Читать книгу Between Barack and a Hard Place - Tim Wise - Страница 7

ONE

Barack Obama, White Denial and the Reality of Racism

Once Barack Obama became the Democratic Party’s nominee for president of the United States, two questions emerged most prominently in media and personal discussions of his candidacy. The first of these, most often put forward by those who were seeking to draw rather sweeping and positive conclusions from their query, was typically posed as, “What does it say about race in America that a black man now stands on the precipice of becoming, arguably, the most powerful person in the world?” The second, presented somewhat more skeptically than the first, and more likely offered up by those whose hopefulness was a bit more tempered by an appreciation of history, most of- ten sounded like this: “Is white America really ready for a black president?”

While we can hardly be surprised at how quickly these became the principal questions asked in the run-up to the November 2008 election, both nonetheless stemmed from premises that were largely false, or at least glaringly problematic. And as with any question that emanates from a false or incomplete starting point, such interrogations as these ultimately led down mundane analytic corridors, to destinations that, although interesting, were never truly the places to which we needed to travel.

For while the political ascent of Barack Obama, culminating with his victory in November over challenger John McCain, certainly says something about race, what it says is far from that which most—including those typically asking the question in the first place—seem to believe. Yes, it suggests that blind and irrational bigotry of the kind that animated so much white opinion for so long in the United States may well have receded (though not as much as we’d like to think, a subject to which I’ll return below). But given the evidence regarding entrenched racial inequities in employment, education, health care, criminal justice, housing and elsewhere—and the studies indicating these are due in large measure to discrimination, either past, present, or a combination of the two—it most definitely does not suggest that racism has been truncated as an ongoing social problem for persons of color generally.

Though Obama’s victory falls well short of proving that racism has been vanquished in America, for reasons I will explore shortly, it is still worth noting some of the positive aspects of the Obama victory when it comes to race. For although I will insist that his rise says far less than many would suggest, we would do well to at least note a few of the beneficial outcomes, so we know what we have to build on in the future.

First, Obama’s election to the presidency demonstrates that old-fashioned racism (or what I call in this volume Racism 1.0), though still far too prevalent in the nation, is capable of being defeated, especially when an effective coalition is put together, and when those who otherwise might fall back into patterns of bias and discrimination can be convinced that their interests (economic, for instance) should outweigh their tendency to act on the basis of skin color. Given the harrowing state of the American economy as voters went to the polls in November, and given the Obama campaign’s message that his opponent would only provide tax relief to the wealthiest Americans while largely continuing the economic policies of the Bush administration, many voters (including white working-class voters who had been turning against Democrats for a generation) turned to Obama. Even if they harbored ongoing prejudices toward African Americans generally (and evidence suggests that many still did), they were prepared to vote their pocketbooks and break with a long tradition, stretching back decades, whereby so many of them had ignored economic interests for the sake of apparent “racial bonding,” against communities of color.

Especially heartening was the fact that part of the strategy for gaining the support of white working-class voters was to directly confront them on their racism when it was expressed, rather than finessing it. Labor leader Richard Trumka, for instance, as well as other labor organizers and Obama’s own campaign in Ohio developed strategies for taking on white racism directly, rather than trying to sidestep it, in the hopes that voters would simply do the right thing for economic reasons alone. By calling out white racism and forcing white working folks to think about the irrationality of racial bonding—especially in the face of an economic free fall—these organizers planted the seeds of potential cross-racial alliance, which, if tended carefully, could bear fruit in the future.¹

Secondly, and on a related note, the level of cross-racial collaboration (especially among youth) that made Obama’s victory possible was something rarely seen in American politics, or history. Although many, including myself, would rather see such mobilizing take place in arenas other than mainstream electoral politics, the fact is, efforts of this nature have to start somewhere. For young people who forged real and meaningful movement relationships in the Obama campaign, the possibility that they may continue to engage in grassroots organizing in years to come—and much of it around issues of racial justice—cannot be ignored. Long-term sustained activism is always more likely for those who have formed those genuine relationships and worked together for a common purpose, as so many young blacks, whites, Latinos and Asian Americans did in this election cycle. Likewise, that so many of the Obama campaigners witnessed racism up close and personal—while either canvassing or making phone calls for the campaign—can only have served to heighten these folks’ sensitivity to the problem of racism in America. So although the average white person may view Obama’s win as evidence of the death of racism (more on this below), those who worked on his behalf will have a hard time coming to that conclusion, having seen and heard so much raw and unexpurgated bigotry on the campaign trail.²

