Bradley Polarized

In the period before the primary election enjoyed weekly discussions with one of my close friends. He was certain that Giuliani would be the next Pres I replied that our former mayor was too socially liberal for the Republican base and too ugly for others. My guess is that Obama would be the man. During the '04 convention Dem cruise when I saw Obama on the podium like a young Smokey Robinson and croon like a superstar, I said, "That's the next president." Actually, I thought that would be four years down the road. My friend was quite sure that America would never vote for an African-American, were too racist and too stupid. But it disputed that argument during the electoral drama. My reasoning is based on an old lady of New Jersey.

Betty is 83, a daughter of immigrants and raised in a working class neighborhood of Boston. It was programmed with all the racial stereotypes and resentments that were mitigated by the social stigma of racism that prevailed half century later. His son, a longtime friend of mine told me that her mother went mad when he brought home an African-American friend in first grade. "Never bring all here again. Never! "He experienced the same diatribe about black girlfriends in high school and later well into adulthood.

Pretty shocking, eh? In fact for me was really surprising because I always liked Betty. When I was in high school was fun and generous – a favorite mothers and favorite aunt of my friend's cousins. How could such venom as Betty inhabit a girlfriend that allowed freak-flag waving freshly painted and son has blurred the bedroom walls become a canvas for graffiti obscene radical friends? The walls were left untouched when he went to college, and the room is not turned to painting until the family moved to a house a few blocks away. You can imagine decent, intelligent people harbor some latent form of racism relatively benign – that is, never expressed a punitive way. But Betty has made it clear that anyone of a minority whose skin was darker than Betty could be subjected to humiliation. Betty has never been beaten by the ironic fact of his own minority status. It was a typical product of a pre-Freudian generation before irony and culture.

That was before a black family moved in next door sometime in the eighties. I laughed until I almost choked when he said.

A decade later told me about how she gave the house to one family, then a favorite of his neighbors, when their house was destroyed by a fire and how depressed he was when they moved. Betty It had never really interacted with blacks or Latinos, before, I never knew that the versions middle class "they" exist. And I looked Yuk it up with African-American guests at the wedding of my friend. Sixty years of the programming was virtually erased overnight. And last month when he said he was voting for Barack Obama, his tone was matter of fact, as if she said she was going to the dentist in November four.

Although all were released on infoheads Bradley Effect, I knew that in the course of a generation of millions of people like Betty was darker skinned "others" television, film, in the neighborhoods, doctors' offices, supermarkets, their children and grandchildren's birthday parties and theater school. They have also been used to the gay and probably vote against the ban on gay marriage when Obama is running for his second term.

There are millions of Bettys out there that will make America proud. It can take an imminent cataclysm or one of "them" move in next door, but I have this faith-based reliance on Betty. She's the change we can believe in.

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Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – Why America Was Ready for Obama – the Little Old Racist Lady and Her Black Friends Next Door