David Roediger, a Marxist historian at U Illinois and one of the pioneers of "whiteness studies" analyzes the impact of the Obama victory and remains skeptical of the triumphalism of left, right and center, and cautions against appeals to "change everything, so that nothing may change."
By all accounts the election of an African-American president represents an important historical milestone in the US, but Roediger points to the deep structural inequities which affect Black communities and warns:
To think more precisely about the coexistence in the U.S. of such stark and deadly racial inequalities with the historic triumph of an African American presidential candidate requires that we recognize that racism is more than one thing and that we specify what has changed. The view that Obama heralds the end of race-thinking in the U.S. rests on a particular definition of racism, one that currently very much holds sway in U.S. politics and popular culture. Racism turns, on this view, on bad but disappearing individual attitudes, of the sort that can be measured by whether many or few voters act on those attitudes on election day, or even by the ratings among whites of Oprah Winfrey’s television shows or the sales of products Tiger Woods endorses. Deep structural inequalities may be considered unfortunate, but race is personal.
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My recent How Race Survived U.S. History would add that the tremendous influence of African and Latino popular culture, usually in the most highly marketed forms, leaves race seeming more and more a matter of choice and even taste to white young people who came to prefer Obama and his style.However, to chart such changes is also to note their limitations. Race is not a matter of choice for poor people of color in the U.S., who are often “illegal” in terms of immigration status or “in the system” of incarceration and its aftermath. Moreover, the politics of style which attracted white voters to Obama would have been greatly strained if his campaign also included straightforward plans to redress racial inequalities. The resonances of freedom movements by people of color inspired the Obama campaign, but those movements are in considerable disarray. The election therefore told us critical but by no means simple things about the present and future of race in the U.S.
Africana scholar Corey D. B. Williams offers a similar analysis:
The historic nature of Senator Obama’s campaign and election has been justly hailed as a signal event in American politics. Indeed, given the peculiar – to put it gently – history and character of Majoritarian Democracy in the United States coupled with the deep symbolic investments in the Office of the President, Senator Obama’s ascendancy to the nation’s highest political office will rightly be the subject of conversation and debate for many years to come.
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Along with a fundamental challenge and transformation of the formal mechanisms of politics – from a domestic policy that leaves citizens unprotected in the face of mounting economic devastation to an ideologically driven economic policy that privileges the wealthy over the needy to a foreign policy that fundamentally reinforces the dictates of empire to a virtually nonexistent environmental policy in the face of a planetary ecological crisis that threatens all of existence – there must be an equally dramatic reconfiguration of power between the American state and the American people.
Thus, while the nation and world breathes a justified sigh of relief, the searing words of Martin Luther King, Jr. serve as a forceful reminder that the work of a just democratic politics has only just begun: “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”
