Race Will Survive the Obama Phenomenon

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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.

Patterson is by no means alone in his vacillations. We are often told in the news media that race and racism are on predictable tracks to extinction. But we are seldom told clear or consistent stories why. Often multiracial identities and immigration take center stage. To take one instance, the 1993 issue of Time magazine, on the "New Face of America," used a computer to morph into existence a new "Eve," created out of images of those migrating to and mixing in the United States. The cover girl typified a future mixed America; at the same time, she represented an obsession with race, types, and genes.

The sunsetting of race by a fixed date acquired legal weight in the 2003 Supreme Court decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion upheld the affirmative-action admissions policy at the University of Michigan Law School. O'Connor emphasized the benefits of diversity for majority students but added that the court "expects that 25 years from now," preferences would no long-er be needed. A research group on inequalities of wealth, United for a Fair Economy, reached a quite different and much better-grounded conclusion in its "Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008" report assessing racial justice. The report estimated that existing trends would not equalize black and white median household wealth for more than half a millenium. On some measures, the report added, equality is several thousand years in the future.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, solidified the perception that race was almost over: Fear of a common enemy would erase divisions among Americans. Politicians, editorialists, and even comedians repeatedly emphasized the essential unity of everyone in America. However, the long aftermath of 9/11 has strongly challenged that idea.

From the outset of the war on terror, the racial profiling of Arab-Americans and of Arab and Islamic travelers to the United States became a concern for many civil-rights supporters. Initially, jokes from black stand-up comics played on relief at getting to take a rest from being the subjects of suspicion. But such lines proved less funny as the broadcast faces of terror often resembled those of South Asians, African-Americans, and Latinos, not simply the imagined Arab stereotype. The possibility of an Obama presidential campaign matured in a post-September 11 moment, but that moment also created the dynamics leading some conservatives to miss no opportunity to use the candidate's full name, Barack Hussein Obama. It made good political sense.

The Obama campaign itself became the alleged proof that the United States had so quickly moved beyond race that even Justice O'Connor was too gloomy in her timetable. However, that campaign has also illustrated the tenacity of old racial divisions, and the force of new ones. The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page greeted the earliest of Obama's primary triumphs as proof that the nation had transcended the bad old days of racism. The misnamed and conservative American Civil Rights Institute parlayed Obama's primary successes into proof of the absence of institutional racism — and any need for affirmative action.

At the same time, the "colorblind" news media combined such assertions with strikingly reductionist resorts to race to "explain" voting patterns. Early in the campaign, for example, African-Americans were said to support Clinton because of an atavistic questioning of whether Obama was "black enough," as Time asked in a headline.

When Obama did well among black voters, such arguments were immediately cast aside, although there was no acknowledgment in the news media that its earlier reasoning had been egregious. Nor did commentators stop to notice that African-Americans were supporting a mixed-race candidate with a foreign-born father, making them perhaps the most cosmopolitan sector of the electorate. As the campaign progressed, the candidates were said to grapple over who would get the Hispanic vote or the "white male" vote, with the news media assuming simple equations between identity and voting. Crude racial profiling of voters jostled for space with extravagant claims regarding the transcendence of race.

Such careening representations of the Obama campaign reflect an overwhelming desire to transcend race without transcending racial inequality — as well as the impossibility of doing so.

As the candidate himself seldom tires of saying, he is the product of Kenya on his father's side and Kansas on his mother's. Thus he evokes the promise that intermarriage will break down color lines. If his second-generation-immigrant success story has so far resonated only a little with the recent-immigrant population of the United States, it is nonetheless a part of his broader appeal. His elite education typifies a stratum of a new black middle class that has matured as segregated education has partially given way. Above all, his political attractiveness to a substantial minority of white voters is unprecedented, with the support of young white voters at times especially impressive. Among much else, it underlines how much African-American protest traditions, however hesitantly embraced by Obama, are associated with the possibility of change.

When Obama has deflected difficult questions regarding race with the charming response that, given his parentage, he could not be on any one side, he also reflects an increasing experience of the nation, especially its youth, with what cultural-studies scholars call "hybridity." Moreover, he appeals to a widespread sense that race is now, more than ever before, about choice. With Jim Crow illegal, with science firmly declaring against the biological import of race, with racial status on the census having for decades been determined by self-identification, and with the 2000 census offering an array of mixed-race choices for such self-identification, race is today a far more fluid category, both popularly and at law.

A huge share of the "white" population now regards itself as identifying with "nonwhite" peoples or culture in some way that respondents regard as central to their lives. Those identifications range from living and loving interracially, to parenting interracial children or adopted children of color, to devotion to Buddhism, intense reggae, salsa, jazz, hip-hop, blues, gospel, or world music, to wanting to be like Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. The images are often powerfully, and at times superficially, connected with, to borrow from Yale University's Paul Gilroy, wanting to be free and to be seen as free. A mixture of the exalted, the everyday, and the fanciful — of the intimate and the commercial — informs the ways that white people identify with nonwhite cultures, figures, and products.

