Sadly, the fact that level-one (overt) racism has been defeated while the deeper (level-two) racism survives is not just a matter of the social and racial justice glass being half-full. It's more darkly complicated than that. The second and deeper level of racial oppression's power may actually be more firmly entrenched by celebrated Civil Rights victories and related black upward mobility into the middle and upper classes insofar as those victories and achievements encourage the illusion that racism has disappeared and that the only obstacles left to African-American success and equality are internal to individual blacks and their community - the idea that, in Derrick Bell's phrase, "the indolence of blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic gaps separating the races"(Bell 2004, pp. 77-78). "It's hard," Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown have noted, "to blame people" for believing (falsely in Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown's view) that racism is dead in America "when our public life is filled with repeated affirmations of the integration ideal and our ostensible progress towards achieving it" (Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown 1999, 6-7).
In a similar vein, Sheryl Cashin notes that "there are [now] enough examples of successful middle-class African-Americans to make many whites believe that blacks have reached parity with them. The fact that some blacks now lead powerful mainstream institutions offers evidence to whites that racial barriers have been eliminated; the issue now is individual effort"(Cashin 2004, p. xi).
The white-run culture's regular rituals of self-congratulation over the defeat of overt, level-one racism - the Martin Luther King national holiday, the playing of King's "I Have a Dream" speech over school sound systems and on television, the demotion of Trent Lott, the routine reference to integrationist ideals in political speeches, and now the presidential viability of the "conservative" Obama, etc. - reinforce the dominant white sentiment that the United States no longer has much of anything to answer for in regard to its treatment of black America and the ubiquitous white American notion that racism is something only from the now relatively irrelevant and distant "past." "Now we can finally forget about race completely" is the basic white wish seeking fulfillment in the election of someone like Obama.
This is a problem that Martin Luther King, Jr. anticipated. By the middle 1960s, King and other civil rights leaders were most concerned about the deeper institutional and societal racism that existed across the entire United States. King and others feared that the defeat of open segregation and racial terrorism in the South would reinforce the majority white nation's tendency to avoid more covert, established, invisible and nation-wide forms of racial oppression while encouraging whites to falsely conclude that all the nation's racial problems have been "automatically solved" (King 1969, pp. 321-322).
King also worried that early Civil Rights victories over level-one racism would encourage white Americans to deny the powerful and living legacy and material relevance of "past racism." As he knew and as is still true today, the older, more open racism of the long pre-Civil Rights past continues to cast more than just an incidental shadow over contemporary racial inequalities. Most white Americans object strenuously to the idea that "past racial discrimination matters in the present" (Feagin 2000, 261). But anyone who examines capitalism in an honest way knows that what people get from the present and future so-called "free market" is very much about what and how much they bring to that present and future market from the past. "Long ago" racism continues to exact a major cost on current-day black Americans, raising the question of whether unresolved historical inequity is really "past." Slavery and then Jim Crow segregation in the South - and the racial terrorism, discrimination and apartheid imposed on black northerners in places like Chicago and Detroit and the thousands of northern all-white "Sundown Towns" that were formed between 1890 and 1968 (see James Loewen's masterly study Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: Touchstone, 2005) - "long ago" continue to shape present-day racial inequality.
