Story on race -- part 2

To underscore that point, I included a profile of York resident Ann Carver of York.

Ms. Carver's father was William McCulloch, a conservative Republican congressman who was instrumental in getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. She made the point that Democrats have received virtually all the credit for landmark civil rights legislation, which she assumes is because of the efforts of presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

But a bloc of southern Democrats vehemently opposed the Civil Rights Act. Without the contribution of Republicans such as Carver's father, the bill would never have passed.

One of the reasons I thought Ms. Carver was a good subject for the story is because she's been a resident of downtown York for many years. (It turns out she's actually a neighbor of mine.)

She's very active in a downtown neighborhood association, and volunteers at a local public school. As such, she's a walking refutation of the stereotype that Republicans are a bunch of sheltered suburbanites who willfully ignore the problems facing cities.

Ms. Carver shared an interesing insight with me. She said that she's worked on many Republican presidential campaigns over the years.

Around Republican campaign headquarters, Ms. Carver said, they don't talk about race. That's not because it's a taboo subject. It simply hasn't been an issue for the campaign volunteers with whom she's worked. They're more concerned about matters such as the economy or national defense.

Ms. Carver makes the argument, and it's a compelling one, that the mindset she described is inherently less racist. In effect, they're taking race out of the picture altogether.

And yet ...

And yet in the past couple of weeks, I've spoken with plenty of black people who might argue just as compellingly that they haven't had the luxury of treating race as a non-issue these past few decades.

Ms. Carver, to her credit, is not one of these political conservatives who claims that discrimination no longer exists in our society.

Still, I've spoken to plenty of people over the years who seem to believe that Institutional discrimination against black people is a product of the distant past, with as much relevance to contemporary political dialogue as, say, the once pervasive discrimination against the Irish.

Lynchings? Jim Crow laws? Come on, that was years ago! Get over it!

The argument there seems to be that all such discrimination took place in some distant era of American history that has no bearing on the present.

Maybe it's a symptom of hitting middle age. But I recently turned 42. By default, I consider anything that happened in my lifetime to be recent.

So it was within my lifetime that black people were beaten and jailed for trying to assert their basic rights as citizens. It was within my lifetime that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Those memories are more fresh than many white people would like to acknowledge.

I myself didn't fully realize that until I was working on this story. Several people told me of an opinion that's not uncommon among black people living in York. Some are convinced that if Obama is elected, he'll be assassinated. They don't want to vote for him for that reason.

True or not, King's murder has instilled in them the belief that being black and prominent is an offense that American society punishes with a death sentence.

I find it both sad and infuriating to think that the acts of racist violence in the 1960s meant to scare black people away from political involvement are still working all of these years later. Regardless of who wins in November, regardless of which candidate we support, lets hope for all of our sakes that we can get past that someday soon.