There's no question that we've come along way in the way we perceive race. So far, in fact, that we elected a black man to the highest office in the country last November—something that would have been unthinkable just thirty years earlier. Perhaps nothing captures the distance we've come better than the indelible image of Jesse Jackson—himself once a candidate for the Presidency—shedding a tear during Barack Obama's acceptance speech.
But it is too early to talk of having achieved a post-racial society—if such a thing is even possible. Consider the vast disparities still remaining—to take just one example—between the conditions of blacks and whites in America. According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median black worker earns just over $600/week, about 80% of what the median white worker makes. Black men are incarcerated at 6.6 times the rate of white men, with almost one in twenty black men in prison. And as this interactive graph shows, unemployment rates are nearly twice as high for blacks as for whites in essentially every demographic category. Almost half of all young black men without a high school education are out of work nationally.
Nor is it true that we as a nation have suddenly become colorblind. While his race didn't stop Barack Obama from getting elected, it certainly was a factor in the presidential campaign. In some key areas the vote split dramatically along racial lines—as Daniel Schorr points out, Obama won 78 percent of the black vote in South Carolina, but only 24 percent of the white vote. The pervasive rumors that Obama had been born in Kenya and was a Muslim would never gained much traction if the white mainstream didn't perceive him as somehow "other." Conversely, while it's hard to believe being black was on balance an advantage for Obama, his race—and the fact that he would be the first black to win the presidency—was undoubtedly part of his appeal. As Shelby Steele argues, by invoking the ideal of a post-racial society—by calling on us to judge him by the content of his character rather than the color of skin—Obama was able to tap into "the longing on the part of whites to escape the stigma of racism."
Rather than showing that we have finally gotten beyond race, Obama's election makes it clear that we are still grappling with its role in our society. Indeed, it's precisely because race is still an issue that his election was such an important historic milestone. So we shouldn't take it as license to turn a blind eye to the racial issues in our society. In their fascinating new book, Nurtureshock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman argue that our reluctance to talk about race only allows the prejudices our kids naturally develop to go unchallenged. Likewise, as adults we shouldn't ignore the very real disparities that remain in the way we see and treat different races. We shouldn't use Obama, as Larry Wilmore joked on The Daily Show, as "that convenient black friend every white person has to prove they're not racist." While we might like to believe that racial distinctions no longer really matter, pretending we don't see them won't make them go away.
Discuss
Urban Ascetic on November 13, 2009, 5:32 PM
I agree until we can raise issues of race without embarrassment and until old fashioned characterisations and stereotypes stop influencing our workplaces then there is no hope of a post racial society.
I think for a lot of people the election of president Obama was seen as a full stop, as an indication that American society had arrived . That the embarrassing race issue could finally be ignored. This doesn’t mean we’ve not made progress it just means we’ve not arrived at the end of our journey.
If we are going to stop racial prejudice then we have to be able to challenge it constructively. To many people black or white, race, disability or sexuality can be the elephant in the room that no one talks about. We have to as Kyra Gaunt would put it “be willing to be offended” if we are going to make real progress in becoming a post racial or post anything society. http://wrdeer.blogspot.com
Robert de Neufville on November 13, 2009, 6:19 PM
Thanks for the comments. There have been a number of black candidates before—not just Jesse Jackson, who did quite well, but also notably Alan Keyes, Carol Moseley-Braun, and Al Sharpton. You could make a case that there have been no really viable black candidates before Obama, but of course part of the reason that earlier black candidates weren’t viable was because they were black. That’s part of why Joe Biden got in so much trouble when he dismissed previous black candidates as unappealing—it came out as seeming that he simply didn’t like black people. I really like the idea that we have to be “willing to be offended.” Discussing racial issues will be painful, but we need to do it.
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