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How Big a Stretch?
Supporters say Barack Obama's message of unity and inclusion, plus the charisma factor, are factors in his appeal, especially to white voters.
(Tami Chappell - Reuters)
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"He's got such brilliant judgment," Richard Fueyo says.
Fueyo finds Obama's handling of race especially intriguing: the way Obama navigates among the American electorate's perceptions and expectations.
"I don't think he's one of these guys who says, 'We're past that. Race doesn't matter. We're a color-blind society,' " says Fueyo. "But I think that he's smart, and if people want to read that in him, he doesn't disabuse them of that."
"I think part of what he's really saying is we're not a black America and a white America. But I think if you were to ask, 'Well, does that mean there are no cultural differences, no racial prejudices?' -- the whole thing they say in white America, like, 'We're tired of hearing it' -- I think he would say, 'No, I don't agree with that.' "
And Fueyo knows a good bit about what "white America" thinks.
"I hear many racial jokes and epithets because I am 'white,' " he wrote later in an e-mail. "IMO, there is far more racial prejudice out there than a black person might realize."
Undeniably, there is a deep yearning -- among people of all kinds -- for the nation's racial divisions to ease. But equally undeniable is the fear that the country has not progressed as much as many would hope. This concern is especially pronounced among some Obama supporters.
"I'd like to see Obama win," says Tom Orr, 56. "I'd like to see Obama be the president. What worries me is there's still so much prejudice in the country it might not be possible."
An entrepreneur and inventor, Orr grew up in Miami. When his father, Jack Orr, a Florida legislator, was the lone voice against a state effort to shore up school segregation in the face of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling, strange things started happening.
"People showed up with torches on the porch, and I thought it was Halloween," Orr says, laughing at his innocence at the age of 6 or 7. "They burned a cross into the lawn with gasoline. Another time they burned a whole phrase into the lawn that I won't repeat."
His late father, who also was Metro-Dade mayor in the 1970s, remains Orr's inspiration "that someday we'll erase all this nonsense about race." He is so troubled by racial categorization, he says, that when he fills out any form asking for his race, he writes the word "human."
Wryly, he calls his support of Obama a kind of "reverse prejudice. It's just about time that someone of color got some credibility in a race like this for president. It's happened too many times that they've been left out. He represents some progress in the attitudes of the country."