Fluidity and choice, however, exist within the very structures of deep contemporary inequality. Such inequality especially afflicts those readily identifiable as black and poor, or as Latino, poor, and "illegal," or as American Indians on or off reservations. Possibility and tragedy coexist, while two desirable changes remain impossible for both Obama and the larger society. The first impossibility is achieving meaningful black-immigrant unity; the second, speaking out in mainstream politics against the existence, persistence, and continued reproduction of racial hierarchies. Both of those impossibilities spawn endless discussion in the news-media coverage of Obama's campaign. Nonetheless, the full import of each goes largely unacknowledged.

It is possible that the growth of a mixed-race population and of immigrant communities divided more by nationality than race might someday simply overwhelm attempts to repackage what James Baldwin called "the lie of whiteness." But history should make us wary of predictions that demographic changes will cause race to disappear, rather than simply to be reconfigured. In any case, we are at this moment very far from such a reality, and we are not on a road that leads in any sure direction.

If we project the recent increase in births of mixed-race children over time, new patterns do emerge. However, the patterns remain contradictory. A recent study — published in a conference paper, "Recent Trends in Intermarriage and Immigration and Their Effects on the Future Racial Composition of the U.S. Population," posted online — by the population specialists Sharon M. Lee, Barry Edmonston, and Jeffrey S. Passel, who used computer modeling to project the population in 2100, concluded that, in that year, the "pure" (both parents of the same "race") and the mixed-race populations of the United States will be almost exactly equal. But that hybridity will be greatly concentrated among Latinos, a group in which the "pure" would make up 30 percent of the total population, while the Latino/mixed would total 70 percent. Among white people, on the other hand, 65 percent would be "pure" and 35 percent white and mixed. Among African-Americans, 63 percent would have two African-American parents; 57 percent of Asian-Americans would have two Asian-American parents.

Interracialism, therefore, might well vary by race. Indeed, if present patterns of inequality persist, the projected 2100 population will contain 66 million "unmixed" African-Americans as well as new generations of desperately poor immigrants whose race, class, and illegality will be linked in popular perception. Those groups will almost certainly be racially despised. Offered as a serious effort at estimates, not an ironclad guide to an unpredictable future, such figures also remind us that no one knows what the racial identification of Latinos who are of mixed race, the largest single category projected, will be in 2100.

In particular, the ways in which those whom the Chicana feminist Cherrie Moraga called "21st-century mestizos" unite with other people of color, both in voting patterns and in struggles to end the material bases for thinking about race, will be key to whether the idea of race can survive.

But it is precisely on that point that Obama's candidacy has so far failed to offer hope for even symbolic change. Although he may be able to win over some voters as an African-American candidate, a mixed-race candidate, and an exemplar of racelessness, Obama has not been able to gain support as a second-generation-immigrant candidate. He lost in the California primary, despite his great successes among black and even white voters, because of Latino and Asian-American support for Clinton. Like most children of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, Obama is seen by those groups only as black.

The news media's drumbeat of emphasis on Obama's lack of support among Latinos says both too much and too little about race. It is manifestly false that black candidates cannot win significant majorities of Latino votes: Harold Washington did so in Chicago's mayoral election in 1983, as did David Dinkins in New York City in 1989 and 1993. In the 2005 Los Angeles mayoral election, black votes for Antonio Villaraigosa were pivotal. In most presidential elections, big majorities of African-American and Latino voters unite behind white Democrats. Up against a Clinton machine very experienced in turning out Latino voters, Obama ran a relatively poor campaign among Spanish-speaking voters, producing bilingual materials only late in the day. As the University of Chicago political scientist Michael Dawson astutely remarked after Obama's Philadelphia speech on race, "Most surprising, perhaps, was the minimal acknowledgment given to the recognition that the racial landscape has fundamentally changed with the large-scale immigration of particularly, but not exclusively, Latino and Asian populations into the United States."

With neither Democratic candidate forwarding ambitious plans for immigrant rights or concrete proposals for immigration reform, exit polls in Texas showed that over half of Latino voters counted the economy the dominant issue. The votes of that large bloc of economically concerned, Democratic Latinos went overwhelmingly to Clinton, although some in her camp joined the news media in turning a particular trend into a universal truth about Hispanic hostility to black candidates.

