A second and related reason not to do racial justice cartwheels over Obama's popularity with whites is the candidate's deep willingness to accommodate white supremacy. In his ponderous, power-worshipping and badly titled campaign book The Audacity of Hope (New York: Henry Crown, 2006), Obama ignores elementary U.S. social reality and strokes the master race by claiming that "what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts." Equally calming to the white majority is Obama's argument that "white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America" as "even the most fair-minded of whites...tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country" (Obama 2006, p. 247). Part of the reason for this "push back" - also known as denial - is, Obama claims, the bad culture and poor work-ethic of the inner-city black poor (Obama 2006, pp. 245, 254-56).
White fears that Obama will reawaken the tragically unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and Civil Rights are further soothed by his claim that most black Americans have been "pulled into the economic mainstream" (Obama, 2006, pp. 248-49). During a speech marking the anniversary of the Selma, Alabama Voting Rights march, Obama claimed that 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists - who he referred to as "the Moses Generation" - had brought black America "90 percent of the way" to racial equality. It's up to Obama and his fellow "Joshua Generation" members to get past "that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side" (Barack Obama 2007)
And then there's Obama's claim that "conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare." The abolished Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, Obama claims, "sapped" inner-city blacks of their "initiative" and detached them from the great material and spiritual gains that flow to those who attach themselves to the noble capitalist labor market, including "independence," "income," "order, structure, dignity and opportunity for growth in peoples' lives." He argues that encouraging black girls to finish high school and stop having babies out of wedlock is "the single biggest thing that we could do to reduce inner-city poverty" (Obama 2006, p. 256).
Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Loewen 2005, p. 130; Shapiro 2005). Never mind that lower-, working-, and middle-class blacks continue to face numerous steep and interrelated white-supremacist barriers to equality. Or that multidimensional racial discrimination is still rife in "post-Civil Rights America," deeply woven into the fabric of the nation's social institutions and drawing heavily on the living and unresolved legacy of centuries of not-so "past" racism (Feagin 2000; Brown et al. 2003, Street 2005; Street 2007).
