World - US;Transcending Race

It’s a paradox. Barack Obama’s candidacy is hailed as “historic” for the very sound reason that he is the first African-American to become the presidential nominee of a major party. In a country whose history is permeated by race, that’s clearly a significant event, at the least a huge symbolic breakthrough. Yet in his widely praised acceptance speech Obama made no reference to race or to the history that made the occasion “historic”.
Obama has projected himself as a candidate transcending race, and his nomination was hailed even by conservative opponents as a sign that struggles over race were a thing of the past. Raceless reconstruction
As was widely noted, Obama’s acceptance of the nomination coincided with the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Obama harked back to that day, but subjected it to a carefully raceless re-construction. The “young preacher from Georgia” had not, Obama said, offered “words of anger and discord” but a reminder that “in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one”.
Taken out of context, the one passage from the speech he actually quoted — “We cannot walk alone, and as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead” — is politically banal. In fact, as Obama must know, there were many “words of anger and discord” heard on that day in Washington; and no one lashed out more fiercely at the U.S.’s persistent failure to deliver its “promissory note” to black Americans than King himself — a striking contrast with Obama’s celebration of the “American promise”. Terrifying impact
Racial categories exist not in our bodies but in our minds. Their construction is artificial and arbitrary, but their impact is terrifyingly concrete. As historian David Roediger writes, “The world got along without race for the overwhelming majority of its history. The U.S. has never been without it.” Racial inequality was inscribed in the U.S. constitution and, despite the civil war and, a century later, the civil rights movement, it remains ingrained in U.S. society, woven into the fabric of the labour market, workplaces and residential areas.
As Roediger notes, 10 years ago the net financial worth of African-American and Latino families was 17.2 per cent that of whites, and since then the disparity has grown. Today, whites have on average nine times the household wealth of African-Americans and Latinos. Nearly one in three African-American children live in poverty, compared to one in 10 white children. According to the research group United for a Fair Economy, under existing trends black and white median household wealth will not become equal for at least 500 years.
Meanwhile, 75 per cent of all active tuberculosis cases affect people of colour. And 50 years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in education, two thirds of all African American and Latino urban students attend schools in which less than 10 per cent of the students are white. Conversely, in 2006, black students made up only 2.2 per cent of entrants at the University of California at Los Angeles — and one fifth of these were scholarship athletes.
Black males born in 1991 are estimated to have a 29 per cent chance of imprisonment, more than seven times that of whites born in the same year; Latino men are incarcerated at four times the rate of whites. Sixty per cent of the prison population consists of people of colour, the result of massive racial disparities in sentencing, from petty drugs crimes to death penalty offences.
The statistics confirm what is plain to any open-eyed visitor to the U.S. Racial hierarchies are there to see, from mid-town Manhattan restaurants to far flung southwestern suburbs. All this persists some four decades after the civil rights movement succeeded in outlawing racial discrimination.
The contradiction between an officially “colour-blind” society and the reality of continuing racial inequality has given rise to a popular school of thought, which argues that the problem is blacks themselves and their alleged cultural inadequacies. This pathologising of black communities substitutes for a fact-based analysis of racial inequality, takes for granted many assumptions of white supremacy, and grossly caricatures millions of individuals. To some degree, Obama, like many liberals, white and black, accepts the pathologising, and or at least avoids challenging it. Object of resentment
In the long aftermath of the civil rights movement, the main weapon against racial inequality has been affirmative action. This much mythologised programme, always minimal in scope and hemmed in by court decisions, has become the prime object of white resentment. Republicans have seethed against it for decades, while Democrats, even the most liberal, have been reluctant to defend or even explain it.
State referenda against affirmative action were passed in California in 1996, Washington in 1998, and Michigan in 2006. The issue is on the ballot this autumn in four more states. Republican thinking is that these referenda will mobilise white voters who will go on to vote for the Republican candidate. Obama himself is equivocal on the issue, and will certainly not want his campaign to be tainted in any way with what is seen as a black/white “wedge” issue.
Obama may wish to move beyond race but his campaign confronts it at every turn. In the South Carolina primary, where Obama scored a significant victory over Clinton, he took 80 per cent of the black vote and only 25 per cent of the white vote, yet his jubilant supporters chanted “RACE DOESN’T MATTER!”"
It’s worth pointing out that only 18 months ago Time magazine was wondering whether Obama was “black enough” to mobilise the African-American vote. In the end, African-Americans have chosen to back a candidate whose mother is white, whose father was a foreigner — which, David Roediger notes, makes them the “most cosmopolitan” sector of the U.S. electorate.
Obama criticised his former pastor, the black nationalist Jeremiah Wright, for having “a profoudly distorted view of this country — one that sees white racism as endemic”. He stresses what “Americans” have in common and describes race as a diversion from real problems. But racism and racial inequality will not vanish by being ignored, merely as an incidental result of other processes, economic or demographic. As Roediger writes, “race thinking” is “not simply a diversion from other brutalities, but a prop on which they rest”.
Despite his reassuring rhetoric, Obama’s candidacy is a challenge to white supremacy, which is why there will continue to be huge resistance to it. He may try to ignore race, but it could turn out to be a fatal obstacle on his road to the White House.