Between Barack and a Hard Place. Tim Wise

       Preface

      On November 4, 2008, at a little after 10:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, television networks began announcing the big news: Senator Barack Obama had been elected 44th president of the United States, thereby becoming the first person of color to win the office in the nation’s history. Immediately, discussion turned to the historicity of the moment, and with good reason. For a nation built on a foundation of slavery, disenfranchisement, and white domination, the election of a man of color (and a man who, according to the racial taxonomy that has long existed in the United States, is indeed black) to the highest office in the land, is of no small import.

      Millions of new voters, especially voters of color, had turned out in record numbers to cast their ballots for Barack Obama. In the days that followed, African American men and women who thought this moment might never happen, spoke of the pride they felt, having come so far in the past four decades, from a time when merely registering black people to vote could and did result in death. That Obama’s victory says something about the United States, and about race and racism in this nation, is hard to deny.

      But what it says, and what it doesn’t say, is ultimately not determined by the feelings of voters, however joyful they may be about Obama’s victory. What Obama’s political rise says about racism in America is to be determined by an honest appraisal of the real conditions on the ground in this place, not for Barack Obama, but for approximately 90 million persons of color in all: black, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, indigenous persons, and Middle Easterners. When that appraisal is conducted, the racial and ethnic reality of the United States is sure to be seen as far more complex than some might like to think. For while the individual success of persons of color, as with Obama, is meaningful (and at this level was unthinkable merely a generation ago), the larger systemic and institutional realities of life in America suggest the ongoing salience of a deep-seated cultural malady—racism—which has been neither eradicated nor even substantially diminished by Obama’s victory.

      Herein I will explore what the political ascent of Barack Obama might mean, and more importantly what it doesn’t mean, about race, about the power of whiteness in early twenty-first-century America, and about America itself. This I will do in the form of two essays, the first of which argues that contrary to the beliefs of many, the evidence is clear: systemic racial discrimination and profound inequity of opportunity continue to mark the lives of persons of color, Obama’s own successes notwithstanding. Furthermore, not only does the success of Barack Obama not signify the death of white racism as a personal or institutional phenomenon, if anything, it may well signal the emergence of an altogether new kind of racism. Consider this, for lack of a better term, Racism 2.0, or enlightened exceptionalism, a form that allows for and even celebrates the achievements of individual persons of color, but only because those individuals generally are seen as different from a less appealing, even pathological black or brown rule. If whites come to like, respect, and even vote for persons of color like Barack Obama, but only because they view them as having “transcended” their blackness in some way, to claim that the success of such candidates proves the demise of racism makes no sense at all. If anything, success on these terms confirms the salience of race and the machinations of white hegemony. That 43 percent of whites voted for Obama—more than voted for any white Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964—is impressive, to be sure, but perhaps less so than many would like to think.

      In