Even before Matt Drudge linked to it, I knew that my latest story would anger some liberals and black people. My job is to report what people of all backgrounds are thinking and feeling about race. Many people who find a particular belief offensive—in this case, that some black people vote for Obama mostly because he is black—assume that I share the belief that is being written about, or at least want to promote it.

Here’s one such response I got last night:

You should be very proud that your shallow story is being used by partisan Republicans to claim to white voters that black voters are being racist.  You could have written a much longer and serious story that might have explored various "dog whistle" (if you do not know the phrase refers to you might do a little reasearch) that Republicans are using against the man they call the "food stamp president".  And that pehaps black voters have noticed.  Or compare Obama policies versus Romney policies on dozens of issues of concern to black voters and consider whether black voters might believe Obama's policies are better for them in the same way that, perhaps,companies that pollute believe Romney's policies are better for them.  Or you might consider whether Supreme Court decisions are important to black voters and they would rather Obama name justices than Romney (you may not realize this, but black voters do know about the Supreme Court.) Or dozens of similar major issues.

If I say you are a lazy reporter, am I suggesting you are black, with the same dog whistle John Sununu employed when he said Obama was lazy?  No, I am just saying you are a lazy reporter, which I just did, not knowing or caring about your race, though I suspect some black voters (correctly) were offended by Sununu's dog whistle comment.

Did you send your story to Matt Drudge?  Or your editor?  Or the Romney campaign?

NAME REDACTED
(a white man who does not appeciate dog whistle politics or stories such as yours).

I understand where he’s coming from—the same place that conservatives were coming from when they were angered by my piece a month ago exploring whether white people oppose Obama because he is black. I expect this kind of thing. Maybe I encourage it with my writing style for these pieces, which is factual reporting combined with a heavy dose of analysis (which is prettyclose to opinion). So I’m not mad at the man who sent the above message. We had an email conversation, although he probably ended up madder than when we started.

However, I was mildly surprised that a good number of conservatives, and one or two blatant racists, responded negatively to this article. Like so:

Blacks vote for obama because they are inherently dumb. Look in the mirror and then read your own piece believing someone else wrote. Dumb, right? It is the best interest for you and others who still enslave the Black race for your own benefit that you keep them thinking of themselves as a lesser people. Whitey is the evil boogie man.You tell them, your dumb, uneducated because you were slaves, had to ride the back of the bus. Of course 95% of those you convince where never there. Today it is the Black race and Black so called leaders who are the RACIST of the 21st century. Educated Blacks go one of two ways . They get out of the ghetto and Ghetto thinking, become productive and asimilate into the general productive population, or like yourself, they prey on their own race as slave masters.

I hate the N word, but you and your kind are that.

Or like so:

I appreciate the overall subject of your article.  I reject its conclusion; that it's right, or at least understandable that black voters will vote for black candidates simply because they are black, but it is wrong for white voters to vote for white candidates because they are white. … I don't know your race or background, but I can easily see your politics by the piece you wrote. Whoever you are, you have done a disservice to your profession with ignorant misstatements of historical fact, one-sided quotes and uncrticial thinking. You have perpetuated the false and illogical principle that it's okay for today's American blacks to view politics through race-colored glasses, but it's wrong for any other race to do the same.

It’s believed that people read and remember news/information that reinforces the beliefs they already have. But what about a balanced story like mine, which presents both sides of an emotional issue? It seems to me that some people can selectively read a single article and extract what they like or dislike, while simultaneously ignoring/debating the information that counters their preconceived notions.

I try not to be that person. I find it healthy to assume that I'm wrong a good portion of the time. That way I can keep searching for truth.

I didn’t want my story about Ohio’s white working-class voters to be focused on race. But of course the subject came up, without me even asking about it. The experience was gripping, sad, and a little bit scary.

Before I started interviewing people, I decided that the focus of the story should not be how these voters feel about black people, a black president, or whether they are more or less likely to vote for a black man. That ground has been well-plowed since 2008, and I did a variation on the theme just the other day. Instead, my idea was to see what these voters are looking for in a president—what moves them. I knew that in general, these white people see some things differently than working-class black voters (who are overwhelmingly in President Obama’s corner) or working-class Latinos (many of whom are turned off by the GOP’s stance on immigration). We write about so-called minority ethnic groups all the time. Why not write about these particular white people in Ohio, especially since they will play a huge role in choosing the next president of the United States?

