of contradiction. It is a slice of America trapped in the dreadful history of race relations and the legacy of slavery and segregation.

On the streets of towns such as Pikeville and Williamson, and in the minds of people like Little and Telvor, that past lives on. It is kept in the present by poverty, joblessness and a fear of the different. It is also a powerful force that should not be underestimated. It could even decide who will be the next President. ‘McCain will beat Obama. There’s a lot of Democrats around here that will be switching side to vote for him,’ Little said. Behind him a white-washed message in the closed Obama Pikeville office read: ‘Vote Obama 08: change!’ In the brutal summer heat it seemed a forlorn hope. It was asking for the overthrow of generations of entrenched prejudice. But, come November, a black president might finally be pulling up a chair behind the desk in the Oval Office. If he does, that slogan of change might just end up being a prophecy. Even in Appalachia.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Early on in the presidential campaign my loyalties were divided between Governor Bill Richardson and Sen. Barack Obama. Obama was the Young Turk with the gift of eloquence and the message of hope, and Richardson was the seasoned politician with the Mother of all Resumes.

Richardson is supremely qualified to be president, he has a resume that few can match: Governor of New Mexico, Congressman, Chairman of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association in 2005 and 2006, United States Secretary of Energy and United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

But to be honest it wasn’t Richardson’s impressive credentials that captured my interest — it was his ethnicity. Unfortunately, when many Americans see a Latino, they imagine he’s a landscaper, carpenter, field worker or dishwasher. Richardson is an extremely successful Hispanic who has shattered all the stereotypes. I yearned for Richardson to be the next president of the United States because of what it would mean for Hispanics in particular and for race relations in general.

This Latino columnist would have been delighted if Richardson had secured the Democratic nomination. Richardson’s campaign never caught fire, he had the credentials, but he didn’t have the charisma. Americans want a president they can imagine themselves having a beer with. The Average Joe doesn’t care if his accountant is a socially awkward nerd, as long as he is a whiz at solving financial problems. But we want a president who is eloquent, charismatic and likeable.

Richardson didn’t even make an impression in the Hispanic community, probably because of his Anglo surname. I had a hard time convincing some of my friends and family members that Richardson is a Latino. Oh well, I hope Obama considers Richardson as a running mate.

In the Virginia primary I voted for Sen. Barack Obama; and I am doing everything I can to advance his candidacy. One day when I’m in a rest home, I want to be able to tell youngsters who come and visit me that in my own little way, I helped elect the first African American president.

I can understand why Obama has captured the imagination of the American people, — the senator from Illinois represents change and hope. Obama is one of those rare politicians who transcends party affiliations and even race.

But I can especially understand why African Americans are solidly behind Obama. Jim Crow laws, that prohibited blacks from using “whites only” restrooms and other public accommodations were still in place as late as 1965. For an African American who as a youngster was forced to drink from a “colored” drinking fountain, a black president represents a quantum leap forward.

If most blacks had the attitude “I’m for Obama because he’s black, regardless of his stand on the issues”, who are we to say that’s not right? “I’m for Obama because he’s black”, might not be the politically correct posture, but when you have suffered discrimination sometimes you think with your gut.

But it’s important to note that at the start of this long and bitter presidential campaign, Hillary and Obama were splitting the black vote. It wasn’t until Hillary staring losing some contests, that she got desperate and played the race card. Bill Clinton’s infamous race-baiting comments after the South Carolina primary caused, blacks to desert Hillary in droves, and Obama now garners about 90% of the black vote.

It would be a tragedy if the Jeremiah Wright controversy derails Obama’s presidential aspirations. The Whitey-hating Wright is the antithesis of everything that Obama holds dear: Inclusiveness and racial harmony. I hope blue-collar whites will forgive Obama for his mistake in not repudiating Wright months ago, and vote for Obama, the one candidate who can unite Americans of all races.

I still expect Obama to win the Democratic nomination and the general election. When Obama is inaugurated as the next president of the United States, it will be a momentous occasion and a time of rejoicing for African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, Whites and Americans of all other enthnicities.

A controversial examination of how our political system, despite “get out the vote” rhetoric, works to suppress the vote—especially the votes of African Americans.

“Karl Rove began to impress upon leading Republicans…that…one way to address the party’s electoral problem…was to suppress black and Hispanic turnout—a task that would become far easier if the airwaves were buzzing with news of voter-fraud indictments.”—Harold Meyerson, The Washington Post

Popularity: 28% [?]