Finally, Obama’s win indicates that when a person of color has the opportunity to make his case day after day, for at least a year and a half (and really more, since Obama had been introduced to the public four years earlier during the 2004 Democratic National Convention), he is fully capable of demonstrating to the satisfaction of millions of whites (if still not most), his intelligence, wisdom, and leadership capabilities, sufficiently to win the job for which he is in effect, interviewing. So far so good.

But the bad news, and let us not forget it, is that most job interviews don’t last for eighteen months, and don’t involve millions of decision-makers, where at least in theory the biases of some can be canceled out by the open-mindedness of others. Rather, most job-seekers are facing a mere handful of evaluators, often only one, and if there is any significant bias in the heart or mind of that person (or if that person adheres, even subconsciously, to negative stereotypes about folks of color), the job applicant who is black or brown faces an uphill climb that Obama’s success cannot erase or transform. Likewise, most persons of color don’t have the luxury of whipping out their memoir when applying for a mortgage loan, while searching for an apartment, or when they are stopped by a police officer on suspicion of illegal activity and saying, “Here, read this; it’ll show you what a great guy I am.” Most folks of color face far less deliberative snap judgments on the part of employers, landlords, teachers, and cops, and in those instances, the ability of racial bias to taint the process of evaluation is of no small concern.

So, rather than ask what Obama’s success means in terms of race and racism in the United States in the twenty-first century, the better question may be what doesn’t his success mean for those things? What does it not tell us about how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go?

As for the second of the two most often asked questions, while many whites may well not have been prepared to vote for a black—or as some may prefer, biracial—man for the presidency, there is another issue almost completely overlooked by the press: the possibility that Obama might well have won the nation’s highest office in spite of ongoing traditional white racism, and yet because of a newer, slicker Racism 2.0, in which whites hold the larger black community in low regard and adhere, for instance, to any number of racist stereotypes about African Americans— and yet carve out acceptable space for individuals such as Obama who strike them as different, as exceptions who are not like the rest. That this “enlightened exceptionalism” manages to accommodate individual people of color, even as it continues to look down upon the larger mass of black and brown America with suspicion, fear, and contempt, suggests the fluid and shape-shifting nature of racism. It indicates that far from vanishing, racism has become more sophisticated and that Obama’s rise could, at least in part, stem from the triumph of racism, albeit of a more seemingly ecumenical type than that to which we have grown accustomed.

If some whites are willing to vote for a person of color, but only to the extent they are able to view that person as racially unthreatening, as different from “regular” black people, as somehow less than truly black, or as having “transcended race” (a term used with regularity to describe Obama over the past few years), then white racism remains quite real, quite powerful, and quite operative in the life of the nation. More than that, even in the case of the electoral success of a man of color, it might well have remained central to the outcome. The only question, really, was which kind of racism was likely to show up most prominently on election day? Would it be the traditional old-fashioned kind, rooted in conscious bigotry and hate, the Racism 1.0, which historically has caused many whites to act toward black folks with suspicion, violence, distrust, fear, and anxiety, and which—if it is prevalent enough—could have resulted in Obama’s defeat? Or would it be the newer, slicker, enlightened exceptionalism, or Racism 2.0, which still holds the larger black and brown communities of our nation in low regard but is willing to carve out exceptions for those who make some whites sufficiently comfortable? We now have our answer to that question, if we’re willing to examine it. But one thing about which we should be clear as we conduct that examination is this: the election of Barack Obama was not the result of a national evolution to a truly antiracist consciousness or institutional praxis. And this we know for reasons we shall now explore.

