The Race Problematic, the Narrative of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Election of Barack Obama

Arguably, race has been and remains the most intractable problem in the United States. Race defines and shapes the dichotomous social and human relations that have historically specified the juxtaposition of the supremacy, right, privilege, and morality of the ‘‘white’’ and the ‘‘nonwhite.’’ In specific terms, race is a marker that describes, informs, and bounds white and nonwhite people within structures of power and domination. If we accept race as a social construction, then we must also accept it as a category by which all groups in the American society are identified. We must also understand that while whites possess race, they are not raced. To be raced in the American society is to be identified as nonwhite. Historically, this especially has been the case for black people.

This essay attempts an analysis of the race problematic as it played out within Barack Obama’s quest to become the first black person to run for and win the presidency as the standard bearer of one of the two major political parties in the United States. My effort is to interrogate the race problematic within the paradigm of Martin Luther King Jr.’s narrative of a beloved community and Barack Obama’s odyssey of winning the presidency while not propounding his identity as a black man.

What is the race problematic? How did it inform the national discourse on whether white people were prepared to support and elect a black person as president of the United States of America and ‘‘leader of the free world,’’ as it were? I want to examine those questions here. Second, during the 2008 presidential election cycle, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. was invoked as a sort of brook of fire through which Obama had to cross in order to convince many people that he was not running as a black candidate, but rather was transracial or postracial in his campaign to win the presidency. In considering that legacy, I will I argue that the King narrative did inform the discourse on whether, as Obama believes, ‘‘ white guilt has exhausted itself.’’ The race problematic played out in Obama’s presidential victory, but in some surprising ways.

The Race Problematic

Race and racial specificity are interwoven into the civil society, legal system, mores, norms, cultural and social etiquette, and the body politic of American society. Consequently, the problem is not race per se. Rather the problem is racial domination. Racial domination in America is structured by power relations. White people, in very specific terms, have exercised power over black people and other nonwhite groups in fundamental ways that have oppressed, exploited, and aggressed against their human and civil rights.

Conceptually, race specifies a system of ideas and values, and of advantages and disadvantages. Racism is the ideology that rationalizes racial domination and white supremacy. Moreover, racism gives framework to the superstructural, substructural, and infrastructural processes and institutions that practice racial exclusion, circumscription, and proscription. In broad terms, racism in the United States operationalizes a racial contract of whiteness. Whiteness is about privilege and the normality and visibility of white people as the dominant group and class in American society. Historically, whiteness has privileged white people over and against nonwhite people as the ‘‘Other.’’ Moreover, whiteness socially categorizes white people into a dominant power relationship with nonwhite groups. This conceptualization accounts for the differentiation in the resources, power, authority, and influence among white people writ large.

In highly racialized polities, such as the United States, whiteness occupies the superior position in the racial hierarchy, because white people—as the dominant group and class—reproduce the power, social arrangements, and ideology that frame social reality. Over the history of the United States, citizenship, for example, has been a highly racialized commodity.

During the era of chattel slavery, African people were considered property. They were rationalized as subhuman and had no rights that white people were obligated to respect. To be a citizen, a person had to be white and a property owner. As slaves, black people were not white, were not free, and were not citizens. They were inferior, unfree, and property. Therefore, citizenship was a racialized standing. Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution refers to black people as ‘‘three fifths of all other Persons.’’ Amendments 13, 14, and 15 codified black people into the social contract in order to place limits on postslavery racial discriminatory practices by the states. From the mid-nineteenth century to well into the early twenty-first century, black people have engaged in political and social protest, social movement, civil litigation, and the struggle to exercise the vote in order to secure and utilize the basic citizenship rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Therefore, for black people, the question of citizenship has been tied to questions of race, power, and racialization. In the main, the black struggle for freedom has been a struggle for inclusion into the white body politic. Not only was citizenship closed to black people, but the limits, boundaries, and provinces of citizenship were also proscribed by rules and laws forbidding black people from entering the inner citadels of white civic society. The major dominant group and class institutions, organizations, and social relations—politics, law, economic activity, religion, cultural apparatuses, and residential life—have been structured by the racial order. While de jure racial segregation no longer exists, there remain obvious de facto practices of racial constraints in institutional life in America.

