Embracing The Race Issue

Experts Say Obama Needs To Strike A Delicate Balance To Win Over White Voters

by Will Englund

Monday, Aug. 25, 2008


By any account, Barack Obama faces a minefield in his attempt to prevail in a majority-white country, with its painful legacy of race relations. How can he win over the dubious whites he needs to take the election?

Make an emotional connection, says the co-author of "The Black Image in the White Mind." "Tell his story, which is a classic American story," says a onetime party honcho. Show blue-collar workers he can manage the economy, says an Ohio party pro.

But a Princeton scholar who studies race and politics offers a more confrontational approach. "Embrace blackness," says Melissa Harris-Lacewell, author of "Sister Citizen."

That sounds like a paradox, but it's a way to help those who harbor some measure of racial anxiety to feel they have a full picture of Obama and then look beyond his race, says Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor at Princeton. There's a broad consensus, in any case, that only by letting people see him as a man, and not as an emblem of racial identity, can Obama win the white votes that would make him America's first black president.

The white vote, of course, is not monolithic, on this or any other issue. A poll by Stanley Greenberg, for instance, shows that Obama's perception problems with older, working-class whites center on patriotism and experience. Still, for a broad range of white Americans, race is a knotty and uncomfortable question.

There is a reservoir of goodwill among millions of white Americans on race that Obama can tap into, says Andrew Rojecki, a communications professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago whose study of television led to an award-winning 2000 book on how whites perceive blacks through mass media. Prominent African-Americans -- from Colin Powell to Oprah Winfrey to Tiger Woods -- have succeeded in getting whites to think of them not as black stereotypes but as complicated and interesting individuals.

In part that's because of a change in attitudes over the past generation, a shift that perhaps was hitting full stride at just about the same time as the launching of "The Cosby Show" back in 1984.

"People want this to be a nonissue," Rojecki says. "There's a large portion of the white population that wants to put all this behind us."

But he and others agree that Obama can't run a "post-racial" campaign where no one pays attention to his race. Coming on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "Dream" address, Obama's acceptance speech can hardly ignore his African-American identity. Instead, Rojecki says, he must establish an "emotional connection" with his white audience, one that will help people overcome misgivings.

"Across the days of the convention," Harris-Lacewell says, "we need to hear all the itty-bitty stories of Barack as a father, Barack as a son, what it was like to watch his mother die without adequate insurance, what it was like to have to pay off student loans, to worry about child care." Viewers, she says, "have to get to feel he is like them."

That's what "The Cosby Show" managed to do so successfully; it made a white audience comfortable with an undeniably black family that was rooted in black culture but looked familiar in all other respects.

Obama can draw strength from the story of his immigrant father, says Mark Siegel, former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. It's a story that resonates even better with white voters than black voters, Siegel believes, and it's another reason for Democrats to use the convention to portray the candidate as a person rather than to hammer home their policy positions.

"It's the kind of story that every immigrant can relate to -- forget the color of his skin," Siegel says. "He has to show he's a regular guy, and his story is closer to the American dream than his opponent's. He's a self-made man, against all odds and against all obstacles."

Bill DeMora, convention director for the Ohio delegation, where Clinton won the primary handily, says that if Obama persuades Ohioans that he can successfully manage the economy, people won't care what color his skin is. Picking Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who has strong ties to organized labor, as his running mate can only help, he says.

But DeMora also thinks that times are changing. Obama, he notes, appeals strongly to young people. "They don't see color, they don't see gender, they don't see anything but a human being. And I think everybody'll get there."

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