While the reality and the "racial" character of a black/Latino electoral divide has been inflated and inflamed by the news media, the fact remains that antiracist forces face significant legislative and structural hurdles in attempting to forge a black/immigrant coalition. Perhaps least noticed are the difficulties in creating unity between immigrants and their descendants. The 1965 immigration-reform act passed with negligible input from people of color. Its framers paid little attention to its potential impact on patterns of immigration among, and racial hatred toward, Latin American, Asian, and African migrants. Statutory openings to those advantaged by their professional, medical, and technical occupational status and by family networks somewhat delinked immigration and poverty for some newcomers, but imperial wars and neoliberal trade policies ensured that other sectors of the immigrant and refugee populations would be desperately poor.

At the same time, to rectify slights toward Eastern and Southern European nationalities victimized by discriminatory immigration quotas since 1924, the 1965 act applied quotas to immigration from the Americas and refused to adjust one-size-fits-all limits on legal immigration to acknowledge that Mexico, a large and nearby nation, was bound to furnish a number of immigrants far exceeding its quota. The results were predictable: 781,000 immigrants from Mexico suffered expulsion from the United States in 1976 alone. If legal status has been yet another source of division among immigrants, it has more tragically also served as the rallying point for overwhelmingly white anti-immigrant vigilante groups along the border and for political mobilizations purporting to defend the nation's racial character.

Divided as they are by class, immigration category, language, legal status, nationality, and race, migrants are very far from a unitary category. The massive 2006 immigrant-rights demonstrations in Los Angeles, the largest working-class mobilizations in American history, relied on the combination of an energized Mexican-American base and grass-roots leadership by many experienced in activism before their arrival in the United States. They succeeded in reaching across different immigrant nationalities, in uniting the undocumented minority with the "legal" majority of immigrants, giving immigrants common purpose, and in eliciting solidarity from those longer established in the country. That unity rested in no small measure on the extent to which people of color are subject to attacks based on both recognition and misrecognition: Sikhs were among those hurt in the post-9/11 "anti-Arab" assaults in the United States, while Vincent Chin, whose 1982 murder came to symbolize violence connected to resentment against Japanese, was actually Chinese. It is patterns like those that make opposition to anti-immigrant racism, often expressed as a demand for dignity, central to the immigrant-rights movement. Dramatic differences between, for example, the treatment of incarcerated Haitian refugees and Irish undocumented workers have likewise helped to make race a central part of some immigration-policy debates.

But so far, such struggles have not coalesced to produce enduring alliances. The labor movement, impressed by immigrant heroism in organizing campaigns and aware of the difficulties presented when employers can threaten union supporters with deportation, has belatedly adopted more-humane positions on immigration at the national level, although in some unions the impulse to exclude immigrants remains strong. Moreover, the unions are so weak that their insistence on immigrant rights, or on prosecuting employers of undocumented labor, tends to be ignored.

The question of what could anchor meaningful black/immigrant unity goes largely unexamined amid all of the talk about racial voting blocs. Even the insight that labor lies at the heart of the question is too easily oversimplified into the question of whether "Americans" (in this context, usually meaning jobless African-Americans) "want to work" in backbreaking, sub-minimum-wage jobs far from their homes. The structure of the debate continues to allow African-Americans to be damned as degraded if they do and as lazy if they do not.

Columbia University's Nicholas De Genova's recent study of Mexican Chicago shows how management in factories constructs a divide between immigrant unskilled labor and African-Americans, with Mexican workers being told they have been given jobs as a result of their being more tractable and less union-minded than their black predecessors. In urban hotels and in packinghouses in smaller Midwestern cities, management by race and nationality (and now by legal status) is ever more apparent, with the poor of the world vying to keep jobs and avoid immigration raids. To bring those concrete realities into dialogue with the demands of black communities is critical, but so far it has proved impossible within national presidential campaigns — and largely impossible outside of them.

When Obama's primary campaign looked to be heading for victory in March, he came under sharp attack for his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of the church Obama attended. Influenced by black-liberation theology, Wright's jeremiads indicted American racism in ways reminiscent of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. After two weeks of calls to "denounce" Wright, Obama delivered his speech in Philadelphia, in which he sharply separated himself from the minister's message but did not abandon the man.

Whatever sympathy Obama professed for Wright stemmed from the latter's experience with the frustrations of Jim Crow, which had left many in Wright's generation refusing to see that the nation had changed. While Obama did call for expanded discussion of race and vigorous civil-rights enforcement, the speech lacked concrete proposals for producing equality. It managed to be vague to the point of indecipherability on affirmative action, broached as a source of understandable "white resentment" rather than as a policy worth defending. By April, Obama denounced Wright more stridently, reckoning his former pastor as the polar opposite of the unifying figure that the candidate himself worked to be. He attributed his angry opposition to Wright's divisiveness to something written in his own "DNA," in a perfect illustration of how biology-based conceptions of race persist in post-racial America.