After a long, arduous, and protracted struggle against racial segregation and for inclusion, black people do enjoy and exercise some measure of citizenship rights. However, it must be observed that, in the early twenty-first century such exercise is still constrained by race and racial determinants on the extent and limits of freedom and access.

Today, the race problematic is evident in a litany of empirical indexes validating racial constraints that are not simple social constructions: (1) nationally, one in three black males is in prison, on parole, or on probation; (2) nationally, a higher percentage of black females are in the criminal justice system in disproportion to their numbers when compared to the number of white males; (3) black women have accounted for at least 72 percent of new HIV cases over the last decade; (4) black people do not enjoy transformative assets— inherited wealth required to lift families beyond their own achievements over generations; (5) in the twenty largest metropolitan areas, where 36 percent of all black people live, residential segregation pervades basic dimensions of life; (6) at least 70 percent of all black school-age students are in racially segregated schools; (7) in the lowest quintile, the net worth (the difference between what one owns and what one owes) for the typical white household is $17,066, while black households have a net worth of $2,400; among the highest-earning households, white median net worth is $133,607, while the net worth for black households is $43,806; and (8) more glaringly, net financial assets (liquid assets, that is assets that are immediately available) are even more revealing along racial lines; at the middle quintile, typical net financial assets for white households are $6,800, while for black households they are $800. Among the highest-earning households, they are $40,465 for whites and $7,448 for black people. These indexes are illustrative of the disparities we find among other nonwhite groups when compared to whites. While class is an active variable in explaining these disparities, the race problematic is a significant determinant. While race continues to be regarded as a dilemma in American institutional life, few observers wish to confront racial domination as it is manifested in everyday life. Whether race is rejected as a biologistic concept or accepted as a social construction, the very practices of the race problematic give conceptualization and operationalization to race as an orienting concept in dichotomizing and managing people along distinct lines of color differences. Moreover, in the context of the United States, race seems to operate as an immutable category, characterized by color lines between white people and nonwhite people that have been defined, circumscribed, and enforced institutionally.

Once a group or an individual has been raced, then it is difficult to become ‘‘deraced.’’ When cultural and social ideologues think and speak in terms of race, then they usually do not have white people in mind. They usually have reference to black people or other people of color. The historical annals are replete with cases of black people who have been so raced that they prefer being identified with the dominant white group or any other group that may approximate some of the attributes of the dominant white group. The phenomena of passing and racial self-hatred readily come to mind (Kennedy 2008; Bracey 2008).

As social practice, race ascribes a particular racial etiquette that codifies and conceptualizes how people are to act along racial lines. This racial etiquette in turn gives rise to a racial ideology that fixes people into differences that are rationalized by social practices and law. Such was the history of slavery and de jure racial segregation in the United States. The social practices are quite evident today in the ways in which black people are being criminalized, overrepresented at the lower end of the income and occupation hierarchies, and underrepresented in positions of economic and political power, while institutionalized racism remains a powerful determinant of black life chances (Hill and Lee Tazinski 2008).

The race problematic remains an active variable in the thinking and practices that define and shape human and social relations in twenty-first-century America. Race is always just beneath the surface in public discourse. Racism and racial domination continue to operate in subtle and glaring ways to make clear that there is a dominant white group and class that maintain and benefit from the racial order. The narrative on the race problematic has not changed much over the last forty years. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, the civil rights movement had not achieved his beloved community. While measurable, marginal change in the racial status of black people has occurred, the life chances of black people are continually retarded by the racial order.

King's Narrative

Martin Luther King Jr. has been invoked during this presidential election cycle for obvious reasons. The least of them is Obama’s status as the first black person to become the presidential candidate for one of the two major parties. Perhaps, more critical is the fact that Obama, it was argued, represented a transracial or postracial politics in which race was not the central thesis of his bid for the White House. While it was the case that Obama set out determined not to run as a black candidate, he had to confront the conundrum of having black stalwarts in the Democratic Party, and some black neoconservatives, consider him ‘‘not black enough.’’ The black Democratic stalwarts were supporting Hillary Clinton because of the claim that black people owed something to the Clintons; especially since Bill Clinton had been the figurative ‘‘first black president.’’ As a self-identified black man, born of an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, and primarily raised by his white grandparents in Hawaii, Obama did not want to be perceived by the white electorate as black.

