Fairfax County, Va.: Your article has unleashed more than 2,100 comments online so far. Many are racist or at least racially tinged. Others are from people of good will or at least some thought who are getting drowned out by the voices of anger. So I'm wondering how you feel when you see all that. Do you read the comments when you write a story? Do you think The Washington Post is doing a service to the community when it opens the door to unfiltered commentary on such a subject (and supplies the bandwidth and software to host it)? Is it a good thing to know what's out there, or a bad thing to give these people a megaphone? I'm confident some are on a regular program of posting to such articles, either on a self-assigned "mission" or as political operatives. But I think a lot of others are one-time posters.
...
Fairfax County, Va.: Kevin, were you surprised there has been that level of racism and incidents -- or surprised there haven't been more? As a fortysomething white woman, it sounds about like what I would have expected, and a quantum leap forward from what things were like when I was growing up. We have a long way to go, but these stories now come across to me like the remnants and last bastions of racism, not typical of the whole country any more.
Kevin Merida: I think there has indeed been tremendous progress in the nation. It was only 40-50 years ago when people blacks would be blocked from going to the polls at all, hosed, beaten, etc...The young people who have been inspired to work for Obama are undeterred by racial intolerance. Not defeated.
I think that it a shame that in the year in the year 2008 that people are still racist and believe that people are not equal.
