Orig­i­nally pub­lished at Hyphen on May 8, 2009, and cross-posted at Racia­li­cious on May 18, 2009.

The New York Times com­mem­o­rated Pres­i­dent Obama’s 100th day in office last week with some opti­mistic reportage of race rela­tions in the United States. Cit­ing a recent New York Times / CBS News poll, the arti­cle asserted that Obama is pos­i­tively influ­enc­ing pub­lic per­cep­tion of race rela­tions, stat­ing that

“Two-thirds of Amer­i­cans now say race rela­tions are gen­er­ally good, and the per­cent­age of blacks who say so has dou­bled since last July.…”

If only the public’s per­cep­tion of “progress” were moti­vated by actual progress. Even a cur­sory exam­i­na­tion of the state of race rela­tions in the US will reveal that we are still a very racially divided nation, in some ways even more so than before Obama’s elec­tion. The South­ern Poverty Law Cen­ter, for exam­ple, just released a report which found that the num­ber of hate groups in the U.S. has increased by more than 50 per­cent since 2000, and by 5 per­cent since last year. SPLC attrib­utes the increase, in part, to grow­ing anti-immigrant sen­ti­ment — a key point to remem­ber, as Obama’s rise seems to have us think­ing about race rela­tions exclu­sively in black and white.

It wasn’t so very long ago that we were all too aware of the racism-infused anti-immigration sen­ti­ment that sur­rounded last year’s elec­tions and talks of immi­gra­tion reform. Back in those days, the Pew His­panic Cen­ter found that half of Lati­nos believed their sit­u­a­tions were worse than they had been a year before — and this year, the sit­u­a­tion only seems to have wors­ened. Polls com­mis­sioned by New Amer­i­can Media now find that 82 per­cent of Lati­nas report that dis­crim­i­na­tion is a major prob­lem for their fam­i­lies. And let’s not for­get Com­mit­tee of 100’s recent national sur­vey, which found that Asian Amer­i­cans still expe­ri­ence con­sid­er­able discrimination.

And, con­trary to appar­ent pop­u­lar opin­ion and the cheery anec­dotes fea­tured by the New York Times, the sit­u­a­tions of blacks haven’t improved markedly either, as Matthew Ygle­sias of ThinkProgress points out in his own analy­sis of the New York Times / CBS news poll results:

I’m sur­prised that as many as forty-four per­cent of blacks say that both races have equal oppor­tu­nity. I think the evi­dence is unam­bigu­ously clear that they do not. African-American chil­dren have par­ents with lower lev­els of income and edu­ca­tion. Their fam­i­lies, even when they have above-average incomes, tend to have less wealth than white fam­i­lies. And even con­trol­ling for parental income and edu­ca­tional attain­ment, black kids do worse in schools than white kids. Then beyond all that, there’s clear evi­dence of dis­crim­i­na­tion against job appli­cants with “black” names that tends to sug­gest a broader pat­tern of employ­ment dis­crim­i­na­tion. There are inequities in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem both in terms of more pun­ish­ment being meted out to black offend­ers, and the police and the courts doing less to pro­tect black victims.

Evi­dently, race rela­tions haven’t improved quite as much as peo­ple want to believe. Clearly, in some sit­u­a­tions, race rela­tions have even dete­ri­o­rated fur­ther. So what gives? Per­haps the (appar­ently unfounded) opti­mism uncov­ered by the poll has less to do with respon­dents’ per­sonal obser­va­tions of progress than it does with the over­whelm­ing sig­nif­i­cance they placed on Obama’s elec­tion. Cer­tainly the elec­tion of the first black/bi-racial U.S. pres­i­dent is ground­break­ing — and many, I’m sure, hoped that the very pos­si­bil­ity of his elec­tion sig­ni­fied a momen­tous shift in the way Amer­i­cans think about race. But the mis­guid­edly belief that every­thing is auto­mat­i­cally bet­ter now has unfor­tu­nate repercussions.

What begins as a benign belief that things have changed for the bet­ter can quickly turn into the obsti­nate con­vic­tion that racism is behind us and need not be addressed any longer. I can’t count how many times, since Obama’s elec­tion, I’ve been advised to take my race rela­tions com­men­tary down a notch because, in post-race Amer­ica, we are too “above race” to neces­si­tate con­tin­ued crit­i­cal dis­course on the mat­ter. My own sis­ter called me a racist recently for address­ing race issues on the Hyphen blog because, accord­ing to her, doing so is an affront to every­thing that Obama has built for us. Such sen­ti­ments are shock­ingly per­va­sive, I’ve found — so much so, that I’ve taken to call­ing peo­ple who har­bor them “(above-)racists” — peo­ple who think that race is so far beneath them that they can’t help but actu­ally be racist. They are best known for their belief that Obama’s elec­tion means either 1) racism no longer exists or 2) white racism no longer exists and/or 3) point­ing out racial dif­fer­ences (whether casu­ally or crit­i­cally) is, itself racist. Not exactly what Obama had in mind, I think, when he said this:

“…the path to a more per­fect union means acknowl­edg­ing that what ails the African-American com­mu­nity does not just exist in the minds of black peo­ple; that the legacy of dis­crim­i­na­tion — and cur­rent inci­dents of dis­crim­i­na­tion, while less overt than in the past — are real and must be addressed, not just with words, but with deeds…”

Clearly even Obama doesn’t think racism is behind us, and the rest of us would do well to get that straight too. We need to rec­og­nize that one man’s rise — how­ever mon­u­men­tal — doesn’t in and of itself change the struc­tural inequal­i­ties that have long defined and lim­ited the expe­ri­ences of peo­ple of color. Believ­ing oth­er­wise reduces Obama to a token — a mis­lead­ing indi­ca­tor of illu­sory social change — rather than cor­rectly rec­og­niz­ing him as an impor­tant step for­ward on a (still) long jour­ney towards racial equality.

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