While not making the claim himself, Obama may have been vicariously and intuitively assuming the personification of King’s beloved community. Not only did Obama not represent the traditional biography of passage to national black leadership, but his cultural and social narrative was also constructed with appropriated language that did not altogether jibe with the race specific experiences of mass black communities. From his beginnings as a community organizer, Obama had constructed his political resume and portfolio within an urban terrain that required him to coalesce with individuals and groups across ethnic, racial, class, and cultural lines. His Chicago experience led him to cultivate relationships with whites, Jews, Gentiles, Middle Easterners, Latinos, conservatives, liberals, South Side black politicos, black residents of the city, and the white movers and shakers on Chicago’s lakeshore. To become at once a member of Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ and be mentored by one Abner Mikva, a former Illinois congressman and federal judge, did not represent a contradiction for Obama (Purdum 2008; Lizza 2008). Rather, it demonstrated his capacity to reach across racial and ethnic lines to see that his political viability was inextricably linked to a broad, complex human mosaic. Arguably, this strategy was quite Kingian in its intent. Martin Luther King Jr. believed in and propagated the idea of America becoming a beloved community in which black people and white people, as ‘‘brothers and sisters,’’ had to reconcile their racial differences and come together as ‘‘children of God’’ in order to establish America as the ‘‘Kingdom of God.’’ Though King reluctantly became the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the leading black political organization in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, he came to understand, in short order, that the success of the civil rights movement also required the organization and mobilization of the surrounding white community. King believed that white people were morally mutable. He believed they could change to the point of recognizing black people as ‘‘children of God.’’ Thus, King set out to shame white people into changing the racial order and the dominant culture. King was the consummate liberal Christian, who believed that the American dream of freedom, justice, equality, and democracy could be realized and enjoyed by black people. In King’s thinking, racial segregation prevented white people from seeing the American dream as having transformative powers for both black people and whites. Moreover, King believed that the American racial order could be transformed by appealing to the moral conscience of whites.

The America that King saw in the mid-twentieth century was being awakened by a post–World War II international mobilization to end settler colonial rule in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America; a domestic politics in the United States organized against cultural and social intolerance; and the consolidation of the decades long civil rights struggle to end racial segregation and the draconian nadir that had kept black people mired in an inferior state. King came to interpret the black freedom struggle in America as ‘‘part of an overall movement in the world in which oppressed people are revolting against imperialism and colonialism (King 1967a, p. 59)’’ King’s conceptualization of what he saw was constructed in universal terms. He saw racial segregation in America and colonialism in the Third World as the denial of human dignity and worth.

As a liberal Christian, King wanted America to live up to its professed virtues as a liberal democracy by fully granting and protecting black citizenship rights and providing black people with access to freedom, justice, and equality. He knew these things could happen only in a rapidly growing materialistic society, such as America, if America ended its racial order, reckoned with its racism, promoted social equality, and instituted racial integration.

King came to believe that black people represented the moral conscience of America. Through the black freedom struggle, King believed that he could appeal to the rationality of white people. While this was not a new motif—W. E. B. Du Bois, of particular note, began his scholarly and intellectual career believing that white people were rational enough that one could appeal to their moral rationality in making the case to end racial domination—King believed his appeal was to get white people to do ‘‘God’s will’’ (Lewis 1993). Obviously, King knew and understood that a race problem existed in America, but he believed that the ‘‘essential goodness’’ of white people would lead them to accept black people as full citizens into the body politic. As the moral conscience of America, King called upon black people to commit to the protracted struggle against racial domination. From the church pulpit and through his public speeches, King urged black people to practice their human dignity and worth by not resorting to retaliatory action against white people for their racial violence. Consequently, King preached and practiced nonviolent direct action. King’s narrative was the establishment of a beloved community in which black and white peoples could live together in integrated racial unity. If, as King believed, the racial order could be overturned, then black people could achieve access to freedom, justice, and equality. However, the march of human events that led King into the broader struggles for economic justice, against the Vietnam War, and in solidarity with Third World peoples also led him to become disillusioned with America’s capacity to throw off the racial order.

A close examination of King’s thinking from 1965 to his assassination in 1968 will reveal that King was rethinking his earlier beliefs about the moral rationality of white people. During his last three years of life, King had seen the bloody beating on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama; the killing of black people in the Watts district of Los Angeles, California; the four little girls killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church; and black garbage workers in Memphis violently denied their human dignity and worth (Branch 2006).

