“I’m not ready for Obama. Clinton is what I can handle right now.”
   
        At a recent social gathering in Los Angeles I’d asked the cocktail party question du jour: “Clinton or Obama?”

        She was the first to respond, a white woman in her mid-thirties. She was raised in the South, she explained, where the only working woman she knew was the black lady who cooked at the local diner. It was hard enough for her to grasp the notion of a woman as president, she said, let along a black person. She came from a conservative Republican family, she said, where “the ‘N’ word was used freely” and was now wrestling with the dictates of her upbringing. She was in no way proud of herself for thinking this way, she said.

            In this era where the worst forms of race hatred are often cloaked in the jargon of tolerance, this was the first time I’d heard someone I consider a peer describe herself, essentially, as racist. I think of my generation as having gotten past the overt struggle to embrace one another as equals. I think of our challenge as a more subtle one, rooted in our passive acceptance of insidious economic, cultural and institutional bias.
           
            Her honesty jolted me out of the mental lull I’d fallen into, a place where I had come to believe that -- despite the media's overheated claims to the contrary-- Barak Obama’s race would be of as little consequence to voters as Hillary Clinton’s gender. A place where I had been luxuriating in the thrill of an inevitable “first,” where it didn’t matter so much which one you picked, because both held equal appeal.

            So comfortable was I that I planned to cast my primary vote for John Edwards, the candidate whose views -- particularly with regard to American poverty and class divisions -- are most closely aligned with my own (he launched his candidacy in that national disgrace called post-Katrina New Orleans, bless him).

             Not that I expect Edwards, a South Carolina native, to win (when your polling numbers are mired in the teens and you can’t even win your home state you know you’re in trouble), but I hold out hope that his presence in the race and the debates might thrust these critical themes into the public dialogue.

            As recently as a couple of weeks ago my husband and I wondered whether Obama could withstand voter concern -- not over his race but over his acknowledged recreational cocaine use in his younger days.

            But this woman’s comments brought me back to earth, American-style. Her remarks led me to consider in a new light a survey conducted in the wake of Katrina by Michael Dawson’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Dawson found that among blacks polled, 78 percent said racial equality in the U.S. would never be achieved, at least not in their lifetime. Some 34 percent of whites polled agreed. I wonder now, as I re-assess Dawson's findings, if there were some among that 34 percent who didn’t WANT racial equality in their lifetime.

            The Southern woman went on to defend her stance by suggesting that Obama, begat of a white Kansan mother and Kenyan father, was not a "real" African American. For her it seems Obama is both too black and not black enough.

            Perhaps she felt enabled by some leading black Southern politicians, including Robert Ford, a state senator from South Carolina who claims to be an Obama fan and who told Time magazine a year ago that "we in the South don't believe America is ready to elect a black President."
Earlier this month Ford pooh-poohed Obama’s Iowa win, telling reporters "of course you're going to have white liberals in a Democratic primary vote for Obama. That's why I'm concerned. You've got people in this country who wouldn't even vote for a black for dogcatcher, and now you want to ask them to vote for one for president of the United States?"

            After Obama’s South Carolina landslide, it must have given him no small satisfaction to deliver his victory speech in the same hall where he launched his campaign in that state last year, shortly after Ford declared that an Obama nomination would be disastrous. According to the Charleston Post and Courier, Obama’s original speech was punctuated with a chorus of “Yes we can!” In celebration of Saturday’s victory, the crowd chanted, “Yes he did!”

            But he hasn’t done it yet, and if Ford and the Southerner prevail -- coming to the same defeatist conclusion while viewing the Obama candidacy from opposite sides of the racial divide -- he won't. Next week's Super Tuesday in which 22 states hold Democratic primaries or caucuses is, as Monday's Los Angeles Times puts it, "a particular challenge for Obama, who trails Clinton in most national polls."

            Perhaps the Southerner I spoke with is an anomaly, completely unrepresentative of anything or anyone other than herself. Or perhaps there are plenty of others like her, but enough others unlike her to render her personal biases, in the scheme of this election, irrelevant.

            I cheer myself with the memory of a Sunday morning in 1976 when a glossy pamphlet for presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter was slipped through our family’s mail slot. My father scooped it up and after a brief perusal tossed it aside. “No one named Jimmy will ever be president,” he declared, as if it were the most indisputable truth imaginable.