Almost Uniformly White': How Diverse is Obama's Campaign Staff, Really?

In yet another example of its ongoing attempts to be "media savvy," the Obama campaign has posted a photo of its staff on the campaign's Tumblr, intended to show off the (presumably) totally cool and hip people working for Obama. Yet Andrew Stiles at the Washington Free Beacon noticed something rather odd about the photo, and decided to kill their buzz by pointing it out:

Yet the “army of twenty-somethings” campaign manager Jim Messina has assembled in the president’s hometown is almost uniformly white, according to photos contained in a detailed BuzzFeed report Monday.

Compare with the photo itself:

So what, some might wonder - if the race of a candidate doesn't matter, then the race of their staff certainly doesn't matter. This is true, as far as it goes, however, when a Presidential candidate makes a habit out of accusing his opponents of being racist, then a uniformly white staff becomes a problem simply as a matter of consistency. (Related: 'Post-Racial' President's Campaign Lacks Diversity) Stiles points out the irony:

The apparent lack of racial diversity at the Obama campaign headquarters comes at a time when the national black unemployment rate is nearly double the rate for whites.

According to the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 14 percent of blacks are currently unemployed, compared with 7.3 percent of whites.

One wonders what Michael Eric Dyson would have to say about this.