A recent photo of the Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago has caused controversy by displaying a roomful of young twenty-something campaign workers...all uniformly white.
As Mansfield Frazier reports:
The lily-white photo is all the more puzzling given that the president’s staffers have consistently managed to find persons of color to be on stage behind him at campaign events. How could a supposedly savvy political operation assemble such a monochromatic room? The photo is a testament to how overlooked diversity is in America. It doesn’t simply happen on its own, but has to be worked at. ... So the line for volunteers and paid staffers is very long, and the competition fierce—but all of those selected could not have just happened to be white absent racism on someone’s part.
To be sure, Romney's campaign also suffers from a similar problem. According to the Daily Beast:
After a long primary season, Mitt Romney begins his contest with Barack Obama without having attracted any notable black endorsers, surrogates, or high-ranking campaign staffers.
One would, think, however, that a Democrat campaign would make a greater effort to employ a staff that reflects the American population, especially when its core support often stems from the African-American community. And for a campaign as famously savvy and cutting-edge as the Obama team, this photo seems to reveal some potentially puzzling internal dynamics.
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