Here she was beaming under the headline “Race Breakthrough or Logical Step?”
Here she was again under “Obama Leads Nation Across Racial Divide.”
The Fix’s Chris Cillizza and Wonkblog’s Ezra Klein discuss the final days of the 2012 presidential campaign, polling numbers, and the fickle nature of swing states, especially Ohio.
More from PostPolitics
Was the White House ‘aware’ of IRS behavior?
FACT CHECKER | Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) says White House officials were aware of the IRS program. What do we know?
Senate Republicans working on new immigration amendments
Senators eager to support the massive bill say they hope to have an agreement by the end of Wednesday.
Poll: Public wants congressional hearings on NSA surveillance
Edward Snowden splits the public, even as most support the surveillance program he revealed.
“Year by year racial tensions have eased,” Brown began, reading part of the article. Then she stopped. “Okay, they are painting a kind of rosy picture here,” she said, but it was the reader comments at the ends of the articles that she thought told her “what people are really thinking.”
People said they wanted to “take the country back,” which made her wonder, “from whom?” She came across crude racist jokes that seemed to catch on rather than be condemned. She heard politicians like Newt Gingrich call Obama “the food stamp president” and watched large white crowds cheer when he did.
“Things have changed,” Brown said. “People are more vocal, and when people are more vocal, it is rational to have a little more fear.”
This was how things were different now than they were four years ago in Grant Park: along with her emergent success, an emergent fear.
On that night, she had worn a “Yes We Can!” sticker on her smiling cheek and felt safe walking home to her grandfather’s house. Now a pile of Obama stickers and car magnets were sitting on her desk, unused, because she worried that displaying them would make her a target in a country that was angrier and more divided.
“If it’s 50-50 that someone is not an Obama supporter,” Brown said, referring to the rough breakdown in North Carolina, “and if a small percentage of those might be extremely anti-Obama, I wouldn’t want something on my car to draw attention to me. Maybe someone has a beer and wants to do something crazy,” she said, trailing off. “That is in the back of my mind, too.”
A week or so ago, she had glimpsed an article online — a report police now describe as a tragic hoax — about a Louisiana woman wearing an Obama T-shirt who had been set on fire.
“I didn’t want to read it because I didn’t want to get upset,” Brown said. “But it did make me wonder: Do I want to wear my Obama T-shirt, or do I want to cover it up?”
Brown shut the scrapbook and got dressed for work. She got into her pickup truck, where she still could not find the flag.
“I’m thinking, ‘Where is that?’ ” she said later, after looking for it again. “Did I leave it in Chicago?”
Loading...
Comments