So I head into Ohio and start talking to white folks. I’m going to places like dollar stores, check-cashing spots, gas stations, diners, and so forth. Sometimes I just see someone in his or her yard, or working by the side of the road, and pull over. I was on and around Route 7 on the eastern edge of the state. In two days and about 400 miles of driving (none of it on interstates) I counted a total of five black people. But three of those five were on a crew repairing a road. So it was not hard to find working-class white people around Route 7 in Ohio.

One of the questions on my list (I always have a list, written down, before I start interviewing) was, can you relate to Obama or Romney? Do you think they can understand your life? None of the two dozen folks I interviewed said Romney was relatable. Many said quite the opposite. About half said they could relate to Obama. My favorite was the truck driver who said something like, “Yeah, if Obama was here right now, I think I could have a conversation with him, just hang out. It would just be like talking to a cool smart black guy, like you.”

That comment summarizes how everyone treated me. They were friendly, open, just regular. I didn’t feel one bit out of place—until the last interview of the trip.

She was a 23-year-old woman in the little town of Dilles Bottom, right next to Shadyside. I ran into her at a restaurant that her parents have owned her whole life. They also own the motel across the parking lot. We sat down on the patio on the side of the restaurant, she pulled out a pack of Camels, and we talked for about 40 minutes.

The first thing I ask is how she feels things are going in America.

“How do I say this without sounding like too much of a redneck?” she says. “I think things are horrible.” She gives reasons like Obama’s decisions with troops overseas, downsizing of the military, that she can’t find a good job, and the state of affairs there in her hometown.

She’s a high school graduate, did three years in the Navy. Now she’s in the reserves and working at a tractor supply store for $7.50 an hour--$235 a week after taxes. She lives with her parents. She owns a truck and a “four-wheeler.” She likes beer. She has PTSD from being sexually assaulted in the Navy. She has about $25,000 in debt from her truck, credit cards, and some medical bills. She aspires to get remarried (the first one didn’t last), have kids, and open a horse-riding school.

It took a while to gather all this. You can’t just interrogate someone. You have to let the conversation wander down some side streets along the way. So it was about 15 minutes into the discussion when out of the blue she asks me, “Do you feel out of your element here?”

The next table over is filled with a half-dozen white biker dudes—older guys with big beards, bigger bellies, bandannas and whatnot. I assume they’re local because of the way they spoke to the waitress inside the restaurant.

I give her my stock answer: As a six-foot-four black man with a Yale degree, I don’t really fit in anywhere. Not in the hood, not in the suburbs, and not here. But I feel comfortable in all those places, because I’ve spent a lot of time in all of them.

I keep it moving: What do you think about Obama?

“I don’t trust him.”

Why not?

“I don’t know. Do you ever just look at someone and say, I just don’t trust anything you say?”

She continues: “I’d like to sit down and have a beer with Bush. Same thing for Clinton. But I don’t think it’d be fun to have a beer with Obama. He doesn’t seem like a”—she pauses, looking for the right word—“like a person.”

You can’t relate to Obama at all?

“No. I can’t.”

What about Romney?

“I don’t know anything about him.” But she said that he reminds her, vaguely, of her dad.

Can you relate to Romney?

“Yeah, I think I can.”

I mention that Romney doesn’t drink beer or smoke cigarettes because he’s a Mormon, and that Obama does both (or at least he did before quitting smoking). I mention that she doesn't know anything about Romney, but still feels like she can relate to him. And I ask her, do you think you can relate to Romney because he reminds you of your dad, and meanwhile there are very few black people around Shadyside?

She pauses. “This is going to make me sound seriously racist, but yes, it’s because he’s white.”

I was surprised to hear her say it. So I say something like, Really?

“I don’t know why," she says. "I just don’t know why.”

Maybe because you haven’t seen anyone like Obama around here? A black guy from Harvard and all that?

That might be it, she says. “I can’t say that I’m racist, because I’m not. OK, I am. Is there such a thing as picking and choosing? Like, if you’re all ghettoed out, look like a thug, and live off the government, I’m not going to like you.”

We talk some more about her dad looking like Romney, then discuss Romney’s tax plan and some other things. Then something occurs to me. The thing about being “out of my element.”

Am I out of my element here, I ask? Should I feel out of place?

“No,” she says. “Well, yes and no. I guess part of me is saying, watch who you talk to.”

Because…?

“I‘ve found that this place here is worse than when I lived in the south, racist-wise. A lot of people have never gone more than an hour from here. It wasn’t until a year ago that a black family moved in. Over in Shadyside they ran two black families out.”

What do you mean, ran them out?

“They don’t tolerate them. They shun them, make their life a living hell until they leave. Two families live there now. I don’t see them in town, at the grocery store, nothing.”

I asked for details on how she knows all this is true.

