'Get me more white people'

While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama’s event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama.

The Tartan’s correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, “Get me more white people, we need more white people.” To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, “We’re moving you, sorry. It’s going to look so pretty, though.”

“I didn’t know they would say, ‘We need a white person here,’ ” said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. “I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn’t know it would be so outright.”

This began to register with me when I tuned in to Obama's soaring, magnificent victory speech in South Carolina on Jan. 26. His mastery was impressive. And so was that of his image managers, I gradually concluded.

I marveled at the sea of white faces nodding approvingly or cheering wildly behind Obama. Then I realized that only a sprinkling of the black voters and volunteers who helped power the candidate's victory in my home state had made it onto the platform seats behind Obama, in range of the national eye.

Was it possible these voters had not come to celebrate their victory? Hardly. Reporters in the hall saw Obama campaign workers usher photogenic white families toward the platform as they entered. The scene they composed was an effective, calculated rebuttal of the Clintons' effort to portray Obama as a black candidate whose victory depended on race -- a way of killing "this possible racial narrative before it could be born," as Gal Beckerman wrote in a perceptive dispatch on the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk blog.