Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
—W.E.B. DuBois (1903)1
W.E.B. DuBois’s opening lines in The Souls of Black Folk were repeatedly evoked at the dawn of the twenty-first century to intimate that the color line remained a defining problem of this new millennium. Yet, less than a decade into this new century, a historical moment that would have been inconceivable to almost any American in DuBois’s time was fully inscribed into our daily consciousness. Many Americans basked in the celebratory afterglow of having an African American family in the White House, even as they absorbed as a daily fact of life comic moments like media persona Chris Matthews’s infamous remark, “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour,” following President Obama’s first State of the Union address.
In perhaps more barbed terms, the election of Barack Obama invited public speculation over the continued significance of race. Thus Shelby Steele asked, “Does victory mean that America is now officially beyond racism?”; Matt Bai asked, “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?”; Touré asked, “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?”; and the list and litany went on.2 This essay reflects on Barack Obama’s ascendancy as an illuminating lens on racial politics and racial discourse in this new millennium. Rather than tackling head-on the significance of the 2008 and now also 2012 elections and whether they augur a “postracial” future for America, I dig around the edges into some of the unexamined assumptions and hidden transcripts underlying this question.3 Specifically, the essay reminds readers that 2008 in particular was an extraordinary and rare political moment, and not the inevitable culmination of a steadfast march of racial progress. It then revisits the election, paying special mind to the prevailing view that independent voters were the decisive factor in Obama’s success. The essay then concludes with some thoughts on what may in fact be changing about America’s political landscape and how we might reckon that change.
Contemporary claims to a postracial America in the context of what happened in 2008 are perhaps paradoxical and pernicious. Postracialism—if what is meant by “post” is coda, transcendence, abnegation, or invisibility—is clearly more of an aspiration (for those who espouse it) than a materially achieved reality. There is, alas, no shortage of proof points on the persistence of racial inequality in America. Picking indicia is akin to picking up confetti in Times Square on New Year’s morning. So my aim here is not to belabor the point, but simply to note the seeming paradox and irony underlying the persistent discourse on postracialism. The gap between discourse and lived reality is not lost on President Obama himself, who remarked in an address on Martin Luther King Day in 2010, “You know, on the heels of my victory over a year ago, there were some who suggested that somehow we had entered into a post-racial America, [and] all those problems would be solved. . . . That didn’t work out so well.”4
Yet if racial schism and inequality persist, from whence does the longing for a postracial America come? The temptation to see the election of a self-identified African American seems, res ipso loquitur, a beacon signal of the end of what Gunnar Myrdal termed the “American dilemma.”5 Perhaps America’s liberal creed of equality no longer stands so strikingly at odds with reality. The symbolism in telling school-aged children that anyone can be president of the United States after 2008 simply carries a prima facie credibility that it did not before 2008. In this aspect, there is clearly a collective investment among many in what David Hollinger refers to as “a possible future” where choice supersedes ascription and strategy displaces destiny.6
At the same time, much energy—especially from the academic left—has been focused on demonstrating how plainly and doggedly racism and racial inequality exist and, therefore, how untenable claims to such a possible future are. Some of the most incisive of such demonstrations show that aspirations to a postracial society are intimately linked to an ideology of colorblindness and a willful neglect of racial realities.7 My aim in this essay is not to rehash these arguments in other contexts. Rather, I take these interventions as a given and take as my point of entry the question of whether there is any paradox at all between the fact of Obama’s election, and re-election, and the stubborn persistence of racial inequalities.
The paradox only exists, in effect, if both realities are equal in epistemic status. That is, there is only a tension here if Obama’s successful campaigns are an expected electoral outcome in the same way that differential risk rates—unemployment, poverty, educational attainment, incarceration, infant mortality, stress-related chronic health conditions, home default, and the like—are expected outcomes for African Americans (and, to different extents, other racialized minorities). Only if the election of a black man to the White House is seen as an ordinary feature of our electoral system, within a reasonable range of expected outcomes, is Obama’s success at odds with other indicia of structural disadvantage, where successes (especially of such a high order) are decidedly extraordinary outcomes.