SAME AS IT EVER WAS: BARACK OBAMA AND THE PROBLEM OF WHITE DENIAL

That white folks would find it tempting, in light of Obama’s mass appeal and his ascent to the presidency, to declare the struggle against racism over should surprise no one. As we’ll see below, even when the system of racism and white supremacy was more firmly entrenched, white folks by and large failed to see what all the fuss was about. So needless to say, with Barack Obama now in the nation’s top political position, it is to be expected that once again white America would point to such a thing as firm confirmation that all was right with the world. Indeed, the day after Obama’s victory, the Wall Street Journal editorial page intoned: “One promise of his victory is that perhaps we can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country.”³

In fact, even before Obama had been declared the winner of the election, proclamations of racism’s early death were becoming ubiquitous. And so, ten days before the vote, columnist Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times, declared that concerns about white racism possibly sinking Obama’s ship were so obviously absurd as to indicate evidence of “prevailing antiwhite bias” on the part of the media types who continually raised the subject. He went on to explain that white America’s distrust of blacks “crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people.”⁴ Though Rich’s point about the willingness of whites to open up to individual blacks once they become familiar with them may be true for many, he, like most commentators, ignores the fact that most black folks will not get the chance to be known in this way by the average white person. As such, to proclaim a phenomenon observable in the presidential race (whites, getting to know Obama and choosing him in the voting booth) as common or likely to obtain in everyday situations and encounters seems a bit far-fetched.

Then there was columnist Richard Cohen, who said in the Washington Post on the morning of the election, “It is not just that he (Obama) is post-racial; so is the nation he is generationally primed to lead,” and then closed his piece by suggesting, in a bizarre appropriation of civil rights movement language, “we have overcome.”⁵

On a personal note, about a week before the election I received an e-mail from a young white man who proclaimed his desire for Obama to win so that the nation would finally be able to “stop talking about racism, and move on to more important subjects,” and so that “blacks would have to stop whining about discrimination, and focus on pulling themselves up by their bootstraps instead.”

On election eve, before Obama had accumulated enough electoral votes to be proclaimed the winner, former New York City mayor (and Republican presidential candidate) Rudy Giuliani had made clear what an Obama victory would mean for the nation. Speaking of what appeared at that moment to be a sure Obama win, Giuliani noted that if the trend at that point in the evening held up, “we’ve achieved history tonight and we’ve moved beyond … the whole idea of race and racial separation and unfairness.”⁶ Interestingly, not only did none of the other commentators challenge Giuliani’s formulation, but they also failed to note the obvious irony of his comment. Namely, if an Obama win by necessity would indicate the veritable death of racism in the United States, then would an Obama loss have suggested deeply entrenched bigotry in the eyes of Giuliani and others making the same argument? Had McCain won, could we have expected these prophets of achieved color blindness to condemn their fellow voters for being so obviously racist as to vote against a black man? After all, if voting for Obama means people have put away racism, by definition, voting against him would have to mean they had not, right? Actually no, of course, but such a conclusion is where arguments like that of Giuliani necessarily lead.

In truth, such a proposition (that the victory of one person of color signifies a victory over racism aimed at nearly 90 million) is very nearly the definition of lunacy. And note, it is the kind of proposition one would never make regarding sexism in a place like Pakistan, just because Benazir Bhutto was twice elected prime minister of the place; or in India, Israel, or Great Britain, by virtue of all three having elected women as the heads of their respective states. Surely, had Hillary Clinton captured the nomination of her party and gone on to win in November, no one with even a scintilla of common sense would have argued that a result such as this signaled the obvious demise of sexism in the United States. But that is essentially what so many would have us believe to be true of racism, thanks to the national effort that elected Barack Obama.

