The Observer Newspapers | The Good, and Bad, of America

April 17, 2008

The Good, and Bad, of America

Just after I turned 16 years old, I took a long-distance bicycle journey, riding across America from my home in Falls Church to my family's home in Mississippi. I rode 10 to 12 hours a day at a leisurely pace, sleeping at campgrounds and taking plenty of time to stop and chat with people along the way.

The interesting thing about being a person on a journey is that everyone wants to talk to you. I can't count the number of people who offered to buy my lunch or who invited me to dinner with their families because they wanted to know where I had been, what I had seen and where I was going. But there were a couple of points along the trip that were chilling, when I met characters who were threatening, deranged or who obviously would not appreciate who I was if I were to speak my mind.

This past week, The Washington Post published an interesting story about campaign workers for Barack Obama, the front-runner (or not, depending on whom you talk to) in the contest for the Democratic presidential primary race, and the outright racism they experienced as they tried to promote their candidate, who is black.

When I read that story, I was reminded of one afternoon 23 years ago in the far back roads that crisscross between Virginia and Tennessee. My route on this bicycle trip was to travel southwest across Virginia, entering Tennessee and heading south through Knoxville and on to Chattanooga.

After trudging along some lonely road for a couple of hours, I pulled into a Texaco station in a whistle-stop sort of town to take a break and get something to drink. The young, white man who sold me the soda talked with me about where I was headed, and then invited me to take a break in the garage and chat with his buddies.

So, I sat down on a large, overturned bucket in this greasy backwater gas station surrounded by three or four young, white men. Their faces were dirty, with streaks of black grease and grime mixed with the sweat of the hot June day. Their clothes were dirty, and they spoke with a sharp Southern accent heavily punctuated with slang.

It was a pleasant enough conversation at first. The whole purpose of my trip was to have an adventure, so I wasn't the least bit put off by hanging out with people who were obviously not from the same side of the tracks as I was. Then one of the men asked where I was from and I told him I was from the Washington, D.C., area.

"Y'all got a lot of blacks up there?" he asked. I told the man that my home was pretty diverse, and tried to skirt around the issue and move the conversation away from race. But it didn't work. All of a sudden these men were talking about black people in ways I didn't appreciate. The language they were using was disgusting. The things they were saying were racist, sickening, brutal.

It was shocking for me, and I just kept silent as much as possible while trying to figure out exactly how long I needed to take to drink my soda so that I could get up and get moving down the road without insulting these idiots. I kept looking out at the gas pumps in the hopes that a customer would drive up and I could step away without getting beaten to a pulp by a bunch of racist pigs.

I was terrified that it wouldn't take too long for them to recognize my lack of participation in the conversation was an indication that I didn't agree with them, and then these people who had befriended me would turn on me. These men were filled with hate, and it was only for the color of my skin that they did not yet hate me.

I was lucky enough to politely finish up my drink, thank them for the hospitality, wish them well and get on my bike and out of town without any problems.

That incident and that conversation have stayed with me all these years. For me, it was an eye-opener that there are many people in America for whom racist feelings and beliefs are not hidden or abstract or ancient history. Many Americans continue to hold racist beliefs, regardless of their own race or background.

When L. Douglas Wilder was elected governor of Virginia in 1989, pollsters noticed a peculiar failing of their predictions. Wilder was widely predicted to win with a relatively comfortable margin of 10 percent in the days before the election. Even the exit polls on the day of the vote confirmed that Wilder would win by 10 percent or so.

When the results came in, Wilder won by less than 1 percent of the vote. When the polltakers tried to figure out why their polling was so far off the mark, they concluded that even though their surveys were anonymous, many voters reported that they were voting for the politically correct candidate, the black candidate. But when those same voters were all alone in the voting booth, they made different choices.

I am so impressed with our current presidential race because for the first time America will have the choice to vote for an impressive, well-qualified woman to be president, or to vote for an impressive, well-qualified black man to be president.

John McCain has earned his status as the Republican candidate for president. He has integrity. People respect him. I admire his leadership and his foreign policy background. The Democratic candidate will make history in any case, but especially if he or she wins the election and becomes president.

If Barack Obama secures the Democratic Party's nomination for president, he will be the one to answer the question no polls may be able to accurately predict: Is America ready to elect a black person president?

I hope it is. I hope that over the past 23 years those young men I met at that gas station have changed, softened, learned. I hope they have put aside feelings of fear and hatred and embraced the American ideal that all people are created equal. I hope.