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SEVENTEEN An Affirmative Act? Barack Obama and the Past, Present, and Future of Race-Conscious Remedies CHERyL i. HARRiS The white liberal must affirm that absolute justice for the negro simply means, in the Aristotelian sense, that the negro must have his due. There is nothing abstract about this. It is as concrete as having a good job, a good education, a decent house and a share of power. It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits. But this is a day which demands new thinking and the re-evaluation of old concepts. A society that has done something special against the negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him to compete on a just and equal basis. . . . The white liberal must escalate his support for the struggle for racial justice rather than de-escalate it. —Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here, Chaos or Community? (1967) 90–91. On the night of the election news commentators effused over the historic nature of the Obama win: Despite the racial odds, a black man had been elected President of the United States. Moments later, in an interview with the same commentators, Obama’s campaign director and close 278 . CHERyL i. HARRiS advisor David Axelrod sincerely asserted that throughout the two years of the campaign, race had never been discussed, except in response to mediastoked controversy.1 Thus, at the same moment Obama was marked by race and declared to be (at least ostensibly) racially transcendent. In part this racial bipolarity was produced by the conflict between a history and reality shaped by race and the ascendancy of color-blindness—a racial ideology that espouses us to “get beyond race” and indeed, asserts that we already have. Of course, color-blindness was never really color-blind in its objective. Color-blindness was initiated to protect white racial power by changing the racial terms of the debate2 and creating a racial narrative unburdened by the taint of old-style segregation. Instead of defending racial hierarchy as legitimate, proponents of color-blindness insisted that racial inequality is produced by cultural dysfunction, not racial subordination.3 Indeed, race conservatives claimed that color-blindness represented a return to civil rights’ original intent, an assertion rhetorically underwritten by the selective appropriation of the words of Martin Luther King Jr. to oppose the very policies and programs he championed. The hope among progressives, and many black people in particular, was that Obama’s presidency might offer some resistance to the particularly strident form of color-blind racial ideology that had been enthusiastically embraced by successive Republican regimes and weakly contested by the Democratic opposition. The conservative project to install color-blindness as the reigning racial ideology focused on affirmative action in part because of liberal ambivalence about defending it. As the opening epigraph from Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrates , the liberal consensus on affirmative action accepted the premise that the pursuit of equality sacrificed merit. Yet as many including Obama have noted, merit is socially constructed in inherently unequal terms since it encodes white racial privilege and screens out talented and capable people of color. As de jure segregation retreated into the murky past, the failure to contest the racial preference conferred by existing merit standards opened the door to reframe affirmative action as a discriminatory regime that conferred unearned privileges on unqualified blacks and imposed disadvantage on whites.4 White racial privilege was disappeared under this account and racial inequality became precisely what equal opportunity delivered. As racial stratification was naturalized, race-conscious policies from school integration to voting rights were challenged or dismantled. National campaigns were launched to eliminate affirmative action through legislation, court action, or by whatever means necessary. The intensity of these efforts belied claims that affirmative action was irrelevant or dead and inadvertently revealed the challenge it posed to the racial status quo by threatening to disrupt settled expectations. [18.217.116.183] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 07:19 GMT) THE PAST AND fUTURE Of RACE REMEDiES . 279 This apprehension has only been heightened by Obama’s nearly trilliondollar economic rescue plan. Conservatives lost no time in invoking the stimulus package as the reason Obama should dispense with...

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