“Post Racial” Posturings 1

In the St. Petersburg Times, Bill Maxwell considers the pipedream, popular during the late presidential election, that Mr. Obama’s candidacy somehow indicated that the United States had entered some kind of “post racial” era.

It was a pleasant fantasy for those who wanted to pretend to themselves that racism was somehow over; a lot of the pipedreamers were white folks, who want the white history of chattel slavery and oppression to just somehow disappear,

But anyone who pays attention to day-to-day life knows it just ain’t so. Public racism may no longer be fashionable in polite society, where it was accepted less than my lifetime ago, but racism and bigotry live with us still. Usually, they are undercurrents to public discourse, but they still sometimes come forth as over-currents.

An excerpt from Mr. Maxwell’s column:

Many whites, the “birthers” in particular, are so angry that a black man is in the White House, they continue to challenge Obama to prove he is a natural-born American citizen. Their street demonstrations have come with virulent racial epithets and crude placards.

Former President Jimmy Carter, alluding to the attacks on Obama, told students at Emory University last year that he believes race is a huge problem for the nation’s first black president: “I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African-American. It’s a racist attitude.”

Then, the tea party entered the fray with its attacks against Obama. Because some of the movement members’ language was laced with racism, the NAACP declared in a report released in October that the tea party was “permeated with concerns about race” and that some of its affiliates “have given platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots.”

Now comes a must-read new book from the University of Chicago Press, Obama’s Race: The 2008 Election and the Dream of a Post-Racial America, by Michael Tesler and David O. Sears, showing that the 2008 election was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election. The authors argue that there were two distinct sides to this racial divide: resentful opposition to and racially liberal support for Obama. No postracialism in that equation.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t go into what evidence the book uses to support its thesis and I was unable to find a scholarly review of the book (a scholarly review would have dissected its arguments; apparently, the book is too new for detailed reviews to have hit the web).

Nevertheless, given that the 2008 election represented the first time that a black man was a credible candidate for the nomination of a major party–let alone the nominee and ultimately the victor in the election–I would not be surprised if that election was. indeed, “more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential election.”

The only other one I can see being in contention would be the election of 1860.