Not Prejudiced, But 'I Don't Want...a Colored Man' for President

November 27th, 2007 9:03 PM

In the self-incriminating quote of the night, an unidentified white man, in a Tuesday night CBS Evening News story on Barack Obama, insisted “I don't want to sound prejudiced or anything,” but then proceeded to declare: “I don't want to vote for a colored man to be our President.” The soundbite aired during a piece from Dean Reynolds on Obama's racial identity and how it gives some blacks “pause” because “he is not the descendant of African slaves, but is the son of a white mother and a Kenyan father.” Reynolds, reporting from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, concluded by observing that “of course, there are whites who will never vote for Obama because he is black.” The unidentified man, standing in what looked like a store, then asserted in a soundbite:

I don't want to sound prejudiced or anything, but for one I'm not gonna, I don't want to vote for a colored man to be our President.

The CBSNews.com online version of the Reynolds story identified the man only as “one South Carolina voter.”

The man certainly, and very unfortunately, confirmed the media's prejudices about conservative white men.