Race: Has America entered a new era?

In a Detroit restaurant, patrons danced and chanted, “One America!” In Washington, D.C., hundreds of students surrounded the White House, waving flags and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And in Chicago’s Grant Park, where a cheering crowd of 125,000 had gathered, Linda Robb—a white woman—wept. “There is a transformational shift happening,” she said. “Consciousness is being raised.” When Barack Obama was elected president last week, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, and I witnessed people of all colors exulting in cities and towns across the nation, I couldn’t help but break down in tears. For African-Americans, the election of a black man as the nation’s leader represented an acceptance—a validation—that most of us never expected to see. As slaves and laborers, we helped build this nation; as soldiers, w e fought and died in every one of our nation’s wars; as civil-rights activists, we were beaten and shot for demanding our share of the American dream. Only now, as Obama’s “young, beautiful black family” prepares to move into the White House, do we feel, for the first time in our lives, that we are truly equal. It’s a shocking thought, said Keith O’Brien in The Boston Globe, but perhaps Americans “aren’t as racist as we believed ourselves to be.”

There’s no other explanation, said Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Washington Post. I’ll admit that when Obama first entered this race, my jaded friends and I “rolled our eyes.” We reflexively “doubted the humanity of the people he needed to convince in order to win.” But during the primaries, as Obama triumphed in white bastions from Iowa to Idaho, and then won in South Carolina as well, we realized the nation had changed in a fundamental way. Martin Luther King Jr. “believed in white people,” but frankly, neither I nor most black people shared his conviction that one day whites would see past our skin color. Four decades after a white man assassinated King for his audacity, I now know he was right.

Let’s get real here, said Shelby Steele in the Los Angeles Times. Obama won precisely because he was black, not despite it. Obama is what I call a “bargainer”—a black who tells whites, “I will never presume that you are racist if you will not hold my race against me.” His “post-racial idealism” makes guilt-ridden whites feel noble and grateful. But even in “the glow of an Obama presidency,” black America’s problems will remain intractable: an illegitimacy rate of 70 percent, a huge gap in educational achievement, and millions of our young men in prison. In the end, Obama “is likely to leave America pretty much where he found her.”

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You couldn’t be more wrong, said William Raspberry in The Washington Post. The old “civil-rights paradigm” is dead, and African-Americans can no longer see themselves primarily as victims. As Obama has repeatedly pointed out, our community will climb out of poverty and inequality only when black men stop abandoning their children, and black parents turn off the TV and encourage a love of reading and learning. Those changes are on us—not on whites, and not on the government. Obama has said that he took to heart what his (white) grandfather once told him: “Americans can do anything they put their minds to.” Now that one black man has proved the truth of that belief, perhaps others can “begin to see life as a series of problems and possibilities—and not just a list of grievances.”