King loved America deeply. He articulated a vision of hope and possibility in a country of extreme racial oppression, exploitation, and domination. Nevertheless, King believed that people in the United States had to move toward ‘‘fundamental structural changes in their values, economic and political structures, and leadership.’’ He believed that the race problematic could be solved if white people in America were to ‘‘yield to the mandates of justice’’ (King 1967b).

King did not live long enough to realize his dream of the beloved community. Over the last forty years, much cosmetic change has taken place in the social status of black people. There are more than nine thousand elected black officials in the United States. Approximately 60 percent are located in the American South. The black members of the U.S. House of Representatives comprise a critical voting bloc, and the one black member of the Senate, Barack Obama, has been elected president of the United States. Since 1965, black persons have been elected mayors of most of America’s major cities. Black individuals have served in high posts in U.S. presidential administrations, including two black secretaries of state. Some black persons have made notable strives in the corporate sector, including chief operating officers at AOL-Time Warner and Merrill Lynch. Three black persons from the entertainment industry have become billionaires—Oprah Winfrey, Robert Johnson, and Shirley Johnson. While we can conjecture that King would probably be proud of these and other notable individual achievements, he would, perhaps, note they have not lessened the levels of poverty and dispossession that continue to structure black everyday life inside the United States.

In the final analysis, it was inevitable that Obama would be compared to King. But we cannot place the burden of history on King, a man who spoke so eloquently to the black predicament in mid-twentieth-century America, to take up the cause of freedom, justice, and equality in the twenty-first century. King left a legacy upon which others can build. The unfinished work of transforming America rests with these times and with individuals who want to continue the struggle for King’s dream of the beloved community. Obama is faced with the dilemma of knowing that the dream has not been realized and the possibility that America has not matured enough to put aside the racial order. How did the race problematic play out in Obama’s quest to win the presidency?

The Race Problematic and the Presidential Candidacy of Barack Obama

The race problematic has been at play in presidential election cycles long before the use of the phrase ‘‘race card’’ gained currency in the public lexicon. In the Black Belt of the American South, racial demagoguery was employed by white politicians desiring to ‘‘outnigger’’ their opponents by trying to convince white voters that by voting for them rather than their opponents they could be assured that black people would be kept in their place and that nothing would be done to relax the racial order. In explicit terms, the use of the race problematic in presidential campaigns has been characterized as the ‘‘southern strategy’’ (O’Reilly 1995).

In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate, employed the southern strategy by making ‘‘law and order’’ the major thrust of his campaign because he believed black people, by employing political protest, were responsible for the ‘‘violence in the street.’’ Goldwater was opposed to and voted against all the major civil rights legislation of the era. (It is of particular note here that Hillary Rodham Clinton was then a ‘‘Goldwater Girl.’’) Goldwater’s southern strategy so concerned Lyndon Johnson, the 1964 Democratic presidential candidate, that Johnson asked the major civil rights leaders to halt all demonstrations until after the November elections. Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Martin Luther King of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Whitney Young of the National Urban League (NUL), and A. Philip Randolph, the noted labor organizer, agreed to do so because they thought such demonstrations might seal Goldwater’s victory. Only John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) refused to do so. Goldwater lost the 1964 election, in large measure, because Johnson received the majority of the white vote. This, however, was not the end of the southern strategy.

Richard Nixon employed the southern strategy in 1968 by declaring that liberalism, as represented by Hubert H. Humphrey, the Democratic candidate, was a ‘‘doctrine sympathetic to the excessive demands of blacks.’’ While Nixon has been more pronouncedly identified with the southern strategy, many presidents before Nixon and since have used it (O’Reilly 1995). Ronald Reagan did in his infamous 1980 speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in which he called for states’ rights. Once elected, among other racially charged decisions, Reagan decentralized community development programs. For a generation, community development programs had been central to infrastructural and civil society developments in black communities.

George H. W. Bush gave crime a black face by using the infamous Willie Horton ads against Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate, to frighten white people into believing that black men were going to rape and murder their women. Bush also employed the Nixon mantra against liberalism in order to consolidate the ranks of white conservatives.