The point here is not to expect that Obama, or any mainstream politician, will take risks to aggressively defend the last fragments of affirmative action. His reticence on the issue is widely shared. When pressed, he has vaguely suggested that affirmative action be based less on race and more on poverty, allowing that his daughters should not benefit from the policy. In making the case for "class based" affirmative action, he follows the impractical but high-sounding path of some conservative opponents of "race preferences" and of John Kerry and other Democrats. Indeed, many activists are tempted to give up the affirmative-action ghost. But it is nonetheless worth stressing that Obama does not represent the triumph of an advancing antiracist movement but rather the necessity, at the highly refracted level of electoral politics, of abandoning old agendas, largely by not mentioning them.

However, now, after the primaries, it will not be easy to avoid taking strong public positions on "divisive" racial issues like affirmative action, as Republicans aggressively raise "wedge" issues to split Democrats along racial lines. The Notre Dame political scientist Darrin Davis observes that "on every racial issue, Barack Obama is walking the tightrope." Conservatives have already organized several anti-affirmative-action referenda to coincide with the presidential election in pivotal states. "The more he supports traditional black issues like affirmative action, the more that will eat into his white base of support," Davis writes. Equally, open retreats from such issues will decrease enthusiasm among parts of his base.

Adroitly responsive to polling data, Obama's maneuverings nonetheless serve to distort how we conceptualize and address white supremacy, past and present. He moves from the casting of race as "divisive" to terming it a diversion from "real" issues affecting all Americans — the environment, war, housing, jobs, and health care. However, the problem with settling for that partial truth is that racial inequality itself remains a fundamental problem, both in coalition-building and in everyday life. When Obama waxes nostalgic for the good old days of economic progress and calls for a focus on pocketbook issues like job training, trade policies, and gas prices, his narrative breaks faith with remembering the bitter days when Wright was growing up and likewise underplays the impact of the past on us. In critiquing race politics in his Philadelphia speech, Obama proposed a new departure based on too-easy appeals to economic unity: "This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life."

Not only is such a departure not new — ironically, it was a staple of Bill Clinton's appeal to win back conservative "Reagan Democrats" — but it posits as the objects of its nostalgia two historical arenas most responsible for present inequalities. The closed mills Obama refers to were presumably the Southern textile factories that were long the embodiment of Jim Crow employment practices, and the steel factories in which limited, much-resisted attempts to undertake affirmative action were so long delayed that their eventual implementation coincided with the industry's decline. And the overwhelming channeling of federal subsidies to home loans for white families and the construction of infrastructure for segregated suburbs have created and increased the tremendous racial gaps in wealth that exist in the contemporary United States.

Such blind spots have far more than mere historical importance, as they call into question the very way that Obama portrays today's issues as simply cutting across racial lines. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the subprime-mortgage crisis. The wholesale foreclosures accompanying that crisis fall into distinct racial patterns, reflecting the lack of resources that black and Latino home buyers bring to the market because of past discrimination, and the ways that they are still steered and preyed upon by lenders. Federal data show people of color to be more than three times as likely to have subprime loans as white people are, with a substantial majority of African-American borrowers in that category, as against one in six white borrowers.

The lack of an aggressive response by Obama to the subprime crisis has led some critics to propose that this issue best marks the limit of his economic populism, reflecting instead his close ties to banking and investment capital. Such critics are not wrong, but race has also mattered in the evasion of the full gravity of the crisis in home mortgages. The absence of any racial and historical framing of the subprime issue, a deficiency shared by Obama with Clinton and McCain, strengthens the tendency to rely for a cure on the same banks and investment firms that caused the problem. The subprime catastrophe was poised to serve either as a perfect vehicle to show how issues capable of dragging down much of the whole economy are about both race and class, or as an occasion for generalities, pro-mortgage-industry policy changes, and wishful thinking. The latter road is the one taken by Obama and all his major competitors.

To expect more that is concrete, forthright, and policy-oriented regarding race from Obama in the context of a presidential campaign is apparently fruitless. To sum up eloquently the ways in which the idea of race has and has not changed, the most important aspect of his campaign has been to show how much and how many people desire peace and want to find a way to move beyond race. To make their hopes and their commitments match up will require new, even unforeseeable, considerations of the role of white supremacy. It will require new alliances, especially of African-Americans with immigrants, and of feminist and working-class organizations with antiracist forces, in movements seeking not only to be represented within a highly unequal order but also to transform that order. The alternative is that race-thinking will survive in new and destructive permutations, and will continue to serve as a diversion from other brutalities and as a prop on which they rest.

David R. Roediger is a professor of African-American studies and history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This essay is adapted from his book How Race Survived U.S. History: From the American Revolution to the Present, published this month by Verso.