The Obama candidacy presents a dilemma for scholars of race, writes Jonathan Tilove in an article for Newhouse News Service. While his election would be a “breathtaking symbol of racial progress,” it could also mask lingering racism, and “cripple” efforts to call attention to it.
“It’s an odd paradox that this will shrink even further any kind of public space to talk about race,” says Angela Dillard, a professor of Afro-American and African studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the article. “That shouldn’t be possible, but it is.”
Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, says that an Obama victory would weaken arguments for affirmative action. Black voters, he said, “are voting for the end of affirmative action and they don’t even know it.
“They’re voting for the end of race and they don’t even know it,” said Mr. Loury, who is black.
At the same time, an Obama election wouldn’t necessarily spell an improvement in the condition of black Americans, says Roland Anglin, executive director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University. For change to happen, he says, black voters will have to keep up the pressure on Obama to address the crisis of black males, the education gap and the prison gap.
Still, some conservative scholars see in Mr. Obama’s candidacy proof that racism is not endemic to the United States.
“I think it really is going to change the way responsible people talk about racism,” said John McWhorter, a black linguist affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, in New York. “Their basic idea, that racism is at the heart of how Americans feel, simply has been shown not to be true in the way they said it.”
