Anguiano on Racial Politics

I've written in the past about the Mexican punditry's general favoritism toward Barack Obama, and today's "A Black American President?" by Eugenio Anguiano is another good example. He closes his piece with the following:

Returning to the question heading this article, to an occasional visitor to the region around Boston...it could seem that Americans have matured to the point where they could vote without racial prejudice, but the US is big and racial conservatism is still widespread, which makes you wonder about the arrival of a black man to the presidency of the country. Despite that, I dare predict that, should he be confirmed in August to the Democratic candidacy, his chances of winning the big one would be very high.

I think Mexicans typically misread where lies the biggest challenge in Obama's candidacy: it's more his name than his race. Americans' anti-black racial prejudice in the post-Civil Rights era is surely less pronounced than Americans' anti-Muslim-sounding-name prejudice in the post-9/11 era. I'd be willing to bet a lot of dollars that there exist no small number of Americans who have no prejudice against African Americans (or whose light prejudice wouldn't affect their voting choices) but who would be uncomfortable with a White House occupant whose middle name is (famously) Hussein. At the same time, I'd also be willing to bet that there are fewer Americans who would not vote for a black man but who would vote for a white man named Muhammad.

In Obama's case, it's impossible to completely separate name prejudice from racial prejudice, but I think of the two, the former is the bigger obstacle. Of course, bets I'd make don't really equal evidence, and I have no polls to back me up, so maybe Anguiano has it right.