I was headed into my local grocer in Durham, North Carolina last weekend when I saw a startling sight. A pickup truck of early 1990s era was in the carpark, and scrawled across the side of it in big, carefully-lettered permanent marker were the words "Southern White Hard-Working Beer-Drinking Gun-Owning White Man In His 50s FOR OBAMA!", with the last two words drawn about eighteen inches high.

Now, it isn't uncommon for a man to deface his beloved pickup truck in the South, especially when he is passionate about a cause. This isn't to say that we don't revere the iconic pick-up truck much the way that some nomads revere horses or camels. It's as much an economic issue as anything – a man with a pick-up truck won't starve, ever. But as such, most truck-owning Southerners treat their vehicles like prized thoroughbreds – it takes a lot to bring a man to voluntarily deface it. When it does happen, it is a bold and powerful statement to the community.

Usually a Nascar racing team is involved, or a local government agency who he feels has targeted him unfairly. Ex-wives frequently crop up on the sides of trucks – as do their lawyers – and especially after September 11, global Islamic terrorists and our war-weary troops have been the favourite subjects. And religious verse and iconography are not infrequent, either. Pickup trucks in the South are a kind of rolling marginalia, an eight-cylinder object d'art, a practical exercise of free speech on big tires.

So when a Southern white man defaces his white truck in the name of an African American candidate for office – favourably – that is indeed worthy of note by us casual "pickup truck spotters".

Admittedly, we are in a solidly-Democratic city with a large African-American population, with one of the most liberal private universities in the nation and the South's second highest lesbian population. If you travel 50 miles in any direction from Durham, you emerge into the "real" rural South, famed in song, story and film for its quaint cultural attitudes, casual violence, extreme politeness and devout religious piety. And, of course, its racial insecurity.

Race intrudes in just about every aspect of life in the American south that it becomes part of the atmosphere, like the water in a fishtank. I didn't really understand that myself until I traveled beyond the South and realized the difference. Once upon a time it would have been nigh unthinkable for a white man, no matter how liberal, to voice support for an African-American political candidate - period. After 30 years of consistent jabbing at the old Southern social order, such things are more common today. The "Age of Obama" has helped shake up the last vestiges of the old regime, however, and as we approach Election Day it's easy to see how the casual racism that used to be so overt in Dixie can be so easily exhumed.

The danger to the Obama campaign in the South has always been racial in nature – and his campaign has done its best to distance itself from the traditional southern African American political machines (which are just as corrupt and effective as the white Republican political machines) while still energizing the base they represent. It's been a delicate dance, and one made harder by his middle name and African heritage. Militant "Black Muslims" have always been a boogey-man to ignorant white voters in the South, and damning Obama by implication is second nature to his opponents here. They nearly salivated over the inflammatory Jeremiah Wright video, figuring it was an open-and-shut condemnation that would keep the region safely red this year.

Not so fast.

The race card has been continuously played here for 200 years, now, and used to effect political change, usually by wealthy white people. It has led to the only successful coup d'etat in American history, the deaths of thousands by lynching, the disenfranchisement of a good 20% of the population, and a racially-based caste system that took decades to overthrow. Today it leaves behind a residue that is all-too-apparent in this presidential race.

Sometimes it's blatant. "You're just supporting Obama because of white guilt," one woman of my parents' generation accuses me. "They are trying to make you feel bad because of slavery!" she whines. She's voted Democratic in every election I've voted in, but she's suddenly become a conservative Republican, now that McCain is facing a black man. My protests about the race-neutral issue of a trillion dollars spent on our foreign wars meaning more to me than four centuries of racial injustice fall on deaf ears. To her, the only reason a sane white Southerner would ever support an African American for president is because of racial guilt.

Sometimes it's slightly more subtle. Another lady from my church, one I privately called "the Right Arm Of God" - not because of her observed piety, I should probably point out, but for her excessive zeal in protecting her daughter's virtue - is upset that I've been vocal in support of Obama in public where people can see. "I hope you'll use that intellect to get the right man elected," she cautions me. I don't need to be a genius to figure out what she means.

But sometimes you find relief from the ignorance in unexpected places. Like when my brother-in-law, a deputy sheriff, epitome of Southern conservative power, pulled into my driveway and nodded to my Obama sticker. "I'm gonna vote for that sumb*tch," he expressed, colourfully. "Looks like McCain's gonna be another term for George Bush, and I'd rather vote for a damn Muslim negro than that." And no, he didn't use the word "negro". It was the same day I saw that pick-up truck with the proud pro-Obama message.

Baby steps.