Bill Clinton was more clever and perhaps more sinister than any other presidential candidate in his use of the southern strategy. In 1992, while enjoying the glowing support of the black political elite, Clinton was at once the arbiter of black folks’ interests and their paternalistic benefactor. Clinton had crafted for himself a portfolio that made him look quite anomalous as a white boy growing up in racist Arkansas, who could make the generic claim that ‘‘some of my best friends are black.’’ Clinton claimed to have regarded segregation as a sin. And, as well, he claimed to have admired Martin Luther King Jr.

However, during his 1992 presidential run, Clinton was determined to prove to white voters that, unlike Michael Dukakis, he was a strong prosecutorial governor. During the New Hampshire primary, Clinton returned to Arkansas to preside over the execution of one Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged black man. To prove, unlike Walter Mondale, he would not kowtow to Jesse Jackson, Clinton used the occasion of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition conference to blast Sister Soulja for suggesting that ‘‘if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people.’’ Jackson submitted that ‘‘the attempt to align me with her is an attempt to malign me with her.’’ James Carville, Clinton’s campaign manager, later admitted that ‘‘the campaign wanted to bait a prominent African American.’’ Jesse Jackson was certainly among the most prominent African Americans of the time. Clinton went on to win two terms as president. Not only did he manage to sustain the support of the black political elite, including Jackson’s, he also enjoyed the figurative status as ‘‘the first black president (O’Reilly 1995, pp. 413–14).

George W. Bush played the southern strategy in both of his presidential campaigns. Bush exploited the denigration of the liberal label to convince white conservatives to vote for him. Bush’s appeal was to the same racist tropes that had been used since the Goldwater and Nixon days. He also made a convincing case that he represented ordinary people because he was not endowed—despite the fact that he came from privilege, was a Yale and Harvard graduate, and the scion of the George H. W. Bush—with great intellect. In the final analysis, Bush’s notion of ‘‘compassionate conservatism’’ became a cloak to continue retrograde policies against the interest of people of color. Bush’s compassionate conservatism was on full display in his regime’s ineffectual response—or lack of response—to the Hurricane Katrina tragedy in New Orleans in 2005, in which many hundreds of black people died.

The southern strategy was employed by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Clinton’s wife, in her long-fought but failed bid to wrestle the Democratic nomination away from Obama. By all estimations, Clinton’s campaign was revitalized when she made a blatant appeal to white working people during the Pennsylvania primary by convincing them that Obama was an elitist. By appealing to the base racial instincts of rural white, conservative voters, Clinton validated the longstanding sociological understanding that the very political organization of the white working class was a racial project.

John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 contest, appropriated the themes used by Hillary Clinton. McCain employed the fallacy that Obama did not have the experience to be president. In addition, McCain attempted to make the case that a vote for Obama would be risky. During the September 26, 2008, debate, McCain repeatedly stated that Obama ‘‘just doesn’t understand.’’ The implication, of course, was that, as a black man, Obama does not have the capacity to grasp the nuances of U.S. foreign policy. This came from a man who chose as his vice presidential running mate a person, in Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin, who believed she had derived her ‘‘foreign policy experience’’ from Alaska’s proximity to Russia. (According to McCain insiders, Palin thought Africa was a country, and not a continent. Palin, they said, also could not identify Africa on the map.)

The Obama presidential candidacy was confronted with a long, engrained history in which the race problematic has played out in subtle and overt forms to convince a critical mass of white voters that it would not be in their interest to elect persons to the presidency whom they perceived to be to the left of the so-called American mainstream. Consequently, the two Democrats—Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton—to win the presidency over the last twenty-eight years were conservative.

We must recall that, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, conservatives fostered the idea that race no longer characterized the dominant human and social relations between black people and whites. The black middle class had aggregated to a measurable level. Civil rights gains had eclipsed any residual racial problems. Martin Luther King Jr. had been appropriated as a proper icon for conservative consumption. Race came to be discussed in metaphoric language: ‘‘the race card,’’ ‘‘driving while black,’’ ‘‘angry white men,’’ ‘‘affirmative action babies,’’ ‘‘quota queens,’’ and the like.

Barack Obama entered national politics at a time when it was perceived that the period of overt racist public statements and actions had passed from the scene and any residual cases of such were anomalies. Some white journalists even wondered aloud, ‘‘Is Obama the end of black politics?’’ (Bai 2008, pp. 34–55). This is the view that Obama accepted as a given. In his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama observed, ‘‘There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America’’ (Obama 2004). Two years later, in his book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, Obama rationalized the point:

In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America. As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe. (p. 274)

Obama believes that this rationale buttresses his view that ‘‘whatever preconceived notions white Americans may continue to hold, the overwhelming majority of them these days are able—if given the time—to look beyond race in making their judgments of people’’ (Obama 2006, p. 278).