The point here is simple, but worth pondering nonetheless. It is beguilingly easy to think of the outcome of the 2008 presidential election as unsurprising and perhaps even inevitable. The nation was on the brink of the Great Recession; our military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan had driven us even deeper in debt and exacted a ruinous toll on American lives and livelihoods; the incumbent president George W. Bush’s approval ratings were hovering around a near-historic low of 30 percent; and so on. Furthermore, there is a clear and well-documented trend over some fifty years in support of the idea that the nation was ready and willing to elect an African American to the White House. Since 1958, the Gallup Poll has asked Americans, “If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be black, would you vote for that person?” In the first poll in which this question was asked, roughly three out of every five whites were unwilling to vote for someone like Obama, even if “well qualified” and from the political party of their affiliation. By the 1980s, when the Reverend Jesse Jackson twice ran unsuccessfully to be the Democratic Party’s nominee, that figure had fallen to less than one in every five whites; in 2008, it dropped even further to fewer than one in every ten whites.8
Yet prior to the 2008 election, the state of our researched understanding also painted a clear picture that “the terms prejudice and racism [remain] important and deeply meaningful facets of the American social, cultural, and political landscape.”9 In the political arena, studies consistently showed that the color of a candidate’s skin would predictably handicap African Americans running in a majority white jurisdiction, even controlling for the content of their character and the quality of their political bona fides.10 At an aggregate, historical level, David Canon’s study of 6,667 congressional elections between 1966 and 1996, for instance, found that African Americans won in only 0.52 percent of the cases (no typo there!).11 At the more microlevel of individual voters, studies showed that whites were not only more likely to favor white candidates over their African American counterparts, but also that they were more likely to favor lighter-skinned African American candidates over their darker-skinned counterparts.12 Other studies showed a stubborn gap among white Americans between (nearly uniform) endorsement of racial equality and (a much more divided) attitude toward the practices and policies that might achieve that equality. In the breach between principles and practices, moreover, stood divergent attributions of racial inequality, overtly negative stereotyping, and renewed strains of racism, rooted in both socialized symbolic resentments and realistic group competition.13 Finally, beyond the reach of consciousness and introspection, studies showed a strong unconscious operation of stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. By one measure, as high as 88 percent of whites held an implicit bias for whites and against African Americans.14
The marrow in these various studies of bias is that Obama’s election caught most people—including (and perhaps even especially) scholars of race and racial politics—quite by surprise. As an anecdote, I organized a roundtable of six nationally preeminent scholars of racial politics and voting behavior at a political science conference in the spring of 2008. The stellar cast keyed their wits and wisdom on the still-fresh wounds of the ongoing primary contests between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and what they meant for various dilemmas of race and gender politics. Yet none on the panel declared their confidence (or even aspiration) that Obama would win in the general election. The fact that Obama’s success ran against the expectations of many experts in the field, of course, may be more of an indictment against the academy than anything else.
The question of whether social science research on race warrants arraignment on its deficits in light of Obama’s success deserves a fuller consideration than this essay permits.15 For the present, I share two vantages that reinforce my point that there is no paradox between Obama’s election and the persistence of racism. The first is an observation about the dominant mode of analysis in much of the social science research on race relations and racial politics. This mode relies on quantitative reasoning and explains or predicts outcomes that are most likely to happen under “ordinary,” equilibrium conditions of politics. The analysis is commonly couched in the statistical language of central tendencies, expected values, maximum likelihoods, propensity scores, and the like. This practice is often poorly equipped to explain or predict extraordinary events, or does so only by stripping phenomena of their defining contexts or by rendering race as a category of analysis into a reified ghost.16
Whatever else the 2008 election may have been, it was extraordinary on several dimensions. A looming economic meltdown, a hugely unpopular war (and with it, sitting president), and an unusually strong ground game and record-breaking fund-raising campaign all made for uncommon circumstances. But there was also Barack Obama, an exceptionally fresh and prepossessing candidate, possessed of prodigious powers as a public speaker and an uncommon credibility among a diverse cross-section of Americans. In racial terms, Obama was singularly polysemous and multivocal, enabling voters of multiple stripes—black, multiracial, postracial, immigrant, Pacific Islander, and so on—to see him as a candidate who dignified their experiences and advocated for their interests. Political scientists are adept at deriving statistical models that specify the marginal effects of incumbency, a poor economy, wars, scandals, and even hurricanes and snowstorms on Election Day—but we are not so accustomed to reckoning a candidate like Barack Obama.