What white America has apparently missed, in spite of all the Black History Month celebrations to which we have lately been exposed, is that there have always been individually successful persons of color. Their pictures adorn the walls of our elementary school classrooms; their stories get told, albeit in an abbreviated and sanitized way, every February, when corporations and the Ad Council take to the airwaves to tell us about so-and-so great black inventor, or so-and-so great black artist, or so-and-so great black literary giant. What remains unsaid, but which forms the background noise of all this annual praise for the triumphs of black Americans (or, at other times, Latinos and Latinas, Asian-Pacific Americans, or the continent’s indigenous persons), is the systematic oppression that marked the society at the time when most of their achievements transpired. In other words, even in the midst of crushing oppression these hearty souls managed to find a way out of no way, as the saying goes. But that hardly suggests that their singular achievements, even multiplied hundreds of times over, actually rendered the system any less oppressive for all the rest. Thus, Madame C.J. Walker managed to become a millionaire developing and selling beauty products to black women in 1911. This achievement, though of importance in the history of American entrepreneurship, and to the narrative of black success, nonetheless fails to alter the fact that, on balance, 1911 was not a good year to be black in the United States, Madame Walker notwithstanding. Though I am hardly so naïve as to suggest that nothing has changed since 1911, the point still holds: the triumph of individuals of color cannot, in itself, serve as proof of widespread systemic change.

Although it is possible that the political success of Barack Obama could serve to open the minds of whites as to the potentiality of effective black leadership, it is also possible that it might deepen the denial in which so much of the white public has been embedded for generations. And although Obama’s success has had a measurable effect on young men and women of color, who appear empowered by his example—and this could lead to greater levels of accomplishment for still more persons of color, thereby producing a ripple effect when it comes to collective racial uplift—it is also possible that this sense of pride may be stalled if Obama is unable to deliver on his promise of “Change We Can Believe In,” thanks to the exigencies of Washington politics. Long story short, what the rise of Obama comes to mean, regarding race or any other subject, remains to be seen.

But what we can say, without fear of contradiction, is that it does not signify, as some would have it, a fundamental diminution of institutional racism in the United States at present. Contrary to the proclamations of conservatives, both white and of color—such as Abigail Thern- strom and Ward Connerly, who have been among the chief critics and organized opponents of affirmative action programs since the mid-1990s—Obama’s ability to attract white votes (and even then, let us remember, a minority of those) hardly suggests that we can put away various civil rights remedies and proclaim opportunities to be truly open and equitable. That white America may desperately want Obama’s success to serve as the final nail in the political coffin of civil rights activism—and even the media seems to have evinced this hope, as with the August 2008 New York Times article that asked whether Obama marks the “end of black politics” altogether—hardly speaks to whether it should be used as that nail, or whether there is evidence to support the notion that his individual victories are proxies for institutional transformation.⁷

Though the evidence about our nation’s progress says something else altogether, it turns out that white folks have never paid much attention to the evidence, and so denial has long carried the day. This, of course, is no shock in 2009. After all, it is not only the age of Obama, but the age of Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington, Colin Powell, Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters, J-Lo, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Russell Simmons, P. Diddy, and any number of dizzyingly successful folks of color in the worlds of entertainment, sports, and politics. Hip-hop is, for most youth of whatever race, at least part of the sound track of their lives. With such apparent signs of progress, who can blame white folks for thinking the work has been done, and that it is now time to move on to other subjects, leaving the stale topic of racism in the dustbin of history?

Given such a transformation of popular culture as we have seen in the past few decades, it should hardly surprise us to read that according to a summer 2008 Gallup/ USA Today poll, more than three in four whites say that blacks have “just as good a chance as whites to get any job for which they are qualified” (a proposition with which fewer than half of African Americans agree). Likewise, it can’t be much of a shock to learn that 80 percent of whites polled say blacks have “just as good a chance as whites to get a good education,” while fewer than half of blacks agree. Or that 85 percent of whites claim blacks have “just as good a chance to get any housing they can afford,” while only 52 percent of blacks agree. Or that only about a third of whites accept the proposition that discrimination has played a major role in producing income disparities between whites and blacks.⁸ Or that, according to a survey for CNN and Essence magazine, only one in nine whites believe racial discrimination against blacks is still a very serious problem, while nearly four times that many say it’s not a serious problem at all.⁹ And all this, despite a July 2008 New York Times/CBS poll, in which seven in ten blacks said they had suffered a specific discriminatory incident (up from 62 percent who said this in 2000).¹⁰ No, there is nothing particularly surprising about any of this. The outward trappings of major transformative change appear to be everywhere, causing whites and blacks both, in the wake of Obama’s victory, to announce their hope and expectations that race relations will improve in coming years.¹¹ So white denial (and perhaps even a bit from persons of color themselves) makes sense. It fits the visuals beamed into our living rooms, incomplete as they are.

