Blacks ponder Obama’s white vote

By COURTLAND MILLOY

WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — A new version of an old race game has been gaining popularity among African-Americans lately. I call it, “Divining the White Mind: Can a Black Man Be Elected President?” Imagine a board game in which a black figure moves across a map of the United States, offering up clues about racial attitudes in America.

Here’s how my friends and I play:

We start with a figure of mythical proportions, one that can appear to be black in a flash, then instantly meld into the mainstream. A political kung fu master, he can walk on the rice paper of race relations, acknowledging white institutional racism on one hand and exhorting blacks to behave responsibly on the other.

Call him Barack Obama. But who is he really? Our guide to the colorblind Promised Land that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned? Or a puppet candidate, whose phenomenal financial backing comes with strings attached?

As a Democratic candidate for president, Obama took the Iowa caucuses by storm, and he held his own in New Hampshire. In the past, those states were described in such terms as “conservative” and “independent.” But with a black man in the game, they have been recast as “white states.”

Are they also barometers of a new white state of mind, as the political pundits claim?

Enthusiasm

Edward Chapman, an African-American physician who lives in Mitchellville, Md., does not hedge his enthusiasm.

“To see a black man stand on stage with his wife and two children and all of those white folks supporting him has already been a sea change for me about how far white people have come,” he told me after Obama’s victory in Iowa. “My mother was born in Sioux City in 1913. The changes that have occurred since then tell me that America is beginning to acknowledge that there are many black talented people out there, talented enough to run this country.”

Few African-Americans that I know divine what’s on white minds with such trusting abandon. And understandably so, for deeply embedded in the subconscious of many is the historical memory of incomprehensible white inhumanity toward black people.

Even as Obama makes great strides in his 21st-century run for president, a group of white supremacists is planning a 19th-century-style Ku Klux Klan march on Jena, La. Gleaning which white people would vote for a black man and which would just as soon string him up is part of a survival instinct that black people have honed over centuries.

But we don’t always guess right, as James Byrd Jr. of Jasper, Texas, learned in 1998 when white men he mistook for friendly tied him to the back of a pickup and dragged him to death.

With Obama, the race game is certainly more fun — even though the possibility of a tragic end keeps our psychic antenna acutely tuned. As CNN’s Wolf Blitzer put it in a promo for a news segment last year: “Coming up, a presidential race factor, death threats and a real fear of assassination. Find out what African-American candidates are facing on the road to the White House.”

Is America ready?

A CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted in December 2006 found that 54 percent of blacks believe that America is ready for a black president — even though 65 percent of whites say it is.

“I never thought I’d see a black president in my lifetime, but it could happen,” said Sidney Strickland, 57, an African-American lawyer and a founding board member of Revere Bank in Laurel, Md. “Of course, it may not happen.” Why had he hedged? “You don’t want to be totally disappointed,” he said. A friend, Harold J. Logan, also plays the divining game cautiously.

“I have a theory that it’s easier for people to vote their hopes early on, but as we get closer to actually picking a president, they begin to vote their fears and uncertainties,” said Logan, a black writer and co-founder of the W.E.B. Du Bois Society, a program for talented African-American high school students based in Atlanta.

As the campaign moves into the Deep South, the race game will become even more exciting. What white state of mind will we find in the Old Confederacy? Be careful how you answer. Give whites too much credit for a change of heart, and they could break yours. Give them too little credit, and they could blow your mind.

X Milloy is a columnist for The Post’s Metro section.