Prometheus 6

It's long...make sure you have a few minutes to read and think.

Race Will Survive the Obama Phenomenon
By DAVID R. ROEDIGER

The idea of race emerged amid evolving processes in which the government, the economy, and the society sorted people into very different relationships to property, management, punishment, and citizenship, according to fictive biological categories. Great struggles, peaking in the 1860s and 1870s, and again a century later, forced important changes. But those struggles lost momentum and unity before effecting other political economic changes that might have decisively disconnected color from degradation and suspicion, leaving even formal, legal equality fragile. They also allowed room for the development of new racial sorting by state-sponsored incarceration and deportation.

With whites today having, on average, more than nine times the household wealth of African-Americans and Latinos, and with white-male incarceration rates at less than one-seventh those of African-American men, desires to claim white identity and to defend the relative advantages attached to it will persist unless substantial changes occur, even in the wake of post-civil-rights gains for some minority groups. That is so not only because the past of slavery and racial discrimination lingers on, but also because since the civil-rights movement, deep racial inequalities have now been recreated across two generations. Only a tiny remnant of the always inadequate palliative of affirmative action remains to address racial inequality, and that is seldom defended out loud by political leaders.

And yet we hear often that race is almost spent as a social force in the United States, eliminated by symbolic advances, demographic changes, and private choices, if not by structural transformations or political struggles. Nowhere is that argument more forcefully, or more contradictorily, made than in analyses of Barack Obama's campaign for president.

"Race Over" was the headline of the Harvard University sociologist Orlando Patterson's prognostications a few years ago in The New Republic. In 2050, Patterson assured readers, the United States "will have problems aplenty. But no racial problem whatsoever." Inconsistencies littered Patterson's predictions. Black people in the raceless United States would use new technologies to change their appearance. In the Northeast and Midwest, "murderous racial gang fights" would persist — but allegedly without the issue of race being involved. In the Southeast, the racial divisions of the "Old Confederacy" would continue but would somehow make no difference in the national picture. A still more glaring contradiction obtruded when Patterson added another set of futurological observations in a New York Times article in 2001, which contested the common view of demographers that white people would become a minority in 21st-century America. Arguing that "nearly half of the Hispanic population is white in every social sense," Patterson forecast that the "white population will remain a substantial majority and possibly even grow as a portion of the population." Patterson's point — that some of the children of intermarriages between non-Hispanic white and Hispanic white people will identify, and be identified, as simply "white" is not implausible, but the contrast between the two articles is jarring: Race will vanish — but whiteness will persist.

In 2008, Patterson was back in the Times, analyzing Hillary Clinton's "red phone" campaign advertisement. In it, she answered an emergency 3 a.m. phone call with an assurance that, according to the implication of the ad, Obama could not provide. Patterson observed that the commercial had Clinton defending white children (and perhaps some meant to be seen as Latino) in a way that implied that the nebulous danger evoked might be a black man. Not only did the advertisement cast Obama as unfit to be the reassuring solution; its subtext associated him with the menace itself. Race, over or almost done, still saturated public discourse.