Obama is not a post-racial president

Shelby Steele notes the contradiction between Barack Obama's rhetoric of seeking a post-racialist America as he did in the 2004 speech that brought him to prominence in which he claimed that there was no black America and no white America and his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court as the ultimate in identity politics. She was chosen specifically because she was a Latina and, with her nomination, he could make racialist appeals to Hispanics across the country. Since her time in college she has embraced her Puerto Rican heritage and served as a campus activist demanding more Hispanics be admitted to Princeton and for a Hispanic professor to be hired. She is not a symbol of a post-racial America, but a sign that we are still in the era of minorities embracing victimhood and demanding affirmative action compensation from whites. She is a woman who is proud of her ethnic identity and has repeatedly since 1994 used the phrase of either "a wise woman" or a "wise Latina woman" in speeches to indicate who would make wiser decisions than a white man. If Obama was truly interested in getting beyond race, he would have picked someone for the Supreme Court who has demonstrated that he or she has gotten beyond race. As the New York Times contrasted the ideological paths yesterday of Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas, it is clear that only one of them has gone beyond race. And it wasn't the one who gave support to a group called "The Race."

As Steele writes,

The White House acknowledges that this now famous statement -- both racist and dim-witted -- was turned up in the vetting process. So we can only assume that the president was aware of it, as well as Judge Sotomayor's career-long claim that ethnicity and gender are virtual determinisms in judging: We need diversity because, as she said in her Berkeley lecture, "inherent physiological or cultural differences . . . make a difference in our judging." The nine white male justices who decided the Brown school-desegregation case in 1954 might have felt otherwise, as would a president seeking to lead us toward a new, post-racial society.

But of course "post-racialism" is not a real idea. It is an impression, a chimera that grows out of a very specific racial manipulation that I have called "bargaining." Here the minority makes a bargain with white society: I will not "guilt" you with America's centuries of racism if you will not hold my minority status against me. Whites love this bargain because it allows them to feel above America's racist past and, therefore, immune to charges of racism. By embracing the bargainer they embrace the impression of a world beyond racial division, a world in which whites are innocent and minorities carry no anger. This is the impression that animates bargainers like Mr. Obama or Oprah Winfrey with an irresistible charisma. Even if post-racialism is an obvious illusion -- a bargainer's trick as it were -- whites are flattered by believing in it.

But the Sotomayor nomination shows that Mr. Obama has no idea what a post-racial society would look like. In selling himself as a candidate to the American public he is a gifted bargainer beautifully turned out in post-racial impressionism. But in the real world of Supreme Court nominations, where there is a chance to actually bring some of that idealism down to earth, he chooses a hardened, divisive and race-focused veteran of the culture wars he claims to transcend.

Steele is too polite to say so, but it is clear that all that "post-racial" talk was just talk to appeal to white voters and get their support for Obama. When it came to a truly important decision that could have affected the nation's movement into a post-racial world, Obama played identity politics. Getting beyond race is a dream of white voters, but not of the man who sat for 20 years in Reverend Wright's church.