“I hear them calling people the word you’re not supposed to call them. They try to get them to fight. And the police and everybody in town are the same way, so nothing happens.”

Why do you think people act like that?

“They’ve never left the area to see a different side of people. They just hear what older people have told them, so they don’t know any different.”

She says her best friend growing up was a “mixed” girl. She had used that word a few times in our conversation. She talks about how the new gas drilling had brought a lot of "Mexicans" to the area: “We’ve lost count.” She mentions a town she had lived in somewhere in Georgia where a lot of “Mexicans” had arrived. “Now there are no white people there, and everything has gone to trash. I’m afraid that’s going to happen here.”

We talk about some other things before I circle back. I tell her that people reading about our conversation would probably think she's a stone-cold racist. I tell her that I don’t think she hates black people. So, how can you explain all these things you just told me? What would you tell someone who thinks you’re a racist?

There is a long pause, about ten seconds. During this time, I became aware of a silence nearby. The table full of bikers is not talking. That makes me nervous.

“People are going to be who they’re going to be,” she finally says. “I judge a person by how they present themselves and how they act rather than their skin color or race.”

I lower my voice and ask, Are you sure? Is it possible that you have some unconscious bias against black people that you don’t even recognize?

She said, “I have a perfect example of that.” She starts a story about a guy who sold her a cell phone. But there were no black people in the story. It ends up having nothing to do with anything.

While she’s talking, I figure it’s time to leave. My mind is running over some scenarios with the biker dudes. I don't want to make any assumptions about them, but I can see a couple possibilities for trouble. Then she says,

“Are you fully black? You’re very light-skinned, by the way.”

This is the most surprising statement of all.

My mom is white, and my dad was dark-skinned. But pop’s genes dominate in me, appearance-wise. My complexion, hair and lips are about the same as Will Smith’s. My nose is wider than his. Throughout my whole life, people have always been surprised to hear that my mom is white. It has been a consistent theme in my interactions with people. Some of them have silently scrutinized me after learning this information, looking for signs of whiteness. And yet this young woman had correctly guessed that I have a white mom.

I told her yes, my mom is white. Then I thanked her for her time, jumped in my car, and headed home. I made sure to stay below the speed limit.

I got a whole bunch of reader email about my latest story, which discussed the debate over whether Obama’s opponents are motivated by racism. More than 95 percent of the email was from conservatives who assumed that I was accusing all conservatives of racism, instead of reporting on the existence of a contentious debate. Such as:

So you drip condescension all over us conservatives like rancid sweat from a sewage worker walking into a fine restaurant without taking a bath first. We’re all racist, WE JUST DON’T KNOW IT, HUH…?

…It’s becoming easy to quickly humiliate anyone defaulting to the racism charge: I just shout them down as cowards, terrified to talk about welfare waivers, terrified to talk about 1992 book promo brochures shrieking Kenya as Obama’s birthplace, terrified to talk about that slimy political machine Obama comes from, CHICAGO. News Flash, smart a**: A welfare queen is a WELFARE QUEEN, regardless of whether the b***h getting checks under a dozen different names is BLACK or WHITE…! Oh, and yeah… More whites are on welfare now than blacks…! ‘Think you ought to pull your intellect out of the nineteen-fricking 70’s…?

Your article was a pathetic attempt to keep the ‘ALL CONSERVATIVES ARE RACIST…’ charge alive, now that we’re adept at slamming you liberal creeps back in spades. 

As a boy, walking with my cousin, a black boy on an oncoming bike dismounted but accidentally bumped into me. I used a slur to object to it, the boy then said hello to my cousin. They knew each other and easily could have been friends. I was humiliated. I did not forget it all my life, and it has influenced my conduct in EVERYTHING…! Now I wonder what my guilt all these years has been about as I navigate the word ‘racist’ in ANY discussion of Obama…!

Whew.

Of those negative emails, about a third of them say some variation of, “Black folks are racist because 95% of them voted for Obama.” Such as:

PLEASE stop this nonsense.  You didn't mention in your article that 96% of blacks voted for Obama in 2008 - is that not racial bias against John McCain?

Now, I’m terrible with numbers, but I’m always amazed that folks make this argument. Black people usually vote Democrat, no matter if the candidate is black or not. Gore got 90% of the black vote in 2000; Kerry got 88% in 2004. So one might look for signs of racial bias in 5-7% of Obama’s black vote—right?

That said, 2 million more black people voted in 2008 than in 2004 (in addition to 2 million more Latinos and 600,000 more Asian-Americans). It’s fair to say that most of those extra millions of people came out because Obama is black. But is that the same thing as someone NOT voting for Obama because he’s black?

