The Post-Racial Dream in Doubt?

In the run-up to the election, after the media decided Obama was “Black enough” to be called a Black candidate for president and absurd theme started to build steam – we were living in a post-racial society. This idea proliferated across the mainstream media like nude pictures of Brittany Spears did across the Internet until it almost became conventional wisdom. If a Black man can be voted President, race clearly doesn’t matter in America. I think we have seen in the past two weeks two rather obvious examples of what a fallacy this argument is . . .

The first involved famed Harvard legal scholar Henry Louis Gates and his arrest for attempting to break into his own house (http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=8131953&page=1); something that clearly happens to white folks all the times in the suburbs of America. So what’s the big deal? To some liberals, it was yet another example of the racist police force of not only Boston but most of America. To conservatives it was a good chance to take shots at an uppity negro and put him in his place for daring to challenge said racist cops (http://www.examiner.com/x-5738-St-Louis-Political-Buzz-Examiner~y2009m7d24-VIDEO--Rush-Limbaugh-tells-mistruths-in-attack-President-Obamas-comments-on-Gates-arrest). The point that has not been adequately covered is that police are generally racist, do tend to profile and generally don’t go around shooting young white males by mistake (think New York City the past few years). Also worth asking is why a neighbor called 911 in the first place. By placing the focus on his access to Ivy League status and his overreaction to the police (http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/24/gates/index.html), what was lost was a real dialogue about why police would bother a man dressed like Gates, of Gate’s age, in his neighborhood, trying to enter his own house? And there is, of course, the broader question of whether this sort of thing goes on every day with average Black men across the country. Statistics and my own anecdotal knowledge say yes. Obama made this point in his follow-up press conference on Friday: http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/feature/2009/07/24/obama_gates/index.html (though softening his initial reaction).

The second issue involved an image sent out this week by a doctor against the Obama reforms (http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/07/conservative_activist_forwards_racist_pic_showing.php). The clearly racist image shows the lengths many conservatives will go to get their point across and build on the racism that still lurks barely below the surface for so many conservatives today. Reagan won on the latent racism and conservatives have been effectively using it ever since. We saw this clearly at a number of McCain campaign events leading up to the election and heard it almost daily in the mocking of Michelle Obama and Barack himself – together with the absurd claims that he was a Muslim terrorist.

Both cases bring into clear focus the nature of race relations in America today. The reality is that Blacks (and Latinos) have substantially higher drop out rates (45 vs 30%) and lower college completion rates (15% vs 30%), lower paying jobs (In 2007, $569/week vs. $716 for whites; and even in the same categories), high unemployment and poverty rates, lower income and wealth (the income gap has increased in the past 30 years from 63% of average white family in 1973 to 58% in 2004), much higher incarceration rates (6.4x as likely as whites to be in prison) and lower life expectancy (73.3 vs. 78.3). A study a couple of years ago found that Blacks receive worse healthcare than whites, often even from the same doctor. They go to poor schools that are underfunded with inexperienced teachers and thus perform worse academically. And they are the victims of all sorts of blatant and latent racism that undermine their futures. Now to quote these statistics will be called race baiting by many, but what is the image of Obama really doing?

A third is the Sotomayor hearings (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/14/sotomayor-faces-tough-questions-senators/). The conservative argument seemed to center around the idea that Sotomayor couldn’t leave her race at the door when adjudicating cases. Maybe this is partially true, but what it fails to acknowledge is either do whites. We assume in this country that white is a neutral color, but ask most people of color and they will disagree. Whiteness comes with its own biases, prejudices and sometimes outright racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. To question a Latina for her ability to remain objective seems absurd when one moves beyond the rhetoric of the law and justice as a blindfolded woman to recognize, as Gates among many has argued for years, that the law is heavily influenced by the people deciding it and their political and social perspectives. One need only think of Gore vs. Bush as one example among thousands to recognize how important political ideology is to legal decision. Or how about Dred Scott or Plessy vs. Ferguson?