In short, the paradox here emerges from the peculiar refracting lens that much of social science research deploys. If the first point is that a single, anomalous, extraordinary moment should not falsify “normal science,” a second key point is that the best social science evidence nonetheless suggests that race did in fact play a role in 2008 (as it also would in 2012). While Obama clearly fared significantly better than his Democratic counterpart John Kerry did in 2004, there is some telling local variation in that result. For instance, in some states and counties in the Deep South, Obama actually fared significantly worse among white voters than did Kerry in 2004. These racial gaps, moreover, were especially pronounced in jurisdictions covered under Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.17 An even more robust body of research uses psychometric measures of “racial resentment,” “implicit association,” and “affect misattribution” and concludes rather clearly that antiblack sentiments were predictive of greater opposition to Obama.18
Ultimately, perhaps the best way to decide whether race factored into voters’ electoral calculus is through counterfactual reasoning: would the outcome of the 2008 election change if the Democratic nominee were Barack Obama’s white doppelgänger—a candidate equal in every respect to Obama but for his race? While Obama’s rare traits as a candidate make such counterfactuals a generally limiting exercise in abstraction, the best electoral forecasting models would have predicted a more decisive landslide for the Democratic nominee than Obama enjoyed. This electoral cost of racial prejudice is quantified by several studies as ranging between 3 and 5 percent.19 The nub here remains that the best research on race before 2008 would not have foreseen a majority-white national electorate ready for a black president. And in fact, far from signifying a shift to a transcendent, postracial “Age of Obama,” racial conflicts and competition in 2008 held a renewed ferocity in American political life.
If racial bias is such a regnant force, skeptics might ask: how then did Obama win the presidency and what does that foretell for the future of race relations and racial politics in America? No matter how extraordinary the circumstances or how exceptional the candidate, an election is won or lost by the aggregation of votes. Where then did Obama’s margin of victory come from?
On this question, it is useful to revisit and reframe a common narrative about the 2008 election by setting it in bold relief against some election results. Specifically, one of the predominant framing messages in the mass media’s coverage of the 2008 election was that independent voters were a critical segment of Obama’s electoral coalition. As I have argued elsewhere, this idea depends on several accompanying suppositions: that independent voters are predominantly white; perhaps even that most whites who voted for Obama transcended their own racial group interests and favored the postracial promise of Obama’s candidacy. From these priors, it would seem that the longer-term viability of a racially progressive politics in America might hinge on appealing to white independents and espousing a postracial discourse.20
Examples of this predominant framing were visible as early as January 2008, when an article in the International Herald Tribune carried the headline “In This Race, Independents Are the Prize” (Zeleny, January 6, 2008). The narrative continued into April, with a Real Clear Politics article titled “Obama’s Independent Edge” (Avlon, April 29, 2008), and continued into Obama’s first year in the White House, with an in-depth report from the Pew Research Center titled, “Independents Take Center Stage in Obama Era” (Pew Research Center 2009). Then, as discontent with Obama began to mobilize, the framing shifted, with articles such as the Wall Street Journal’s November 2009 piece, “Obama Is Losing Independent Voters” (Rasmussen and Schoen, November 14, 2009). And following Scott Brown’s dark horse Senate victory and the passage of health care reform in April 2010, the Washington Times ran a story, “Independent Voters Turn Angry” (Haberkorn, April 2, 2010).