Obama also believes that racial domination has receded enough that ‘‘white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America’’ (Obama 2006, p. 278). His optimistic and perhaps uncritical hope is that ‘‘even the most fair-minded of whites tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country’’ (Obama 2006, p. 295). But is Obama’s view hopeful or merely naive? Is he playing to the perverse politics that argues that America has arrived at a transracial or postracial era?

What we saw in the 2008 presidential election cycle indicated that the race problematic was played within the same old framework of the racial order, only with different conceptual usages. For example, with Hillary Clinton and John McCain, one did not have to convince whites to vote against Obama because he is black. All one needed to do was to make the case that he was inexperienced. One need not have argued that Obama did not understand the circumstances of the white working class because he was black. All one needed to do was to convince the white working class that Obama was an elitist, too aloof, and too professorial. No matter how the framing or spinning was done, subliminally, it would come out in racial terms. If Obama was perceived as inexperienced and elitist, then the message was that he was an inexperienced and elitist black man. And, as McCain attempted to do, if the racial framing was not palpable, then the argument would be to make Obama a ‘‘socialist’’ and a ‘‘redistributionist,’’ and to charge him with ‘‘palling around with terrorists.’’

Unmistakably, out on the political hustings, Obama self-identified as a black man. Therefore, he is not naive about how black males are stereotyped and phenotyped in American culture. He must know, intuitively at least, that he is and will be burdened with all those negative characterizations and invectives that color the place of black males in American society: ‘‘Black males are violent, angry, shiftless, and prone to sexual obsessions for white women’’ and the like. Moreover, despite his racial hybridity and a biography that is unframed by a history of racial subordination, the narrative from which he spoke was not untouched by the experiences of black people writ large. The nature of America’s racial order did not and will not permit Obama to forget or obscure that he is black. Some whites may not sense that Obama carries a racial grievance, as it were, but they are not comfortable that Obama’s very being reminds them that he is black. And, while many whites might view Obama as an exemplar of American success, this does not necessarily translate into their desire to have him regarded as ‘‘the leader of the free world.’’ Given the entire history of black subordination in this part of the world, that would be a bit absurd.

Though Obama has not presented himself as a deracialist, he does believe that ‘‘an emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn’t just good policy, it’s also good politics’’ (Obama 2006, p. 293). He believes that past public policies shaped in universal terms have worked to bring black people into the American mainstream and will work in the future. Obama observes:

When I look at what past generations of minorities have had to overcome, I am optimistic about the ability of this next generation to continue their advance into the economic mainstream. For most of our recent history, the rungs on the opportunity ladder may have been slippery for blacks; the admittance of Latinos into firehouses and corporate suites may have been grudging. But despite all that, the combination of economic growth, government investment in broad-based programs to encourage upward mobility, and a modest commitment to enforce the simple principle of nondiscrimination was sufficient to pull the large majority of blacks and Latinos into the socioeconomic mainstream within a generation. (Obama 2006, p. 295)

Obama was undeterred from this optimism. His candidacy was built on the belief that he is just the right person and the right voice to use the presidency to complete the work of moving black people, Latinos, and other oppressed minorities into the American socioeconomic mainstream.

Obama was consistent in guarding against any detraction from his broader mission. In response to the national media’s fury over what was interpreted to be racially incendiary speeches by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ and delivered a nationally televised speech in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 2008. Obama attempted to lay bare his concerns about Rev. Wright within the context of how the United States had handled the problem of race. Obama was sensitive to the implications that, since Rev. Wright was his pastor, he must have agreed with his statements. In some way, while the speech could be considered a ‘‘compromise,’’ Obama did place in some critical relief that the problem of race must be understood in historical terms and that people in the society brought different perspectives to what they experienced. Obama declared that Jeremiah Wright ‘‘expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America’’ (Obama 2008a, pp. 218–19).

