Beyond Discrimination: Racial Inequality in a Post-Racist Era

Chapter 1. The End of “Race” as We Know It? Assessing the “Postracial America” Thesis in the Obama Era

39 Chapter 1    The End of “Race” as We Know It? Assessing the “Postracial America” Thesis in the Obama Era Rodney E. Hero and Morris E. Levy, with Benjamin Radcliff In his highly influential analysis of democracy in America, Alexis de Tocque­ ville ([1848] 1966, 475–76) contended that “democratic . . . peoples’ passion for equality is ardent, insatiable, eternal and invincible.” On the other hand, he also recognized the profound importance of and problems posed by race in American society. Tocqueville emphasized America’s liberal and civic republican political values. But his qualification for race identified what has recently been recognized as a powerful inegalitarian or hierarchical normative tradition that has provided justifications for racial-­ ethnic and other social differentiation, indeed stratification and inequality , in American politics (Smith 1997). It has been argued, on the other hand, that the post–civil rights era, especially as embodied and crystallized in the election of the first African American president, Barack Obama, has, in essence, ended race as we know it. Although this claim has been made especially forcefully in the presidential electoral arena, one of its general implications is that a broader displacement or replacement of the predominant role of race in American society by other factors or phenomena has occurred. Such other bases of social division are commonly viewed as fundamentally less averse than racial ones to core American values. This chapter complements scholarship addressing the alleged declining importance of race in other arenas of 40    Beyond Discrimination American politics but also advances such research in a distinctive way and brings unique evidence to bear. The major welfare reform legislation of 1996 (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act), for example, was, in President Clinton’s words, supposed to have “end[ed] welfare as we know it,” (Vobejda 1996, A01) and maybe it did. But part of the reason for reforming welfare was a subtext of race: the existing policy (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was linked, in the minds of the reform proponents, with race. According to one scholarly analysis, the ”poor became black” with the fuller inclusion of blacks in receipt of welfare benefits following civil rights legislation of the 1960s (Gilens 2003). The attainment of increased legal and formal equality for blacks regarding various governmental services was presumably an indicator of black advancement. However, that attainment, and more black inclusion as welfare beneficiaries , engendered a racialization of this policy, which had previously been viewed as largely nonracial in nature. Over time, there was a growing perception that blacks were disproportionately represented, and implicitly undeserving, beneficiaries of welfare; thus their heightened legal status was accompanied by attitudinal resentment toward them. Research on welfare from the 1960s up to the 1996 reforms consistently showed that states with larger black populations spent less on welfare, and research on the 1996 welfare legislation demonstrated that the reform did not remove the impact of racial factors long associated with this redistributive policy (Soss et al. 2001). The finding that ending welfare as we know it hardly diminished the influence of racial factors offers lessons for and suggests further reason to question claims that the 2008 election substantially changed, much less ended, race as we know it. The election of Obama and the various developments leading up to it have already generated an enormous amount of commentary and media attention, including blog discussions, editorials, articles, books, and so on. We can only begin to imagine how much more, and what, will be written, debated, and otherwise discussed about these and a host of related issues in the near and long-­ term future. Early on, the word postracial was popularized as a description of the rise and election of Obama (compare Lee 2011). Although its origins are a bit murky and its substantive accuracy dubious, the sheer frequency of its mention is striking. This prominence merits further reflection—and of a different sort from that it has already received. Here, we consider the postracial notion from two different vantage points: the role of race in elections and racial inequality in the economic sphere. Earlier scholarship that considers and conceptualizes the role of race in elections also illustrates the vagueness in the contemporary meaning and The End of “Race” as We Know It?    41 use of the concept “postracial.” The concept probably conflates or confuses as much as or more than it clarifies, but assessing its applicability to contemporary American society is significant...