I don't have a blog anywhere else, so I figured that this is the next best thing. Since I normally don’t keep any journals, this is an oddity for me, but I needed to get it off my chest.
I just moved into a neighborhood of that has a higher percentage of whites than where I was, and although I haven’t personally been affected by any racism in the town, I know it’s there. It seems as though I’m the exception in many cases because despite the fact that I’m of Latino descent, I ‘act white’ and not at all like what is normally ‘expected’ from a Latino, that being loud and baggy clothes, dropped civic with a broken exhaust and a sick sound system.
Despite this, I’m quite aware that racism is alive and well in America and I’m glad to see that it doesn’t seem to have any significant impact on the ongoing election today. The realization that racism is much closer than I previously though came to me yesterday as I spoke with a local near my home.
I have a personal rule not to speak to anyone but family about politics, and much less about religion, as the two topics are so rich in controversy that I always wound up in some two or three hour long discussion with neither party backing down for an instant. So I should have known better than to stumble upon politics with this fellow, but I followed him in anyway as he seemed a rather enlightened individual. It wasn’t until we were knee deep in the issue that I realized my mistake.
The white man, who was obviously a very conservative republican, clung to his belief that Obama was a Muslim extremist in cahoots with Al-Quaeda, and that if he were elected, that they, with the help of the strengthening democratic party, would slowly change this country into a Muslim state. He also began ranting off stories about Obama’s background and questions about his citizenship as well as his family and the like…all of which I went online to research after our conversation. Since I will not be voting for McCain, I wanted to see how much if any of this hearsay was true.
Needless to say my vote hasn’t changed, but as the conversation dragged on I came to the realization that his entire rant was based on bringing Obama down and only that. He actually had very little information about McCain and why he was actually voting for him. He also had very little to say about Palin’s scandals so far…insisting simply that Obama was not right for the job. Basically I came to understand that it was about race and that this man had no reason as two which was he was voting besides race.
I do understand that it is our right to each have a vote, but to be honest these are the types of voters that depress me. They seem like completely uninformed people. I’m no political guru myself, in fact I try to stay away from politics and I only make it a habit to vote for president most of the times. At the very least I attempt to learn a bit about each candidate before I cast my vote…in general I am a democrat, but I’m by no means a blind voter as many people out there seem to be.