Obama wants to be identified with the view that he will not employ race to formulate and implement public policy. In his July, 14, 2008, speech to the national convention of the NAACP, Obama said: ‘‘If I have the privilege of serving as your next president, I will stand up for you the same way that earlier generations of Americans stood up for me-by fighting to ensure that every single one of us has the chance to make it if we try’’ (Obama 2008b, p. 3). In a Kingian sense, Obama made clear that to stand up for such a principle ‘‘means removing the barriers of prejudice and misunderstanding that still exist in America. It means fighting to eliminate discrimination from every corner of our country. It means changing hearts, and changing minds, and making sure that every American is treated equally under the law’’ (Obama 2008b).

Most observers will agree that Obama has said and done everything reasonable to convince doubtful whites they should not be worried about how he would perform as the nation’s first black president. His selection of Senator Joe Biden of Delaware should have made that message unequivocally clear. Senator Biden has been in the U.S. Senate for thirty years. He is a moderate Catholic who has represented the values of the white working class in his native state of Pennsylvania and his adopted state of Delaware. Biden also has longstanding foreign policy credentials from his leadership on the Senate foreign affairs committee.

Yet, during the rather intense Democratic primaries and caucuses, Hillary Rodham Clinton ventured that Obama was not prepared to take the proverbial 3:00 AM telephone call announcing some national emergency, and Kentucky Republican Congressman Geoff Davis questioned Obama’s lack of preparedness to handle nuclear policy, saying, ‘‘That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button’’ (Antosca 2008). After Clinton conceded that she had lost her bid for the nomination, one of her ardent supporters, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, declared, ironically, that she would not support Obama because he was elitist. In 2000, Forester de Rothschild married Sir Evelyn Rothschild of the famed British banking family, the CEO of the worldwide holding company EL Rothschild. Forester de Rothschild then threw her support to John McCain (Frederick 2008).

The cover of the New Yorker magazine of July 21, 2008, featured Barack and Michelle Obama celebrating with a fist bump in the Oval Office in front of a portrait of Osama bin Laden and an American flag burning in the fireplace. Michelle Obama is portrayed as a militant radical with a bushy Afro hairstyle and an AK47 hanging from her back. Barack Obama is portrayed in full Muslim garb. In response to public reaction, the New Yorker’s editor declared that the cover was ‘‘a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right wing critics have tried to create.’’1 However, the cover pointed to the fact that even in white high culture, the race problematic plays out in blatant offensive ways. In September 2008, Georgia Republican Congressman Lynn Westmoreland described the Obamas as ‘‘uppity’’ because they did not display the characteristic subservience that some whites still expect black people to exhibit.

Even as Obama attempted to overcome the blatant messaging to his race and his fitness to be president, he still had to contend with the perception that he was Muslim. Although Obama stated in many venues that he is a Christian, he was unable to shake the perception that he is Muslim. On September 18, 2008, a Pew Center for Research survey found that 19 percent of McCain supporters said that Obama was a Muslim. Among white voters, 17 percent of those who have not completed college said Obama was a Muslim. Among white college graduates, 7 percent said Obama was a Muslim (Pew Research Center 2008). If Obama had lost his bid for the presidency, it would probably have been, in some measure, because his failure to prevent the perception that he is a Muslim ‘‘de-Americanized’’ him.

Obama overcame the ‘‘Bradley effect,’’ a phenomenon named for Tom Bradley, the first black mayor of Los Angeles, California, who ran for governor of California in 1982. In the gubernatorial race, every poll indicated that Bradley would win. He did not. It was determined that many white voters, who were polled, lied and said they would vote for Bradley. On the day of the election, the white support for Bradley, as indicated in the polling, did not materialize. During the last two months of the 2008 presidential campaign, it was widely speculated that the Bradley effect would be at play. According to the Pew Center for Research survey, ‘‘less educated white voters are nearly as likely as white college graduates to say that many will not support Obama because he is black—42 percent vs. 47 percent.’’ Nearly 20 percent of whites polled also believed Obama is a Muslim.

Obama received 43 percent of the white vote on November 4, 2008. Comparatively, Obama received the second-highest percentage of the white vote for Democratic candidates in the last ten presidential election cycles. Jimmy Carter received 47 percent of white vote in 1976, and Bill Clinton received 43 percent of the white vote in 1996. The black vote was a record 13 percent of the national electorate. Obama received 95 percent of the black vote, higher than any Democratic candidate in the last ten election cycles. The 67 percent of the Latino=Hispanic vote that went to Obama was the third-highest in the last ten presidential election cycles. At 62 percent, the Asian vote for Obama was the highest in the last ten presidential election cycles. Equally important, the effort to paint Obama as a Muslim faded in the 78 percent of the Jewish vote that Obama garnered.

