Indiana Racists Alarm Obama Campaign Backers

For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24588813/

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarms Obama Backers

Who would have imagined that racist folks lived in Indiana and Pennsylvania?

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarms Obama Backers

Or that doors would be slammed in the faces of door-to-door campaign workers.

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarm Obama Backers

I guess not much has changed since 'Hoosiers.'

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarm Obama Backers

I'm trying to see how this might possibly be a revelation. With words, names and terms of every type being thrown out like candy on a daily basis (even here), we clearly have a long way to go in this country. If Obama backers are "alarmed" by these reactions, they must have been living in Fantasy-land for years.

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarm Obama Backers

I'm sure it's alarming every time someone throws a racial slur in your face.

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarm Obama Backers

I thought all the racists lived in the South?

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarm Obama Backers

Didn't mean it like that. But surprised that these attitudes still exist in 2008? C'mon...

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarm Obama Backers

"The previous evening, Dondra Ewing was driving the neighborhoods of Kokomo, looking to turn around voters. Ewing, 47, is a middle school guidance counselor, a black single mother of two and one of the most fiercely vigilant Obama volunteers in Kokomo, which was once a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. On July 4, 1923, Kokomo hosted the largest Klan gathering in history -- an estimated 200,000 followers flocked to a local park. But these are not the 1920s, and Ewing believes she can persuade anybody to back Obama. Her mother, after all, was the first African American elected at-large to the school board in a community that is 10 percent black."

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarm Obama Backers

I love this clip ...

http://gawker.com/389976/old-white-people-know-the-truth-about-barack-obama?autoplay=true

... woman in West Virginia says she can't vote for Obama because he's Muslim. And when the reporter sets the record straight, she still refuses to accept that Obama's not Muslim.

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarm Obama Backers

Love the last line in that story.

"Seriously, West Virginia, we are going to give you back to Virginia unless you can demonstrate that you can handle statehood again."

 

Re: MSNBC: Indiana Racists Alarm Obama Backers

I like this:

"I heard that Obama is a Muslim and his wife's an atheist," said Mr Simpson, drawing on a cigarette outside the fire station in Williamson, a coalmining town of 3,400 people surrounded by lush wooded hillsides.

As the writer says, how does that even make sense?