What is illuminating in these headlines (and their corresponding stories) is the nearly total absence of any consideration of race. Such absences—especially when set against a backdrop in which race is clearly a salient consideration, such as Obama’s candidacy in 2008—are often accompanied by a presumption of whiteness, and the media coverage of independents is no exception. The dynamic is commonplace, where whiteness is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere; it is simultaneously being defined in direct opposition to the experience of African Americans, and being accepted without interrogation as the “null” hypothesis or “normal” state of affairs.21
Absences and assumptions notwithstanding, what are the background facts about race, nonpartisanship, and voting behavior?22 First, the dynamics of partisanship have been rapidly shifting, and whites are no longer the disproportionate number of nonpartisans in America. In the earliest academic and media polls, independents were a relatively minor and (for the most part) ignored segment of the American electorate. The first Gallup polls in the 1940s showed a range of 15–20 percent of Americans identifying as independents, and the initial American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys in the early 1950s found a range of about 20–25 percent self-identified independents. In these earlier surveys, it raised few eyebrows to presume that independents were whites. From the 1952 ANES through the 1972 ANES, more than 90 percent of all self-identified independents were self-identified whites.
Since the 1960s, however, there have been two important and interrelated trends. One is a growing percentage of Americans who identify as independents or nonpartisans. As early as the 1970s, upward of a third of Americans identified as independents. In more recent years, that figure has crept up above 40 percent. It is now no longer uncommon for independents to constitute a plurality of the electorate. This trend of rising nonpartisanship—and its relationship to corresponding trends of rising distrust and disaffection among voters and rising polarization among party elites—is a significant source of the growing attentiveness to independent voters.23
The other trend is the rising number of Latinos and Asian Americans in America—and with that growth, a preference not to associate with either political party. The demographic landscape of America in a post–civil rights era is profoundly transformed and transforming. Changes in U.S. immigration law and global migration trends since the mid-1960s have spurred an influx of immigrants to the United States on a scale unseen since the early twentieth century. One in four Americans today is either an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. Moreover, contemporary immigrants come from Asian, African, Caribbean, and Latin American shores, rather than from across the Atlantic. Up until the first decade of the twentieth century, about 90 percent of new migrants to the United States set sail from European shores. Today, roughly 80 percent of new migrants are Latino or Asian.24
Coupled with this demographic change is the fact that Latinos and Asian Americans are especially likely to be nonpartisan. Specifically, the approach that political scientists continue to use to measure affiliation with political parties appears largely irrelevant to many Americans. In two recent surveys—the 2006 Latino National Survey and the 2008 National Asian American Survey—well over half of the respondents chose not to identify as either Democrat or Republican. The effect here has been a dramatic shift in the racial composition of independents. According to the 2008 ANES survey, less than 60 percent of all self-identified independents were whites. If the trend toward diversity continues, we are likely only a few election cycles away from independents being a majority-minority group. Thus, as a general feature of nonpartisanship, it is simply not the case that independents can or should be thought of as a “white” electorate.
A second implication from 2008 is that the electoral debt Obama owes is more credibly to voters of color, be they independents or partisans. That election was highly vaunted for the investiture of large numbers of Americans into the ranks of first-time voters. Who were these rookie citizens? According to the 2008 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement (CPS), roughly 5 million new voters were mobilized in 2008. Of these, the CPS estimates that about 2 million were African American, 2 million were Latino, and 600,000 were Asian American. The CPS estimates no statistically significant new mobilization of whites in 2008. If one simply carries through the National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll estimates of vote share by race—that 95 percent of African Americans, 67 percent of Latinos, 62 percent of Asians, and 43 percent of whites voted for Obama—a reasonable estimate would be that Obama enjoyed the support of almost 80 percent of these new nonwhite voters.
