Hi folks! I just learned that today is Barack Obama’s birthday, and remembered that I had this canvassing story from his first campaign tucked away. So, happy birthday, Mr. President!
Race and gender on Hogan Dr., Richmond, VA, October 27, 2008 — a true story (with names changed).
I did some canvassing for Obama today in a residential area near where I live, which is in suburban Henrico County, near the city line of Richmond. The city of Richmond is deeply blue, but western Henrico County, where I live, is a pretty conservative area: many of the older residents fled here in reaction to the desegregation of the Richmond schools. But things are changing: the recent influx of immigrants from all around the world has had a dramatic impact on the whole region, and in the suburbs in particular (at least in the more modest ones, like mine). So, while the area I live in was once mostly white and American-born (and probably Richmond-born) – there are now also a fair number of African-Americans, Indians, Bangladeshi, Hispanics, Vietnamese, Thais, Eastern Europeans, Lebanese, and Chinese. For example, in my block of 20-some houses, about six have inhabitants who are not white and/or not American-born.
Canvassers are given sheets with names, addresses, gender, and age on them, and it’s possible to target people based on how often they’ve voted and how they tend to vote. The sheet I had said that the person living at the house next on my list on Hogan Dr. was a woman, 82 years old. She would be, I figured, pretty old-school Richmond. She would probably be white and, given her age, probably Republican. Why even bother going to the door?
Well, one of the many pleasures of canvassing is having your mind blown with some regularity. Even when reality ends up being different in a way that you don’t like, there’s an excitement in the forced expansion of one’s perceptions. It’s nice to be surprised by people and have them be unpredictable. I was once canvassing for the Kerry campaign along with a black faculty member from Virginia Commonwealth University; it was her first time out, and I was the “veteran” coaching her. As we started out, I told her to expect the unexpected. The very first house we went to was in the student ghetto near the University, and a young black woman answered the door. For sure she’d be for Kerry, right? She was even a social worker. No, she was for Bush because she was a born-again Christian and she liked his stance on abortion. Her social work was a religious calling, and the other members of the household were all young, black, Christian conservatives who were going to vote for Bush. My mentee, who was doing the talking, just about had a heart attack and so did I!
So, today, mindful of my past experiences about the orneriness of human beings, I muttered to myself, “Don’t make assumptions, don’t make assumptions, don’t make assumptions” as I approached the house. As I drew near, I was pleased to see a rail-thin and spry old bird in a yellow track suit and walking shoes come out of the house and come down to greet me. I had wondered if she’d even answer the door, given that it was just about dusk, when many people are either eating dinner or just too cautious to open the door to a stranger — especially true of older folks. “I’m Flo” she announced, “but I guess you know that,” she said, eyeing my folder.
I tried to explain the purpose of my visit, but Flo interrupted me to invite me into her house. Of course, going into someone’s house is violation of Rule #1 of canvassing, both for safety concerns and to avoid conversations that get too lengthy and keep you from reaching more doors. But, well, I’ve always been of the school that one strengthens the rules by violating them, so I accepted her invitation.
I’ve learned living in the South that there are no quick conversations with real honest-to-god Southerners, which is usually OK by me and reminds me a lot of the way my hometown in Delaware used to be. So, I follow Flo in, and I soon learn all about her: she’s been widowed recently, she’s from a family of 12 children, and she grew up in Farmville (can it get more rural?). She is, in short, from the REAL Virginia (as the conservatives around here like to think of it).
After learning quite a lot about Flo, including where most of her surviving siblings are now living and what they do, plus all about her daughter – that is, after about half an hour – I managed to swing the conversation around to the election. I reminded her (she was pretty sharp, but she did have small memory lapses and had repeated some things a few times) that I was working for the Obama campaign and was curious about her opinion of the election. I braced myself. She was, after all, from the REAL Virginia. She brightened up right away and said, “I’m for him!” “Wow, that’s great,” I said, “would you like a brochure?” “Yes, that’d be good - to show my friends when they come around.” She took the brochure, which had photos of Obama, Mark Warner, and Anita Hartke (our brave candidate who was taking a run against the loathsome Eric Cantor). “They look really good!,” she said, “They all look really good!”
