Obama's People

The New York Times is running a photo gallery, with commentary, of the chief advisors to the incoming Obama administration. It's worth the time to go through it, both as a way of becoming familiar with the "players" and seeing how these men and women behave under the floodlights of a portrait photographer.

Of course, what is most gratifying is how diverse the group of advisors is: gender, race, and age are all more representative of America than we have ever seen before. Certainly the Obama administration is not an administration of aging white men.

We are not yet at a point of post-racialism. Race is still important and will remain so until there is no such thing as "block voting," as there was in this most recent election. When 95% of African American voters, 78% of Jewish voters, and 66% of the Latino voters all elected Obama president, we can still see that primary identity politics are in large part operating in the psyches of voters. What happens in our heads is still racism and the reaction to racism.

Gwen Ifill's new book The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama is being highlighted in the Wall Street Journal today. She suggests that Obama was able to get white voters to convince blacks to support him, and to get young voters to convince their elders that Obama was the right man for the job.

Nate Silver, the guru behind fivethirtyeight.com, does an analysis in Esquire that Obama's votes came from urban voters and suburban voters who began to vote like they were still living in the city.

The Benefits of Living in a Diverse World

Amidst the clamor of the presidential campaign, a study was released yesterday that showed the benefits of educating young doctors in a diverse, multi-racial medical environment, in schools with strong institutional support for diversity as a mission. The study was published in JAMA and found that medical students who were educated in diverse medical school classrooms felt better prepared to work in multi-racial communities. That doesn’t sound like rocket science, but there are nuances to the findings that support maintaining and promoting programs that open the doors for students of color.

Being a diverse population of students alone is not enough. White students attending medical colleges where the institutions truly institutionalized their commitment to diversity felt better prepared to practice medicine in multi-racial communities. The study might have found that white students self-select to attend those medical colleges because those soon-to-be doctors are already strongly committed to racial justice. And the study didn’t find that these students were more likely to become physicians in under-represented communities.

The strongest association appeared in schools where students perceived a positive environment for interracial interaction. White students in the most diverse medical schools were 42% more likely to strongly believe in equitable access to care (54.8% compared to 44.2%) - associations that became apparent as the proportion of under-represented minority students rose above the 60th percentile.

What does this mean? These kinds of studies reinforce the belief that diversity in education, especially when conducted in schools and colleges that infuse their mission with a goal of diversity, affect the attitudes of the students who attend. And those graduates bring these attitudes of understanding and desire to live multi-racially to their work, their families, and their communities.

We need to continue to keep the doors open for equal access to education.