But as predictable as this denial may be today—and however maddening it must be to the persons of color whose very sanity and judgment, indeed life experiences are being called into question by such denial—it is far more enraging to realize that the inability or unwillingness of white America to see racial discrimination as a problem is a pathology with a lengthy and disturbing pedigree. Putting aside the fact that, as with the examples above, we seem to be able to name all the really powerful black and brown folks on a couple of hands—and this, one might suggest, indicates that they are, by definition, exceptions to a much different-looking rule—the bigger problem with white denial is that it isn’t a modern malady.

Though whites may now be seeking to use Obama as evidence of racism’s eradication, let us remember that long before he burst onto the national scene—indeed, even at a time when he was an infant, well before anyone could have foreseen what he would become, and even before the passage of modern civil rights legislation—white Americans were fairly nonchalant about the problems facing persons of color, choosing in most cases to deny what all their senses (and surely their eyes, fixed on the television as most already were by the early 1960s) had to be telling them: that they were living in an apartheid nation; that theirs was no land of freedom and democracy, no oasis of liberty, but rather a formal white supremacy, a racially fascistic state for millions of people.

And so, in 1963, roughly two-thirds of whites told Gallup pollsters that blacks were treated equally in white communities. Even more along the lines of delusion, in 1962, nearly 90 percent of whites said black children were treated equally in terms of educational opportunity.¹² All of which is to say that in August 1963, as 200,000 people marched on Washington, and as they stood there in the sweltering heat, listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, most whites seeing the news that evening were, in effect, thinking to themselves, what’s the problem, exactly? Dream? Why dream? Everything is just fine now. Isn’t it?

Or consider the 1950s, and the way in which white denial manifested so prominently among the very per-sons who had been most implicated in the maintenance of white domination. So, for instance, when racist forc-es in Congress issued their “Southern Manifesto” in response to Supreme Court rulings invalidating racially separate schools, they noted with no apparent misgiving that the push for desegregation was “destroying the ami- cable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.”¹³

Although modern polling techniques weren’t in place in the 1930s one can imagine few whites at that time seeing racism and the oppression of black people as a major concern. Likewise, even at the height of overt white supremacist rule in the United States—during the 1890s, as Black Codes and massive violence against post-emancipation blacks were reaching their zenith¹⁴—one can read editorials in newspapers all around the South in which it was proclaimed how well whites and blacks got along, and how everything would be just fine if those “yankees” would just stop messing with Dixie. And of course it was in the mid-nineteenth century that a well-respected physician of his day, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, opined that enslaved blacks occasionally ran away due to a mental illness, drapetomania, which apparently rendered them incapable of fully appreciating just how good they had it. In short, at no point in American history have whites, by and large, believed that folks of color were getting a raw deal. That we were wrong in every generation prior to the current one in holding such a rosy and optimistic view apparently gives most whites little pause. And so we continue to re- ject claims of racism as so much whining, as “playing the race card” or some such thing, never wondering, even for a second, how a bunch who have proven so utterly inept at discerning the truth for hundreds of years can at long last be trusted to accurately intuit other people’s reality.

Of course, Obama’s own tendency to de-emphasize racism and ongoing social injustice hasn’t helped. It may have helped Obama’s campaign, make no mistake. In fact, had he spoken with any regularity about the frightening reality of U.S. history and the legacy of racism today, there is little doubt that he’d never have found himself so much as a contender for the presidency, a subject about which I’ll have more to say below. But as astute as the political judgment of Obama’s campaign team may have been on these matters, the general avoidance of race as an issue on his part does tend to feed mainstream white denial.

THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SPOKEN: RACISM AND WHITE PRIVILEGE TODAY

And so it is worth taking note of all the things Barack Obama never mentioned on the campaign trail, but which confirm the salience of racism in the modern era. As a well-read, highly versed (and by his own admission, once racially obsessed) man of color, there is little chance that he fails to know any of the following, and yet he mentioned none of it, at least not in public.

