Critical Race Theory and the Election of Obama

No one should think that just because Barack Obama was elected president that we are at the end of race as a defining concept in this country. For two days I have been listening to the leading legal scholars who have spent their lifetimes revealing the racial policies behind the curtain of America's rise to power. Every time Justice Scalia and his little meanie Federalist Society followers call for "originalism" in interpreting the Constitution, we only need remind them that the very essence of our Constitution is slavery, and the decision, meant to keep the Southern States in line, to count Africans as less than a person. Soon thereafter the US Supreme Court held in the Dred Scott decision that an African American, no matter his state of enslavement or not, was not a citizen, and therefore not entitled to those precious protections we associate with freedom. And it wasn't only Africans Americans. Although to a lesser degree, women and poor people had few rights or power either. To vote then, one had to be a white male owning land.

A majority of white voters did not back Barack Obama nationwide, and especially not in Alabama, where only 10% of whites voted for him, and in those states where Obama won a majority, the portion of white votes didn't get much above fifty percent, unless we are looking at the youth vote. Among white youth, ages 18-29, Obama did well, from 32% to as high as 66% of the vote.

Our colleges, universities, and professional schools--law, medical, and business--also reflect far fewer African American and Hispanic students than the overall demographics might suggest. Discrimination and the impact of years of deprivation in housing, schools, and health care show their nasty faces when we try to find African American lawyers, doctors, and MBAs.

The attack on remedies intended to flatten the playing field between Blacks and Whites--affirmative action--and diminish the myth of meritocracy, I say myth, because of the often hidden advantages whites accumulate for just being white, has decreased the absolute numbers as well as the gains of the Civil Rights. It's now illegal in California, Texas, Nebraska, Michigan, Florida, and if Ward Connerly has his way, we will be thrust into his purposed "colorblind" world. But colorblind isn't colorblind for people of color, it merely is code for ending access.

We are not there yet.

Lani Guinier , once Bill Clinton's pick for Attorney General and now a Harvard Law professor, spoke about the need for racial literacy, a lens through which to see the distribution of power generally, and an invaluable tool to critique how power is organized, to see the hierarchy, and to see who is on top of that hierarchy. She asks people to examine the three dimensions of power: What are the rules? Who set them and what is their purpose? And what is the story the winners tell the losers in order to get the losers to continue to engage?

Think about that! Yes, Barack Obama is president, in some ways, because he manipulated his racial identity to make at least some white people feel unafraid of him. He didn't present himself as an angry Black man, but as a feminized, Metrosexual, a family man. This isn't colorblindness; Obama ran his campaign as an accommodation to racism. No one was saying that things aren't better, but because there is still an intersection between race and poverty, we cannot pretend to ourselves that this intersection is mere coincidence.