Then Flo noticed Obama’s name. “That name,” she said, “is he foreign?” As I said, she was fairly sharp in general, but was not playing with every single card the deck has to offer, and late afternoon is a bad time of day for people with memory problems. I briefly explained Obama’s family history to her. “Kenya,” she asked, “where’s that?” “It’s in Africa,” I answered. “Well, he can’t run if he’s foreign, can he?” I was not liking where this conversation was headed. “Well, his father was from Kenya, but he was born here in America, and raised mostly in Hawaii, and his mother’s American.” “So his father was black, is that what you mean?” “Yes,” I said, holding my breath and waiting for the punch to the gut, “his father was black and Kenyan, and his mother was white and American.” I then sat there trying to figure out what to say in response to what I was sure would be her next sentence. Whatever I said had to be responsible to the issue, but not hurtful to a frail old lady. But I was at a loss — what could my response possibly be? And what was her response? She held the brochure up to the light (the room was fairly dark by now) and said, beaming: “Well, he must really be something to have overcome everything and get as far as he did. He looks real good to me!” “Yes,” with tears in my eyes, “he is really something.”
So...who was prejudiced?
But then, to make the encounter more exquisite, Flo turned her attention to the photos of Anita Hartke. Flo told me in no uncertain terms that she didn’t think that women should run for office because they had a lot of health problems, which in her view included normal menstrual periods. “What if she’s in a meeting, and starts bleeding all over the place? And then, you know, some men are mean. She’d be going around door to door, or going out at night to meetings, and someone might hurt her. She’s too young to know that, but you and I know. Is she your friend?” With her remark on ‘going door to door’ I thought she might have been conflating Anita Hartke and me for a moment. Or was that in my mind? The day was wearing on – not a good time of day for her memory nor for me to be going up to strangers’ houses, as she had circuitously reminded me. It’s also not a good time of day, if any is, for letting strangers into your house, especially if you’re a frail older person. So, here she was worrying about me and I was worrying about her — why the heck DID she let me in? – plus I was once again dumbstruck by what she had to say. The gender thing really is down to the core, isn’t it? Whatever Flo’s slips of memory, she had definitely grasped that Barack Obama had a funny name and was black, and that was just fine with her. Perhaps she’d forgotten about racism along with other things she had learned. But not about female leakage and the badness of some boys.
Her remark took me back to when I was 13 (in the late 60s) and heard the argument that women shouldn’t hold public office because our periods make us irrational and we might blow everyone sky-high. I was first exposed to this in all its glory when I was handing out some women’s lib flyer or other on Main St. in my hometown and a guy came up to me, took my flyer, and started screaming at me and frothing at the mouth, telling me how irrational women are because they have these monthly cycles and so should never hold political office. What if they started a nuclear war? He was way too far gone to have it pointed out to him that the button had already been pressed, and that the person who’d done it had a noticeable estrogen deficiency. He drew quite a crowd, ranting and raving about how irrational women are! It was one of the most ironically humorous things that has ever happened to me. Of course, at the same time, I wanted to pulverize him on the spot (I was not above fisticuffs; I really did try to take the non-violence route after King’s assassination, but concluded I was at too base a level in the cycle of being for that to work). It was, though, SO worth it to stay cool and calm and let this be a guerrilla theatre exercise at his expense. How strange that today, forty years later, I find myself having yet another conversation about politics, power, and menstruation.
So, there you have it. There ain’t nothing stranger’n folks, as they say in Delaware, and this just proves it. Biassed thinking is all around and in us, and it’s so often a surprise. It’s a very good thing to take the polls cum grano salis (at the very least): I don’t think any pollster is likely to sort through the million tangled webs in Flo’s or my or your mind.