The Wrong Name

For six hours while I was in Cincinnati, I phone banked for the Obama campaign. On one of my calls, I talked with an elderly man who was undecided for whom he would vote for president. After talking about his disenchantment with politicians (“who never do even twenty-five percent of what they say they’re going to do!”), he finally got around to the crux of his indecisiveness about Obama. “I just can’t see myself voting for a man for president with that name,” he said. “It sounds too much like Osama Bin Laden or Hussein.” He also said that he was uncomfortable with Obama’s history with Islam. Even though he knew that Obama never practiced Islam, he thought that he grew up in a Muslim family, and, “ya know,” he said, “99% of Muslims are fundamentalist.”
He said that unlike some other people, he wasn’t caught up on the “race thing” because Obama is just as much white as he is Black.
Oh, boy! How was I going to respond to this?? There are so many prejudices underlying what he was saying! How could I be honest to myself and respond in a way that doesn’t alienate him?
I remember talking about the mainstream media and how it wants us to believe certain things about Islam that simply aren’t true- that in fact it is only a small percentage of Muslims that are fundamentalist, and that, as a person who studies religion, I see a lot of similarities between moderate Muslims and Christians, who all believe in a loving God and in the value of strong families (as I was looking at a pamphlet “Obama is a man of faith” with a picture and title of him as a “family man” on it.) I talked about how we can judge things and people by their titles (names, titles of faith, etc.), but what really matters is what’s underneath a title- what people believe and how we live is what matters.
We talked for twenty minutes and I cannot say that I convinced him to vote for Obama. But I did feel like he listened. I did feel like he wasn’t happy with the prejudices he did acknowledge having (and probably wouldn’t be happy with the numerous prejudices I saw that he wasn’t aware of), and he wanted to open up to change. He wanted to gain a new perspective.
Confronting the realities of Christian Supremacy and racism was hard, and yet, I was able to swallow and keep pursuing relationship with this man I did not know. I felt like my kinship with him was more important than the harmful state of his beliefs. Would it have been different if I had been Muslim or Jewish or Black? Perhaps. Perhaps the injury would have been too close to my heart for me to genuinely remain open to this man. But I am glad I did, for there are a lot of people just like him who, with a little care and listening, may turn to want to rid themselves of some of the harmful thinking that they have learned.