Interviews with My Somewhat Racist Relatives [View All]

[Tuvok Obama]

Interviews with My Somewhat Racist Relatives
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore the Bradley Effect
by Brendan Kiley

I found this article in an alternative weekly Seattle newspaper, The Stranger. The author explains, based on informal interviews with his releatives in Virginia, why the so-called "Bradley effect" probably will not (assuming it has in the past) be a factor this time, for this candidate.

It's really worth your time to read the whole article. I've printed copies of this for Obama supporters at my college (including one instructor), and all of them said they enjoyed the article.

A couple of excerpts:

You can't really survey for the Bradley effect, since it's all about people saying one thing to pollsters and doing another thing in the voting booth. And racism is not monolithic. It has shades and nuances. But lately I've been wondering whether Obama's particular heritage—being a descendant of voluntary African immigration rather than a descendant of American slavery—will help him with the borderline bigots. Borderline bigots, the ones who are shy about being perceived as bigots, are the engine of the Bradley effect.

It just so happens that there are a bunch of them among my relatives, some of them openly racist (though they prefer the term "prejudiced"), who live in Suffolk, Virginia, in a town just across from the North Carolina border and right next to the Great Dismal Swamp.

For those who, like myself, are not familiar with the Great Dismal Swamp: the author is not being cute. That's the name of that body of water. If you want to get a picture of how deeply backwoods Brendan Kiley's relatives are, here's a look at the Great Dismal Swamp:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Dismal_Swamp

Back to the Kiley article (I found this description of the whites-only pool especially piercing):

My granddad lost a business to those fraught years. He invested a lot of time and money turning a raw piece of land into a swimming pool with a snack bar and picnic area. He and his family worked nights and weekends felling trees, excavating, killing copperheads, laying brick. When the pool opened in the summer of 1964, a century after Captain Thad was shot through the forehead, it was whites-only by default. Three years later, just when the pool was starting to turn a profit, a black family showed up to swim. My mother remembers watching granddad walk past the white bathers and talking quietly with the black family, telling them they weren't allowed in. It hurt him, my mother says—he didn't want to turn them away, but knew that if he hadn't, his white clientele would evaporate. The way granddad saw it, he had three choices: integrate the pool, keep it segregated and risk a lawsuit, or turn his back on years of family labor and close it. He wasn't willing to do the first, wasn't able to afford the second, so took the third—agonizing—choice.

My family's bitterness about the 1960s is not an abstraction. So when I called a few of them on the phone the other day to talk about Obama, their tone was less anxious that I'd expected. Most of them are conservatives—one uncle called this presidential contest "a race between two Democrats"—but they don't seem particularly concerned that a black man is running for president.

The author goes on to describe the way the attitudes of his "somewhat racist relatives" have evolved for the better over time...

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=697772


(edited for typo)