Even after he was forced to address race in the wake of the dust-up over remarks made by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Obama played it close to the vest, talking more about how the historic legacy of racism had shaped the contours of racial inequity and had fed the black anger expressed by Wright, which anger was seen as so threatening to much if not most of white America. By speaking in terms of past injuries and the lingering grievances generated by the same, Obama deftly managed to speak about racism without forcing white folks to confront just how real and how present-day the problem is. Sure, speaking of racism even in the past can be risky, especially when you mix it with any discussion of what our obligations are today to address the legacy of that racism. But to make an issue of ongoing racism and presently dispensed privilege—which, after all, would seem to implicate the current generation of white Americans more than is suggested by a backward-looking historical point—would have been infinitely more risky. It is one thing to note that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and other forms of racism has been a massive racial wealth gap—indeed, the typical white family today has about eleven times the net worth of the typical black family and eight times the net worth of the typical Latino/a family,¹⁵ and much of this gap is directly traceable to a history of unequal access to capital¹⁶ —but it is quite another to point out that this wealth gap continues to grow, not only because of past unequal opportunity, but also because of present-day institutional racism.

And so rather than speak of these matters, Obama avoided them, and when he did engage them, he did so in a way that tended to paper over the ongoing racial inequities that beset the nation, in favor of a narrative far preferred by white folks: the narrative of the color-blind society achieved, or at least, very nearly so. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, for instance, Obama speaks of the obstacles facing black and brown America as little dif-ferent from those facing working-class and middle-class whites. To hear Obama tell it, all are in the same boat, and as he would explain during a speech in Selma, Alabama, during the campaign, the civil rights movement, or what he called the “Moses generation,” had brought the nation 90 percent of the way to racial justice. It was now, according to Obama, time for the “Joshua generation” to carry the load the last tenth of the way.¹⁷

Income and Jobs

But in a land where the average black family has less than one-tenth the net worth of the average white family, and the average Latino family has about one-eighth as much, it’s hard to square Obama’s mathematical calculus of progress with the facts. So too when other data is considered, such as the fact that black high school graduates actually have higher unemployment rates than white dropouts;¹⁸ or the fact that white men with college degrees earn, on average, a third more than similar black men;¹⁹ or the fact that only 7 percent of private sector management jobs are held by African Americans, and another 7 percent by Latinos, while whites hold over 80 percent of all such positions;²⁰ or the fact that middle-class black families have to put in approximately 480 more hours per year—equal to twelve work weeks—relative to similar whites, just to make the same incomes as their middle-class white counterparts;²¹ or the fact that blacks, Latinos, and Native North Ameri-cans are 2.5 to 3 times more likely than whites to be poor, while Asian Americans are about 30 percent more likely than whites to be poor.²² In the case of Asians, higher poverty rates and lower incomes often remain the norm, despite higher, on average, educational attainment than whites’, thanks to high-skilled immigration. And so, as one study of Asian mobility in Houston, Texas, discovered, although Asian Americans in Harris County are 50 percent more likely than whites in the county to have a college degree, they have considerably lower incomes and occupational status than the lesser-educated whites with whom they compete for opportunities.²³

And given some of the data suggesting that things are getting worse for blacks—and in particular for black men—it is especially troubling to think that the public may come to believe the rhetoric about racial equity having been essentially achieved. So consider that at the same time America can make a black man president, data from the labor department indicates that for average young black men today, things are not nearly so rosy. Indeed, the typical young black male growing up today will earn 12 percent less than his father did a generation ago. Furthermore, the data suggests that while most middle-class white kids will grow up to do better, economically, than their parents did at the same age, most middle-class black kids will grow up to find themselves having fallen backwards and actually doing worse than their parents. Indeed, the numbers show that black youth from solidly middle-class families are nearly three times as likely as similar whites to fall to the bottom of the income distribution, and nearly half of all black middle-class youth will do so.²⁴