Further support for this view comes from keying in on the independent vote itself. Here, the NEP exit poll data show that while the two-way split favoring the Democratic candidate remained unchanged between 2004 and 2008, a slightly higher proportion of independents reported voting for Obama (52 percent) than for Kerry (49 percent). Yet to put this in some perspective, Obama also saw an equivalent percentage increase in support among self-identified Republicans, garnering 9 percent to Kerry’s 6 percent of this crossover vote in 2004. Perhaps more crucially, the 3 percent uptick in independents’ support for Obama in 2008 was slender compared to the mobilization of the African American, Latino, and Asian American support, where 2008 saw a corresponding increase in turnout of 7 percent, 9 percent, and 6 percent, respectively (vis-à-vis the 2004 figures). The icing on top is the breakdown of the independent vote itself: while Obama enjoyed the support of a majority of independents in 2008, a far greater proportion of this support came from nonwhite independents. Among white independents, only 47 percent reported voting for Obama, compared to roughly 70 percent of nonwhite independents.25
The first sections of this essay focused on the plus c’est la même chose elements of race as a motive force in American politics. That discussion mainly focused on the extent to which prejudice persists in the calculus of American voters, notwithstanding aspirations to the contrary or the successful election of an African American president. Given the broad charge of this volume—to consider whether there is a “new black” that defines race relations in the twenty-first century—it is important to note that Barack Obama is not just a symbol of the continuing negative role of racial bias and conflict.
The extent of Barack Obama’s support among African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans should force us to consider another symbol for Obama: the positive role of racial solidarity, group mobilization, and collective self-empowerment. Can the same group boundaries that demarcate unequal opportunities and outcomes for communities of color also define a basis for collective action and racial solidarity? While much attention has been paid to the question of whether and how racial bias and conflict have changed post-2008, less attention has been paid to whether and how racial group-ness serves as a basis for shared experiences, common purpose, and collective action. The electoral results portray a mass mobilization across communities of color that have often been pit against one another. This, in my view, is the real surprise and the potentially transformative seedling of change to emerge from this historic event.26
It is also a germ of change that reflects the decidedly multiracial and multiethnic future of this country. The racial remix that we have seen over the last half century is expected to continue. If Census Bureau projections hold, the United States will become a majority-minority nation sometime in the next three to four decades, as the self-identified white population falls below 50 percent of the U.S. adult population. Majority-minority status already describes the demographics of New Mexico, Hawaii, and California, as well as many cities throughout the nation. These far-reaching changes in number, moreover, are occurring amid equally sweeping changes in kind and in categorization. Our ethnoracial classification system alone has seen the introduction of a separate Hispanic ethnic identifier in 1970; a proliferation of Asian, Pacific Islander, American Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native categories in 1980 and 1990; and, in the most recent decennial census, the option of choosing more than one among these categories.
What is unclear from the remaking of the American racial landscape—and with it, a multiplicity and hybridity of identities—is whether the sort of multiracial moment seen in 2008 (and again in 2012) is a harbinger of things to come or a brief pause in an otherwise long history of defeat and disaffection. To many, the 2008 election represents a potential watershed moment of success on a grand national political stage engendered by a panracial coalition of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and racially sympathetic whites. Yet to others, it is the 2010 election that is more representative and reprises the kind of racial backlash that has historically accompanied moments of legislative and electoral triumph. Did the panracial mobilization seen in 2008 give us a peek into our future, or will such an ideal fracture and flounder under the weight of economic crises, partisan polarization, political distrust, and the countermobilization of moral and racial panics?
At risk of excessive navel gazing, political scientists grappling with such questions often seek guidance from an archetypical view of “black politics,” in which a shared racial group label is demonstrably bound to a collective group politics. If such a discernible linkage is found among any group in the United States, it is found among African Americans.27 Thus, the fact that two million African Americans were mobilized as first-time voters in 2008 and that 4.3 million more African Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2008 than voted for John Kerry in 2004 is impressive, but maybe not preternatural.
