Obama's candidacy doesn't close race gap: poll

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(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-07-16 23:52

WASHINGTON -- Americans are sharply divided by race heading into the first election in which an African-American will be a major-party presidential nominee, a new poll released Wednesday has found.

The New York Times/CBS News poll shows blacks and whites holding vastly different views of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas.

More than 80 percent of black voters said they had a favorable opinion of Obama while only 30 percent of white voters said they had a favorable opinion of him.

Nearly 60 percent of black respondents said race relations were generally bad, compared with 34 percent of whites.

Four in 10 blacks say there has been no progress in recent years in eliminating racial discrimination, while fewer than 2 in 10 whites say the same thing.

And about one-quarter of white respondents said they thought too much had been made of racial barriers facing black people, while one-half of black respondents said not enough had been made of racial impediments faced by blacks.

The survey suggests that even as the nation crosses a racial threshold when it comes to politics many of the racial patterns in society remain unchanged in recent years.

The poll shows markedly little change in the racial components of people's daily lives since 2000.