Naturally some will suggest that this data, however troubling it may be, has little to do with institutional racism in the United States today. Perhaps non-discriminatory factors such as differential qualification levels, unequal educational backgrounds, or family composition could explain economic disparities between whites and people of color. But while it is true that earnings disparities, wealth gaps, and differences in occupational status are not only the result of racism perpetrated by whites, the evidence that discrimination contributes to the phenomenon indi-cated by the data is strong. Even after controlling for such ostensibly race-neutral factors as differential test scores and grades, family background, and other variables that can impact income levels, white males still receive about 17 percent more than their otherwise identical black male counterparts.²⁵ But beyond mere income disparity data, direct evidence of ongoing racial discrimination is also plentiful, however much President Obama may have finessed it on the campaign trail.

So what does it say about how much we’ve transcended race, or rather, failed to do so, that according to a study from just a few years ago, conducted by economists at MIT and the University of Chicago, job applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to be called back for a job interview than applicants with black-sounding names, even when all relevant qualifications and experience are indistinguishable?²⁶ Or that, according to the same study, for black-named applicants to have an equal chance at a callback, they must actually have eight more years of experience than those with white names? One thing it surely says, but which has gone unremarked upon by most pundits, and which remained unspoken in the presidential campaign, is that white fears about so-called “reverse discrimination” are based on irrational and nonsensical delusion. After all, if it were really white folks who couldn’t catch a break when looking for a job, then a study such as this would have come to the exact opposite conclusion of what it actually found. When the researchers sent out the résumés to prospective employers, it would have been all the “Tamikas” and “Jamals” who got called in by enthusiastic companies bent on hiring black folks, and it would have been the “Connors” and “Beckys” left out in the cold to wonder what in the world had gone wrong. But this didn’t happen, because it never does. And yet, not only did Obama not speak this fundamental truth—that it is still very much the usual suspects who face the obstacles of race-based discrimination—rather, he pandered to the lie in his Philadelphia speech on race, wherein he mentioned, as though it were perfectly valid, white anger over losing out on a position because of a preference given to a minority.²⁷

What does it say that, according to another study conducted by Princeton sociology professor Devah Pager, white males with a criminal record are more likely than black males without one to be called back for a job interview, even when all credentials, experience, demeanor, and communication and dress style are the same between them?²⁸ Or that according to a massive national study conducted by legal scholars Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen, who examined tens of thousands of businesses, at least one-third of all employers in the nation are racially biased and discriminate regularly against job applicants of color, and at least 1.3 million black and brown job-seekers will face racial bias during their job search in a given year?²⁹ Other research would suggest far higher rates of discrimination than even the Blumrosen study was able to find. So, for instance, according to data from the mid-1990s, compiled by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, as many as three-fourths of all businesses covered by civil rights and affirmative action laws were in “substantial violation” of those laws, because of ongoing discrimination against persons of color and women of all colors.³⁰

What about the fact that according to study after study for years—not to mention a healthy dose of common sense—most jobs, especially the most lucrative ones, aren’t filled based on qualifications anyway, or open competition, so much as by networking and word-of-mouth? And what of the racial impact of this truth: namely, that it is disproportionately folks of color who end up “out of the loop” when it comes to such networks, thereby scratched from the start of the race and afforded less opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.³¹ Indeed it is the matter of social and professional networking that explains, in large measure, why persons of color with the same educational background as whites, and of the same age, doing the same job, so often earn much less.³² So, for instance, a recent study found that Chinese Americans in the legal and medical professions earn, on average, about 44 percent less than their white counterparts, despite equal qualifications and educational attainment.³³ Whereas white job-seekers are able to access more lucrative positions, be they professional, managerial, or even blue-collar, thanks to the networks within which they so often find themselves, black and brown Americans, equally qualified as their white counterparts, have to take positions with less capitalized firms and companies, with the resultant lower pay, because they simply aren’t in a position to network with the right people. Although this form of exclusion is not illegal, it does amount to institutional racism—a kind of racism that is perpetuated within structural settings, even without deliberate and bigoted intent, due to the normal workings of long-entrenched policies, practices, and procedures. And for whites, the privileges that flow from the arrangement are substantial.