And what about those Deep South states where Obama’s share of the white vote was well below any recent Democrat’s? What’s that about, and did it offset the extra votes Obama got in the turnout and that black 5-7 percent?

(For the record, from what I have observed through my job and everyday life, I think the percentage of black people and white people who are racially biased is about the same.)

I’ve met black Republicans who said they voted for Obama simply because he is black. They did so out of pride—that a member of a group that had been oppressed for so long finally had a shot at the highest office in the land. “I’m doing it for my son, so he can see that he can achieve anything he wants to do,” one such Republican told me. This motivation for voting seems much different than the mentality that pushes people to vote for someone because they are white, or to vote against a black person because they are black.

I’m not vouching for the pride thing, or saying that it’s a good way to think. That’s a whole other discussion. I’m just saying the motivation behind a pro-black vote seems different than the motivation of an anti-black vote or a pro-white vote.


And that we need to be careful when making assumptions about why Obama got 95 percent of the black vote.

I did a very interesting interview for my most recent story, but not a word of it made it onto the AP wire. I could have used it, but chose not to. Here’s what happened:

I was in Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market, looking for people to interview about their perceptions of how race relations had changed since the election of the first black president. I spotted a white gentleman eating alone. He looked to be in his mid-50s. I introduced myself and he was happy to speak with me. He gave me his name, occupation (construction management for a state transportation agency), and home town (in a mountainous state between California and Kansas). He was traveling on business. He had voted for Obama in 2008 “because I thought he could unify the country.”

Unify how, I asked. Politically? Racially?

“Both, really,” he said.

But now this man was completely unhappy with Obama. He thought he had “deepened racial divisions” through policies like “Obamacare” and other things that act as a “tax on working people and are a huge benefit to those who don’t deign to work, who reside on welfare for years.”

And these people who don’t deign to work are disproportionately black?

“Yes. More of an inner-city type of individual,” he said.

At this point, let me say that I do not believe this man is a racist. We spoke for about 30 minutes. I don’t think he believes white people are better than black people, or that black people are lazy, violent, and so forth. And it seems very unlikely that he could be a racist and vote for Obama in 2008. I can’t be certain, of course. But this was my impression from the overall tone and nuance of the statements he made.

Back to the interview: The man said a lot of things that I have heard from many non-racist white Americans: Obama seems to favor black people. He’s “pushing an agenda through the Democratic political system to try and benefit certain classes or groups of people more than others.” That when Obama said, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,” he was “saying subconsciously that Trayvon couldn’t have done anything wrong, and he shouldn’t have been penalized because he looks that way.”

(“Penalized” is quite a mild euphemism for losing your life.)

Looks what way, I asked the man. Black?

“That’s right,” he said.

I understand where these feelings come from, because I spend a lot of time on my job speaking to white Americans. They are not unusual ideas.

Then came the most interesting part. I was setting up a question and mentioned that Obama doesn’t talk often about race.

The man interrupted me: “His wife does, though.”

Excuse me?

“She talks about it, and he can’t divorce himself from what she says.”

What kind of things does she say?

“Things like, I hate America.”

As it happened, I had just finished writing a profile of Michelle Obama. I had read two biographies of her, a half-dozen in-depth profiles, and two months’ worth of “Michelle Obama” Google alerts. Not once had I seen any mention of her saying, “I hate America.” I had not even seen a debate over her saying that. I’m fairly certain that she has never publicly said anything close to that. If she had, they would be making a fortune selling T-shirts with that quote above her picture.

I asked the man if he had actually seen a clip of her saying that, or read a quote to that effect. He acknowledged that he had not, but “she is credited with saying it.”

And you believe that?

“I think she could have said it,” the man said.

Wow.

Anyway, I wrap up the interview and proceed to quote the guy in my story, because like I said, his statements were indicative of how a significant portion of the population thinks. The next day, I get an email from him:

“After our interview yesterday in Philadelphia I talked to my supervisor. He was not very pleased with our conversation. It is extremely important that you do not reference my name or my company. If that happens I will most likely lose my job. Additionally my wife was not happy because she believes we will be stigmatized if our neighbors find out about my position.”

This put me in a tough spot. I was on deadline. AP does not permit the use of anonymous quotes in this situation. I would have been well within my rights to include his name—people often regret what they said in a moment of candor and try to take it back.

But what kind of guy would I be if this guy lost his job?

I took him out of the story. I did have a question, though. What was his wife afraid of, exactly? That his neighbors like Obama so much they would treat her badly if they know how this guy feels about him? 

“I won't pretend to understand where she is coming from,” he emailed me back. “Even after 32 years I can't guess on this one.”