Naive to believe society is colorblind

The Washington Post published a disturbing account Tuesday of the overt racism confronted by campaign workers for Barack Obama.

The story describes a 20-year-old campaign worker named Danielle Ross soliciting support in Muncie, Ind. "The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,'" Ross told the Post.

Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, recounted her phone bank duty in Pennsylvania, telling the Post one caller explained that he would not be voting for Obama by saying, "Hang that darky from a tree."

A volunteer named Karen Seifert told of an encounter she had outside a polling place in Lackawanna County, Pa. Asked by a woman why she was supporting Obama, Seifert said she trusted him. She told the Post that the woman replied, "He's a half-breed and he's a Muslim. How can you trust that?"

We don't use these anecdotes to reaffirm our earlier endorsement of Obama. This isn't an editorial about him. (In fact, if anything, Obama's campaign pointedly strives to downplay any racial incidents it encounters, as the Post points out.)

But they do say a lot about where we as Americans are in 2008 when it comes to racism and prejudice, the large social issue of our time. Actually, looking back through history, it is, perhaps, the large social issue of all times, the tendency for the human race to stereotype, prejudge and oppress.

We have a tendency to think the racism of the past has disappeared. Or if not leaping to that extreme, to focus on the progress that has been made in the past half century.

And certainly, great progress has been made.

To a large degree, open prejudice is not tolerated, as it was in the days of George Wallace and George Lincoln Rockwell. Access to education and the corporate ladder is more universal than ever before. This year, a black and a woman have been widely accepted as genuine candidates for president.

There's been great progress.

But as the Washington Post article clearly illustrates, that has not erased racism and prejudice from our hearts.

We can rightly congratulate ourselves on our society's progress. But we kid ourselves if we think our society is colorblind.

We kid ourselves also if we think that prejudice exists only out there, in some remote region described in the pages of the Washington Post.

Ask a teenager some time about the atmosphere between whites and Latinos at the local high school. Take a look at the comments sections on dailyherald.com; racially tinged comments are not uncommon, and our editors are forced to deal with them virtually every day.

Yes, there has been great progress.

But there is still great work to be done.