By Jill Chapin

May 15, 2008

Any obvious but unpleasant truth that people want to avoid acknowledging is usually referred to as the elephant in the room. In West Virginia, the apparent unpleasant elephant is a lingering racism that clings to those in this predominantly white, blue collar state. And with a population that is not as college educated as others, young adults miss out on immersing themselves in the vast melting pot that represents campus life.

This suspicion is validated by exit polls where 22% admitted that race was an important factor in their decision. These responses were from people who were willing to admit to this bias; it does not factor in those who may have agreed with this sentiment but were unwilling to reveal it. More startling, 29% said that they would support Senator John McCain over Senator Barack Obama, implying that they would vote against their own best interests rather than elect a black man.

To be sure, not everyone in West Virginia holds this view. But enough do to give us pause as we try to reconcile this undeniable prejudice with our general assumption that we Americans have moved beyond such a simplistic benchmark for electing a president in the twenty-first century.

In some states, it is evident that we haven’t progressed as far as we’d like to believe, and West Virginia is the poster child for unfinished business as it relates to racial harmony.

In defense of West Virginians, it is more difficult to shed racial prejudices in a state with little diversity. With a preponderance of people surrounding us who look and act and believe as we do, there is not much opportunity to associate with people who are different from us, both physically and culturally. What we don’t know usually frightens us, and I truly believe it’s more a fear of the unknown rather than a deep-seated hatred that propels those in West Virginia to summarily dismiss a candidate as supremely qualified as Senator Obama, simply because he is darker than they are.

Just as bad habits are difficult to shed, so too are prejudices handed down over the generations. With little new input to encourage those to re-examine what they thought were unshakable truths, a perfect storm of lingering racism is allowed to rain down on each successive generation.

Senator Obama’s challenge will be to bring sunlight into a state that I suspect is more open to another point of view than even West Virginians realize when it comes to judging a man by more than the color of his skin.