Tim Wise
Nashville, Tennessee
December 2008
ONE
Barack Obama, White Denial and the Reality of Racism
Once Barack Obama became the Democratic Party’s nominee for president of the United States, two questions emerged most prominently in media and personal discussions of his candidacy. The first of these, most often put forward by those who were seeking to draw rather sweeping and positive conclusions from their query, was typically posed as, “What does it say about race in America that a black man now stands on the precipice of becoming, arguably, the most powerful person in the world?” The second, presented somewhat more skeptically than the first, and more likely offered up by those whose hopefulness was a bit more tempered by an appreciation of history, most of- ten sounded like this: “Is white America really ready for a black president?”
While we can hardly be surprised at how quickly these became the principal questions asked in the run-up to the November 2008 election, both nonetheless stemmed from premises that were largely false, or at least glaringly problematic. And as with any question that emanates from a false or incomplete starting point, such interrogations as these ultimately led down mundane analytic corridors, to destinations that, although interesting, were never truly the places to which we needed to travel.
For while the political ascent of Barack Obama, culminating with his victory in November over challenger John McCain, certainly says something about race, what it says is far from that which most—including those typically asking the question in the first place—seem to believe. Yes, it suggests that blind and irrational bigotry of the kind that animated so much white opinion for so long in the United States may well have receded (though not as much as we’d like to think, a subject to which I’ll return below). But given the evidence regarding entrenched racial inequities in employment, education, health care, criminal justice, housing and elsewhere—and the studies indicating these are due in large measure to discrimination, either past, present, or a combination of the two—it most definitely does not suggest that racism has been truncated as an ongoing social problem for persons of color generally.
Though Obama’s victory falls well short of proving that racism has been vanquished in America, for reasons I will explore shortly, it is still worth noting some of the positive aspects of the Obama victory when it comes to race. For although I will insist that his rise says far less than many would suggest, we would do well to at least note a few of the beneficial outcomes, so we know what we have to build on in the future.
First, Obama’s election to the presidency demonstrates that old-fashioned racism (or what I call in this volume Racism 1.0), though still far too prevalent in the nation, is capable of being defeated, especially when an effective coalition is put together, and when those who otherwise might fall back into patterns of bias and discrimination can be convinced that their interests (economic, for instance) should outweigh their tendency to act on the basis of skin color. Given the harrowing state of the American economy as voters went to the polls in November, and given the Obama campaign’s message that his opponent would only provide tax relief to the wealthiest Americans while largely continuing the economic policies of the Bush administration, many voters (including white working-class voters who had been turning against Democrats for a generation) turned to Obama. Even if they harbored ongoing prejudices toward African Americans generally (and evidence suggests that many still did), they were prepared to vote their pocketbooks and break with a long tradition, stretching back decades, whereby so many of them had ignored economic interests for the sake of apparent “racial bonding,” against communities of color.
Especially heartening was the fact that part of the strategy for gaining the support of white working-class voters was to directly confront them on their racism when it was expressed, rather than finessing it. Labor leader Richard Trumka, for instance, as well as other labor organizers and Obama’s own campaign in Ohio developed strategies for taking on white racism directly, rather than trying to sidestep it, in the hopes that voters would simply do the right thing for economic reasons alone. By calling out white racism and forcing white working folks to think about the irrationality of racial bonding—especially in the face of an economic free fall—these organizers planted the seeds of potential cross-racial alliance, which, if tended carefully, could bear fruit in the future.1
Secondly, and on a related note, the level of cross-racial collaboration (especially among youth) that made Obama’s victory possible was something rarely seen in American politics, or history. Although many, including myself, would rather see such mobilizing take place in arenas other than mainstream electoral politics, the fact is, efforts of this nature have to start somewhere. For young people who forged real and meaningful movement relationships in the Obama campaign, the possibility that they may continue to engage in grassroots organizing in years to come—and much of it around issues of racial justice—cannot be ignored. Long-term sustained activism is always more likely for those who have formed those genuine relationships and worked together for a common purpose, as so many young blacks, whites, Latinos and Asian Americans did in this election cycle. Likewise, that so many of the Obama campaigners witnessed racism up close and personal—while either canvassing or making phone calls for the campaign—can only have served to heighten these folks’ sensitivity to the problem of racism in America. So although the average white person may view Obama’s win as evidence of the death of racism (more on this below), those who worked on his behalf will have a hard time coming to that conclusion, having seen and heard so much raw and unexpurgated bigotry on the campaign trail.2
Finally, Obama’s win indicates that when a person of color has the opportunity to make his case day after day, for at least a year and a half (and really more, since Obama had been introduced to the public four years earlier during the 2004 Democratic National Convention), he is fully capable of demonstrating to the satisfaction of millions of whites (if still not most), his intelligence, wisdom, and leadership capabilities, sufficiently to win the job for which he is in effect, interviewing. So far so good.
But the bad news, and let us not forget it, is that most job interviews don’t last for eighteen months, and don’t involve millions of decision-makers, where at least in theory the biases of some can be canceled out by the open-mindedness of others. Rather, most job-seekers are facing a mere handful of evaluators, often only one, and if there is any significant bias in the heart or mind of that person (or if that person adheres, even subconsciously, to negative stereotypes about folks of color), the job applicant who is black or brown faces an uphill climb that Obama’s success cannot erase or transform. Likewise, most persons of color don’t have the luxury of whipping out their memoir when applying for a mortgage loan, while searching for an apartment, or when they are stopped by a police officer on suspicion of illegal activity and saying, “Here, read this; it’ll show you what a great guy I am.” Most folks of color face far less deliberative snap judgments on the part of employers, landlords, teachers, and cops, and in those instances, the ability of racial bias to taint the process of evaluation is of no small concern.
So, rather than ask what Obama’s success means in terms of race and racism in the United States in the twenty-first century, the better question may be what doesn’t his success mean for those things? What does it not tell us about how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go?
As for the second of the two most often asked questions, while many whites may well not have been prepared to vote for a black—or as some may prefer, biracial—man for the presidency, there is another issue almost completely overlooked by the press: the possibility that Obama might well have won the nation’s highest office in spite of ongoing traditional white racism, and yet because of a newer, slicker Racism 2.0, in which whites hold the larger black community in low regard and adhere, for