Does such an archetype help us understand the equally impressive and perhaps more startling mobilization of Latino and Asian Americans in 2008 and 2012? Will it help us to anticipate whether nascent identities like “Latino” and “Asian American” will be a similarly generative force in the years to come? More pointedly, can a common thread of marginalization serve as the basis for an inclusive panracial politics? Does political organizing around “wounded identities” enable or inhibit the pursuit of robust solidarity, democratic politics, and collective engagement? While political theorists have applied themselves to these questions in earnest, they are urgent empirical concerns as well, to which firm answers have been more elusive.28
In practice, the search for a “new black” politics archetype in Latinos, Asian Americans, and other groups is more often than not reduced to a search for evidence of the political consequences of “linked fate” (or some other measure of group consciousness) in opinion surveys.29 As a framework, there are several problems with this mode of inquiring about Latinos and Asian Americans and their capacity to shape the future. First, in stripping a rich concept like Michael Dawson’s “linked fate” down to discrete questions on a survey, the origins of group solidarity in the textured history of the African American freedom struggle and its deep linkages to the organizing role of socioeconomic class are lost. Second, in conceiving of black politics as an archetype vis-à-vis a black-white binary, there is a tacit view that the processes that link group labels and a collective politics for these other groups is functionally isomorphic either to those for African Americans or those of whites. For that matter, there is often a further tacit belief that Latinos and Asian Americans are also functionally isomorphic to one another.
If anything, panethnic groups like Latinos and Asian Americans are so internally diverse and spiced with crosscutting identitarian claims (around class, gender, national belonging, language, religion, sexuality, and so on) that the strong presumption ought to be that any collective basis for politics for either group is decidedly not functionally equivalent to what scholars have found for African Americans or equivalent to one another. A third pitfall, Cathy Cohen and others remind us, is that the African American community itself is characterized by heterogeneity, hybridity, and a multiplicity of crosscutting claims.30
Fundamentally, the frameworks we bring to any inquiry and the questions we ask of them have a way of defining the answers we find. Simplified, convenient inquiries on our present day—ones fueled by aspiration and angst rather than tempered with sobering realities—will invite blithe proclamations of postracialism and the pivotal role of (white) independents, and maybe even the rush to judgments on the inevitability of multiracial electoral coalitions and the evolution of a “new black.” Put otherwise, if we are in fact living through another reconstruction of America’s race relations, we will likely miss this change by clinging to well-worn concepts and frameworks.
As a parting thought, it is useful to keep in mind one constant from the turn of the century that W.E.B. DuBois passed down to our time: the central role of institutions, ideologies, and identities that create a capacity for struggle and resistance. Thus while DuBois bore witness to the lynching of Sam Hose—and in any given year, between fifty to more than one hundred additional Americans of African descent—he also worked with others to spawn intellectual ferment and grow indigenous organizational strength within the African American community. His was an era of the Niagara movement and the Brownsville raid; of the rise of the NAACP, the United Negro Improvement Association, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Urban League; of the Harlem Renaissance and the further maturation of black-nationalist thought and racial uplift ideologies. By contrast, Organizing for America—for all its undeniable strengths and successes in building a twice-winning panracial electoral coalition—cannot be mistaken for a sustainable movement-based organization.
Transformative social change requires the presence of an institutionalized, indigenous countervailing force, wrought from the wellsprings of a robust civil society. Perhaps such wellsprings can be seen in the energy that produced the Occupy movement, or are ready to reemerge in the long wake from the spring 2006 immigration protest marches, or reincarnate from Organizing for America, or appear in some other embodiment of an autonomous demos yet to come. Ultimately, whether “the Obama era” heralds a rupture with our racial past or the unfolding of a panracial or postracial future depends on the meaning and action we give to our present day and on what Max Weber termed the “strong and slow boring of hard boards.” In short, it depends on us, collectively.