NASCAR legend Junior Johnson has endorsed Barack Obama for President. To those of you wondering why this matters...NASCAR drivers and their fans comprise probably the largest monolithic demographic group of Republicans left in this country. To see them break ranks is truly surprising.
Quick and dirty highlights from my trip to South Georgia & North Florida, with a little football in the middle:
* There are no, and I mean NO, signs for any of the Court of Appeals candidates in South Georgia. I saw a Meyer von Bremen billboard around Albany, but that was it. Nobody down there knows who the hell any of the candidates are, I suspect.
* In the 40 miles between Moultrie, GA and the Florida border, we saw only 2 Obama yard signs. Both were in Moultrie proper. There were about a bajillion McCain-Palin signs. Also, Jim Marshall may be in trouble if there's any predictive value in the proportion of Goddard/Marshall yard signs in the more rural parts of his distrct. I saw just one.
* I ate at Waffle House for the first time in over 7 years and I didn't die. (My last WH experience was in Salisbury, NC where the refrigerator door was broken and we could see eggs, bacon and cheese just sitting out open for all to stare at. It totally grossed me out and has kept me off WH ever since.)
* I suck at Scrabble. For a wordy English major, this is a shameful revelation.
* I now have pink eye, and yes I am 33 years old. I know.
* My new season ticket seats (I got moved down about 24 rows) are much better:
* However, my seats are now apparently right next to a little old lady who is nasty and mean, and likes to sit all spreadeagled across 2 or 3 seats at once. When we moved into our seats and she bitched about having to move over, I almost had to get into a fight with her. A little later on, she actually started beating on a Virginia Tech guy sitting in our row. You can see her in this pic:
* This was the first FSU win that I have been at Doak Campbell for since my senior year of college...11 years ago. It was a great feeling, walking out of there with a win. I had almost forgotten how wonderful it is. The day was really perfect.
* I watched McCain yesterday morning on Meet the Press. He was atrociously uncomfortable, seemed frazzled, and obviously had a cold. What is wrong with his press team that they would send him on when he's so clearly sick? Nobody wants to see a sickly old man who can't remember the names of the former Secretaries of State who endorsed him.
* Florida has a truly insane amount of political commercials on every single TV station. Being in the Tallahassee media market for the weekend meant that I got to see all sorts of Obama ads that we don't get up here. Strangely, not that many McCain ads. I guess he's too cash-strapped to waste time on the safely blue Tallahassee area and is concentrating on Jacksonville-Orlando-Tampa.
I'm seeing so many wonderful reactions to Obama's historic speech about race in America. In particular, the born and raised Southerners all speak of common experiences of families going through generational change in terms of how people think and talk about race. These are important stories and I'm so happy that Obama's speech is causing people to think and talk about race when the temptation is often to not touch the third rail because we all fear it will become too ugly and emotional. And it still might, but that is not a reason to stop the conversation.
But I'm bothered by the feeling that comes from these stories that they are somehow limited primarily to southern white folks dealing with their ancestors' ugly history and backwards views about race. Unfortunately, I think the problem is far more pervasive than that, and I think even those who did not grow up in the south need a little soul-cleansing in this regard.
My entire family is from Iowa or Minnesota, neither of which has a large black population or a history of pervasive government-sanctioned racial injustice, and yet I can recall numerous instances of hearing my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and even parents say things that I found offensive and wrong. I wish I could say that every time it happened I spoke up to stop them, but sometimes it was not worth it to pick that battle even though I did not agree. My father still says things on occasion that bother me, and even now sometimes I can't stand the thought of taking him to task for it. I should, but I don't.
In a lot of ways, because of the familiarity of living side by side and dealing with racial upheaval in the 60s and 70s, southerners are more comfortable talking about the old wounds and the way they truly feel about race than the rest of us, who simply sit grim-faced when the topic comes up and only reveal their true feelings in the hushed privacy of likeminded company. Since moving to Georgia over 2 years ago I've had so many instances of people presuming that I share their views, as they openly launch into a diatribe about how there are too many black people in this city, or that you should avoid certain neighborhoods as "too ghetto" or certain destinations as too full of a certain clientele, or talking about certain public officials with what they believe will be a shared assumption that they only get elected because it's Atlanta and they're black. It's all on display here, like it or not, but at least it's real and open.
In my experience outside the South, it's the exact opposite. For all of the talk about Boston being progressive or liberal, it's one of the most racially regressed places I've ever been to. The city is incredibly segregated, with each racial or ethnic group retreating to their own small pockets of the city. The white folks don't go to Roxbury, and the black folks don't go to Southie. Many people don't remember that during the desegregation busing eras all over the country, some of the worst fights were in the greater Boston area where white parents fought tooth and nail to avoid having their white children be forced to attend classes, play football games against, or otherwise interact with black children. Before Deval Patrick was elected governor in 2006, I don't think I could name for you a single elected official from Massachusetts who was black. I think my first law firm when I graduated from law school in 2000 had one black partner, even though it had 200 lawyers. (In contrast, my current firm has 5 black partners and even 1 black managing partner in this office--and we're less than half the size.)
But the problem is, in Boston nobody really talks about this sort of thing because polite upstanding progressive white people in the northeast don't talk honestly and openly about race. Much like my family, they keep up appearances to one another and only reveal their true feelings when they are nearly certain they are in likeminded company. You might think from outward appearances that this makes them a more racially forward-thinking area of the country than the South, but you'd be wrong. This is why I think this is a conversation that everyone should be having around dinner tables and lunch tables and bar tables throughout the country. Maybe the South has more to atone for, maybe it has more ugly in its past, but all of us could use a good honest gut check and a little cleansing of the old ideas. All of us have people in our lives, in our families, who say things we disagree with but who we won't disown--be it our father, or neighbor, or our pastor. We try to change minds, but we also try to pick and choose the best parts of the people we care about and leave the rest alone.
Today at lunch, the subject of the speech came up. Many people talked about their impressions of the speech and of the Rev. Wright brouhaha. One of my coworkers said that she hopes it's generational and slowly phasing out. She said that her grandparents are terribly racist, and her parents are somewhat less openly racist, and she hopes that her generation of the family has gotten racial animus out of its system entirely. Interestingly, she is not only not from the South...she is not white. Our ignorant and ugly racist history and ancestry is something we all have to deal with, no matter what we look like or where we grew up.
