WASHINGTON - Danielle Ross was alone in an empty room at the Obama campaign headquarters in Kokomo, Ind., a cellphone in one hand, a voter call list in the other. She was stretched out on the carpeted floor wearing laceless sky-blue Converses, stories from the trail on her mind. It was the day before Indiana's primary, and she had just been chased by dogs while canvassing in a Kokomo suburb. But that was not the worst thing to occur since she postponed her sophomore year at Middle Tennessee State University, in part to hopscotch America stumping for Barack Obama.... Here's the worst: In Muncie, a factory town in the east-central part of Indiana, Ross and her cohorts were soliciting support for Obama at malls, on street corners and in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they ran into "a horrible response," as Ross put it, a level of anti-black sentiment that none of them had anticipated.... "The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,' " recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. "People just weren't receptive."
Greetings from the 21st century, where naive souls- moi, f'rinstance- still apparently insist on thinking that the color of one's skin is- or at least should- no longer be an issue.
Yeah, right....
Here in the real world, the mere fact of being African-American- regardless of all other wonderful, redeeming qualities an individual may possess- is enough to render a person worthless in the eyes of far too many ignorant, self-superior, God-fearin' White Folk. (Hey, come on, now...we're a majority for a reason, no??) Just when I might be forgiven for thinking that maybe, just maybe, we've finally managed to rise above the employment of skin color as a means for determining a person's "worthiness"...well, let's just say that the knuckle-draggers shall apparently always be with us.
Yes, even here in the 21st century, ignorance and hatred still seem to rule the roost. Somehow I'd thought we'd be better than that by now....