Obama also beat McCain in critical cohorts across the national electorate. Obama carried 56 percent of women’s vote and 49 percent of men’s vote. McCain received 48 percent of men’s vote. Obama beat or drew even with McCain in every age cohort except that sixty or older. Obama’s highest percentage of the vote in the age category came from voters ages eighteen to twenty-nine. Among this cohort, Obama received 66 percent of the vote. In the education category, Obama beat McCain in every cohort. Most notably, Obama received 63 percent of the vote from persons who are not high school graduates. Among voters in big cities, Obama received 70 percent of the vote. From voters in small cities, Obama received 59 percent of the vote. He received 50 percent of the suburban vote, which has gone to Republican candidates in eight of the last ten election cycles. In the family income category, Obama beat McCain among voters earning under $15,000 and among voters earning $15,000–29,999, $30,000–49,999,

$75,000–99,999, and $200,000 and more. McCain beat Obama by 1 percentage point among the $50,000–74,999 cohort. Obama and McCain evenly split the vote among the $100,000–200,000 cohort. In the geography category, Obama won majorities in the Midwest, Northeast, and West. McCain won the South.

Along with winning the overwhelming vote of black voters, Latino= Hispanic voters, voters under the age of thirty, and a pivotal share of the white vote, Obama made inroads among critical swing voters, including suburbanites, independents, and Catholics. He also won the upper southern states of North Carolina and Virginia and the southern exceptional state of Florida.

Obama was right all along: people wanted and needed change. Going into the election, nearly nine in every ten persons thought the country was on the wrong track. Obama received 89 percent of that vote. Especially telling, among white voters earning less than $50,000 a year, Obama received 52 percent of their vote. And in Ohio, the home state of the McCain caricature Joe the Plumber, six in ten voters called the economy the most important issue. Obama received a majority of their vote, and he won Ohio. Similar results occurred in Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where, as in Ohio, white working-class voters were expected to reveal their true racial sentiments on Election Day and vote against Obama.

Through it all, Obama succeeded in not allowing his Democratic and Republican opponents to bait him into morphing into the archetypical angry black man. Obama knew that if he was to win enough white votes to defeat John McCain, then he had to be careful in his utterances and his messaging. In many ways, Obama won the presidency because he remained the racially ambiguous candidate. Like the image of Martin Luther King Jr., Obama had to be enough of a blank slate to become an acceptable political icon for the comfort of whites. Obama’s victory was transformative. It crossed the objective boundaries of race, class, creed, and national identity.

Conclusion

Hillary Clinton said that she appealed to race because the polling data implied that it was salient (Hacker 2008). During the Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, polls showed that 15 to 20 percent of white voters said that race was indeed a factor in their vote (Hacker 2008). Yet Barack Obama overcame the appeal to the saliency of race. He enjoyed an historic turnout among black voters, 43 percent of the white vote, and 67 percent of the Latino= Hispanic vote. Obama overcame the Bradley effect, and on November 4, 2008, he was elected the 44th President of the United States.

Barack Obama is the first black person to accomplish this achievement in the history of the American polity. By any measure, given the long, draconian racial ordeal suffered by African people inside the United States, his victory is momentous for all the obvious reasons. His is a victory for all the storied virtues that have defined and shaped the American idea. In our lifetime, a black person was able to overcome the fallacy of inferiority and the dreadful racial stereotypes and phenotypes to speak a new and different truth to the American body politic. Some will argue that Obama’s victory will mean an end to black grievance. Others will argue that a revolution has occurred and the color line has ended. And, still others will declare that Martin Luther King’s narrative has been manifested and that his dream is now a reality.

As we rejoice in Obama’s transformative victory, vigilance must be the watchword. The racial order is still in place, Obama has not transcended race, and we have not achieved postraciality. Equally so, we must recognize that democracy is a contested ideological commodity, requiring a fierce urgency to imagine an America that is only possible within the lived experiences of everyday people. We must remember the past in order to understand that Barack Obama has arrived at this historic epoch through the crucibles of colonialism, the middle passage, slavery, racial segregation, and millions of ravaged black bodies and souls.

Note

1. See www.charlierose.com.