Does Obama’s victory signal the dawn
of post-race politics?
Darnell Hunt, a professor of sociology, is the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.
November 2008 will surely go down in history as the month in which America’s greatest political earthquake occurred. I felt the first tremors riding down Los Angeles’ Crenshaw Boulevard on the night of Nov. 4. There, along Black L.A.’s center of gravity, unfolded a spectacle as surreal as it was strangely familiar.
Thousands of people, mostly African American and mostly young, had taken to the streets. Police cars marked every intersection. Animated pedestrians gestured to passing motorists, who responded with honks and cheers. Others waved signs and t-shirts and chanted slogans. It was a moment that seemed to break with business-as-usual, when individual lives suddenly connected with some larger whole.
No, the Los Angeles Lakers hadn’t just won the NBA championship.Just minutes earlier, the major broadcast networks had projected Barack Obama the winner of the 2008 presidential election. The stunning landslide election of America’s first black president – only 43 years removed from the 1965 Voting Rights Act – felt like an end and a new beginning. The scene along Crenshaw Boulevard was of a community made manifest.
The feeling was palpable. It was evocative of the one many black Angelenos had shared 16 years earlier. Then – amidst the fires set off by the acquittal of four police officers for the infamous, videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King – some dared hope that the destruction might actually pave the way to a brighter future. Similarly, this was a feeling grounded in optimism, a feeling that everything had suddenly changed, a feeling of transcendence.
Of course, the degree to which America became something altogether new on Nov. 4 remains an open question. Throughout the 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama ran both as the candidate of hope and the candidate of change. He undoubtedly represented a break with the failed policies of the Bush Administration, and for many Americans, this change alone evokes considerable hope.
But what about racial change? Does the election of Barack Obama signal the arrival of a post-race America? Have we indeed finally achieved the dream that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so eloquently described on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 45 years ago?
Perhaps the “
Cosby Show” experiment of the 1980s is a cautionary tale worth considering as we ponder these questions. For me, it stands as a reminder of the pitfalls associated with selective perception and wishful racial thinking.
At a time when the nation was turning to the Right, with the landslide reelection of President Ronald Reagan, Bill Cosby aimed to create an image of the black family that recoded blackness, which transcended the stereotypical portrayals of black Americans traditionally circulated in popular media. Cosby sought, in the end, to present blackness as a cultural fact that paled in comparison to the humanity blacks share with all Americans. In a primetime prequel to Obama’s electoral finale, the
Cosby Show shot to the top of the ratings almost overnight.
The
show centered on the family of Cliff and Claire Huxtable, who – like Barack and Michelle Obama – were well-educated, articulate, and successful professionals living in a multicultural world, despite the fact of their blackness. Audience research revealed that viewers selectively made sense of the show in ways that resonated with their own hopes and desires.
Black viewers, for example, embraced the show as a breath of fresh air, as a “positive image” of black achievement and possibility, even if the show’s avoidance of contemporary black inequality seemed somewhat artificial. For many black viewers, the show was a source of racial pride.
White viewers, by contrast, embraced the show because it allowed them to invite a family into their homes every Thursday night they could relate to – a family that just happened to black. The material success of this fictional black family, combined with white viewers’ affinity with it, convinced many of these viewers that America had indeed transcended race.
“Enlightened racism,” as the researchers put it, led many white viewers to feel confident enough in their own racial morality to support a conservative, “colorblind” agenda that sought to undermine progressive racial policies like affirmative action. Black families that failed to achieve like the Huxtables, these viewers reasoned, had only themselves to blame.
A popular television show hardly compares in significance to the nation’s most meaningful presidential election. And America 2008 seems headed in an entirely different direction than America 1984. But when I consider the musings of television pundits, radio shock jocks, Internet bloggers, and newspaper columnists in the days following the election, I’m troubled by the parallels.
I’m troubled
not because I reject the possibility of Dr. King’s dream or the importance of hope, but because so many want desperately to believe that Obama’s election, in and of itself, has ushered in a post-race America.
The truth is that the next few rounds of America’s race game have yet to play out, and much work remains to be done before we can say justice has finally won. Still, it’s hard to look into the eyes of the youth who lined Crenshaw Boulevard that night and not see Obama’s election as a game changer.
