What's changed? Obama and race in America: Obama and race in America

What opportunities and challenges of racial reconciliation present themselves for the nation and the African-American community in light of the election of Barack Obama as president? Does Obama’s success point to a generational change in the style or substance of black politics? Does Obama’s victory create a new conversation on race or end an old one? What kind of conversation is needed? Five authors offer their reflections.

Barack Obama’s victory underscores the contradictory nature of American politics, for in voting for Obama, Americans have chosen to both reassert and abolish the idea of American exceptionalism. Electing a black man means that America remains a special country with a special destiny, for the moment, not just in its own eyes but in the eyes of the world—a country dedicated to the proposition that diversity is a form of divinity, an expression of God’s providence, the path of our new errand in the wilderness of bigotry, an errand that started in earnest in 1954 with the desegregation of public schools, the errand of liberation and justice.

But this expression of American exceptionalism is a marked rejection of the old American mission of empire and power, the spreading of democratic values by money and might, by Emersonian ideals and corporate expansion, manifest destiny and unbridled nationalism.

It is difficult to read the change: Is it a sign of our faith in our institutions or of our fear that they have failed? This difficulty is directly related to the political hieroglyphic that is Barack Obama. We elected change, but what sort of change? Hard-left change? Change to the so-called center because we were weary of Bush’s right-wing change? Change to still more massive government which Americans now seem no longer to fear? (Give me European-style socialism or give me death! Our intellectuals have always loved that and are as tickled as their 19th-century counterparts that Europe, our betters, love us again.) Reformist change for competent, less corrupt government? Or just change to have a pretty face, a charming demeanor, coupled with an unusual name? (It was not just any black politician we wanted for the presidency, as no other could have achieved this feat, but only this particular one with his new story of immigration and hybridity.)

What made Obama attractive to wealthy and intellectual whites was that he was not freighted with the provincial story of black American injustice. He was international! He had lived abroad. And he has a high IQ—a throwback to the early-20th-century notion that the mixed-race black was superior to his purer brothers and sisters and made up most of the leadership cadre.

Bush dramatically proved that Anglo leadership is worn out; so we now opt for exoticized leadership around which, like children around a Maypole, we can project our fantasies of a renewed, multicultural America, confident that, after all, it isn’t possible that Obama can be as bad as Bush, whatever he might be.

It has always been a tendency of liberals and the left since the end of the 1960s to think that all American problems, all American political hypocrisy and cultural contradictions are subsumed by the race problem, are crucially embedded in it (African Americans have always thought this). To solve the race problem through some highly symbolic means such as electing a black president is tantamount to solving all of America’s other problems: inequality, unregulated greed, poverty, a blundering and overbearing foreign policy, and all the rest. There must be some barrier-breaking that, when achieved, will undo all of our mistaken assumptions about ourselves forever.

Perhaps we have finally found The One, the one barrier-breaker upon whom all the other barrier-breaking depends. In this election, the liberals and the left managed to convince the majority of the American voters that this is so. An extraordinary and profound accomplishment. We have changed as a result, but it is not the end of the race issue in America. Race is likely to become a more salient and bitter topic in the months and years ahead, now that we have a black president. But perhaps it is the end of the beginning that started not in 1619, but in 1865.

—Gerald Early, essayist and professor of English and of African and African-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

On the night of the presidential election, I watched the results come in with eight college students, four of them black and four white. As the news media projected key states for Obama, the excitement among my students was palpable. Screams, hugs, tears and spontaneous dancing erupted at the announcement of Obama’s victory, as they did across the country.

Later we learned that, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the election of the first black president had triggered more than 200 hate-related incidents. Verbal altercations over the results clouded our campus and prompted rumors of physical assaults and arrests. The Associated Press and the SPLC reported on incidents of cross burning, racial epithets and racist graffiti.

These anecdotes encapsulate the range of possibilities and challenges that we now face in race relations. That I watched election results in a public accommodation with a multiracial group of youths in a state that just 40 years ago had outlawed such gatherings and prevented the participation of African Americans in the political process is certainly part of the progress that enabled Obama’s ascension to the White House. The students reported how moved they were watching black Mississippians in their 80s and 90s voting, with tears in their eyes at the possibility a milestone might be achieved that they never thought they’d see. In an instant, at the projection of Obama’s win, generations of thwarted hopes, diminished expectations and violent resistance to change were eased and perhaps healed.

Yet the backlash against Obama is a sobering reminder of the work that remains ahead. The displays of prejudice represent an opportunity. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas has suggested that the greatest challenge in race relations is that most people do not believe there is a problem. I amend his remark to propose that the strongest obstacle to improved race relations is the lack of honest dialogue.

I cannot imagine a more promising climate than the one in which we now find ourselves. A deep measure of hope in our country’s founding principles has been renewed among many who had despaired of progress. And those who would resist the universal application of those principles are removing the patina of politeness that has disguised their sustained prejudice and has undergirded systemic discrimination. We might now have an honest, intensely local, grassroots dialogue about bias and structural racism and opportunity and inclusion in ways that have never been possible.

As president, Obama will face tremendous challenges, and he alone will not be able to solve them. But he tapped into the best strategies of the civil rights movement in his focus on grassroots, collective, participatory campaigning. Such local engagement is crucial to expanding the transformation of our country. Community building that grows from new relationships of trust across racial lines will mark the final fulfillment of a “more perfect union.”

—Susan M. Glisson, executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi.