Transcending race?
A black man with a dangerous-sounding foreign name trounced his opponents in the nearly all-white state of Iowa. And he did so because, after spending months getting to know him, the people of Iowa stopped seeing his color and began to admire his character. In an election where the word “change” became an almost meaningless talisman, Iowa’s triumph over race is a message to the world about the real nature of America — and a ratification of Obama’s belief that this will be an election year where everything is on the table, where all the conventional wisdom can be tossed aside, where anything, including decency, is possible.
I mentioned in the comments to an earlier post that I’m afraid an Obama presidential victory would give too many people a reason to claim – falsely – that we’ve somehow transcended race in this country. When there’s another Jena 6, or when African-American leaders and politicians attempt to push policies that would attack institutional racism, plenty of people (and not necessarily white) will say, “We elected a black President! There can’t be any more racism in this country. Those policies are unnecessary!
Granted, that’s not what Joe Klein is saying at all. But it’s not hard to envision some pundits and newsmakers co-opting that language to shut down any meaningful attempt at addressing the systematic inequalities that are still very present.
Update: This is the headline I’m afraid of: “Does Obama’s win show the U.S. is colorblind?”
No, it doesn’t. And more importantly, the language of colorblindness obscures the fact that the color-line is still America’s central problem.
