"It's going to be something," said Tony Gonzales, an Atlanta barber. "Because it's a black person, something's going to happen."
Shan Dennis, a worker at a Decatur, Ga., insurance company, said she isn't worried about a fix being in -- but she says it's something she hears about quite a bit.
"That's been a big [issue] in the African American community," she said. "A lot of them think someone is not going to let him win."
Other voters are dismayed by the ugly tone that has emerged in the last few months, as Obama's candidacy unearthed frank expressions of prejudice from white voters, and polls show some of them may be resistant to the idea of a black president: One AP-Yahoo News poll in September suggested that a third of white Democrats held negative views toward blacks.
The Rev. Kevin M. Turman, pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Detroit, has seen similar polls. He grows worried and frustrated when he thinks of the scenario they could trigger.
"My concern is that white Democrats -- who agree with Obama on every issue -- won't vote for him because he's black," Turman said.
Historically, Turman said, black voters have proved one of the most reliable constituencies for the Democratic Party. If whites don't show up to vote for a qualified black candidate, he would feel something like betrayal.
"I will have to reconsider my lifelong support of the Democratic Party," he said. "Perhaps it will be time for us to look at elections on more of a candidate-by-candidate basis, and not just vote the party ticket."
Obama's father was a black Kenyan; his mother was a white Kansan; and he was raised by white grandparents. The election, of course, is about many things, not just racial identity. And black voters have different opinions about whether the election should be viewed as a referendum on the state of American race relations.
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a civil rights veteran and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, thinks the matter is plain:
"What we boil down to is a choice between 'Will you vote for the good of the country?' or 'Will you vote your racial fears?' " said Lowery.
But Charles Johnson, a novelist and English professor at the University of Washington, said it may be difficult to draw hard and fast conclusions about race relations from the November vote.
