Thinking about white America's superficial "post-racism" and the related distinction between level-one and level- two racism, a Left black political writer recently told me that the election of a black Democrat like Obama to the presidency would be a "disaster" for the cause of black equality. It would be a big negative from a racial justice perspective, this writer feels, because it would deeply reinforce the pervasive majority white notion that racism is essentially over as a relevant barrier to black equality in the U.S. The writer was thinking also about the perverse role that the related success of a minority of privileged blacks and the related class bifurcation of the black community has long played in the preservation of white privilege. As Stephen Steinberg noted in his important book Turning Back: the Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Steinberg 1995, pp.149-150):
"The success of the black middle-class [since the Civil Rights Movement is not] proof of...a more favorable opportunity structure for blacks. After all, racism has never been indifferent to class distinctions, and it may well be that blacks who have acquired the ‘right' status characteristics are exempted from stereotypes and behaviors that continue to be directed at less privileged blacks. [But] there is nothing new in this phenomenon. Even in the worst days of Jim Crow, there were blacks who owned land, received favored treatment from whites and were held forth as ‘success stories' to prove that lower-class blacks had only themselves to blame for their destitution...The existence of this black elite did not prove that racism was abating (thought illusions to this effect were common even among blacks). On the contrary, the black elite itself was a vital part of the system of [racial] oppression, serving as a buffer between the [ruling white] oppressor and [most truly black] oppressed and furthering the illusion that blacks could surmount their difficulties if only they had the exemplary qualities of the black elite."
The remarkable success of power-respectful, bourgeois, non-threatening (to whites) and (in short) "good" blacks like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and (once) Colin Powell helps white Americans believe that blacks have only themselves to blame on the whole for black America's persistently separate and unequal status in the U.S. For many whites, loving national media stars like Oprah and Barack is the nice reverse side of hating inner-city Darnell and Lakisha.
The sophisticated and opportunistic Obama knows this very well. He's not going to complicate his comfortable funding relationships with the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Henry Crown and Co. and General Dynamics et al (Street 2007d and 2007e). by substantively criticizing empire and/or class inequality at home and abroad. In a similarly calculating and power-seeking vein, he's not about to undermine his favorable post-Civil Rights situation with the white electoral majority by making strong public reference to the persistently powerful and pervasive role of anti-black racism in American life. He's going to try to ride white America's self-serving racial confusion and denial as far as he can - all the way, he hopes, to the White House.
