I was in line at the TSA security checkpoint at Chicago’s O’Hare airport yesterday and had just reached the kiosk where the TSA agent checks your boarding pass and ID. The agent happened to be black. The woman behind me, a white woman in her 60s, asks him excitedly out of the blue: “Are you ready to vote for Obama?”
I know we’re in Chicago, Barack Obama’s hometown, but I think it would be a little much to assume everyone is voting for him. There must be some Republicans in the city. So why would this woman assume that a perfect stranger is voting for Obama?
Could it be that she saw the color of the man’s skin and made an assumption about his preference? This is just plain old racism, as if a black person could not possibly have considered policy stances or character or any other factor and found he preferred John McCain.
Whatever happened to Martin Luther King’s dream that someday we would judge a man by the content of his character, not the color of his skin?
And yet maybe this woman’s assumption was not so far-fetched. I received an audio file in my email from a friend the other day of a clip from the Howard Stern show, of all things. Someone had gone up to Harlem in New York to interview folks in the street, pulling aside black people in particular and asking them who they were voting for. All of them said Obama. So then the interviewer listed off a bunch of McCain policy positions, characterizing them as Obama’s, and asked if this was why they were voting Obama.
“So which of Obama’s policies do you support more: his pro-life beliefs or wanting to stay in Iraq until the job is done.” The most common answer was “both”. The interviewer even asked, “Do you like Obama’s pick of Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate? What do you think of her?” They all thought it was a great idea, they thought she was wonderful.
Maybe the woman in Chicago wasn’t so far off in her assumption. Maybe it’s the people who are voting for Obama because of the color of his skin who have betrayed the legacy of Martin Luther King.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons. Used with permission.
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- obamarally.jpg: Daniel Schwen/Wikimedia Commons | CC BY SA 2.0
Did the woman behind you know the agent personally?
There was no reason to believe she did. She didn’t call him by name and didn’t have any other interaction with him. She just seemed like another person in line.
Is this a uniquely racial issue? It seems like a general political issue. There are probably veterans voting for McCain because he’s a veteran. There are probably Catholics voting for Catholic politicians because they’re Catholic. There are probably women voting for Palin because they relate to her life as a mom, etc.
I don’t think it was a racist comment. I believe the vast majority of voting black people do vote for the liberal candidate. It was a fair assumption in my view.
And the world is full of dopes on the street who don’t know Obama’s policies. In fact, Sarah Palin’s soon-to-be son-in-law slash high school drop-out publicly admits to not knowing “anything” about Obama, while he campaigns for McCain/Palin! Luckily, he’s also not smart enough to register to vote in time for this election. Let’s hope the dopes that were interviewed in Harlem are in a similar situation.
I love your reference to Dr. King and character over color. Sadly, that world is still not here. My African-American friends all state they are voting for Obama because he is black. Even though they are solidly middle class, pro-life, and conservative. They also state that if he loses it will be due to racism. I then asked, ok, what if he is president and does a horrible job? Will he be held accountable because he is black or because he is doing a poor job? They said people will always judge him harshly because he is black. You see, it really is a “black thing” and will never be about character. That’s why the white stranger had no problem assuming who the black security agent was voting for.