I am struck by the invocation of “hushed worry” in the New York Times, which I’ve heard before quite unhushed and expressed with more clarity than worry.

After arriving in Mississippi in 2005 I heard it expressed many times from many of my students (all of them black) that no black man could be elected president and that, if one somehow managed, he’d be shot dead in short order. I told them about Barack Obama, who at that time was unknown to them, and predicted that he wouldn’t run in 2008 (to finish a term in the senate and to make way for Clinton), but to look out for him in 2012 or 2016 depending on a Clinton victory or defeat. I reassured them — and, in hindsight, maybe myself more than them — that times have changed, that the picture one gets of race relations as a black teenager in rural Mississippi is not typical of America, that Bush is loathed vehemently by huge numbers of people and has had his assassination more-or-less endorsed or called for or fantasized about by more-or-less mainstream figures, and that he marches on. I told the story of President Clinton’s visit to a local school while I was a teenager, of the clear Secret Service presence that anticipated it, of the snipers on the rooftops, of the kid pulled out of my photography class by scary men to have the fear of God put in him the day after an off-the-cuff stupid joke reported by I don’t know whom (the walls?) the week prior to the event.

I’ve heard that assertion less frequently and with perhaps less certainty in “urban” and somewhat more worldly Jackson, now that nobody needs me to tell them who Obama is. But I still hear it. Probably two-thirds of a class of twenty-five black teenagers last week seemed convinced that he’d be dead inside a year if he gets elected.

I went into the same speech I’ve given before, but when I’m alone reading the New York Times I know it’s the lunatic and not the 51% of the country hating your guts that shows up armed to the rally, and there’s an uneasy feeling in my gut, more anxious by far for my students and their psyches than for Obama or his family or the nation.