Getting beyond race is a national challenge
Barack Obama's attempt to "get beyond race" in his quest for the presidency has run aground, at least temporarily, by the publicity over the racist remarks of his pastor of 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Chicago. Obama is paying the price of not only his association but his undeniable acquiescence in the rants of a man who literally sees the world in black and white.
The contrast between the smooth veneer of Sen. Obama and the unbridled hatred of Rev. Wright, the man who brought Obama into church, married him and baptized his children, appears to be very great. But those who look beyond Obama's carefully crafted rhetoric to the race-conscious core that accepts the balkanization of Americans into warring and irreconcilable interest groups, or just plain factions, know that Obama's act was just that - an act.
It is certainly not surprising that Hillary Clinton should seek to make political capital on the heretofore "transcendent" black candidate but for more than the obvious reason that she has not moved beyond race (not to mention gender, class, age, sexual orientation, et cetera). It is because the whole Democratic Party, once dedicated to equality of income, has gone further down that road to equality of "lifestyles," according to which one's choices are good, or at least tolerable, as long as one feels good about them.
If there is not a special place in the Democratic Party for left-handed redheads born after 1960 who live in suburbia, it is only because nobody has thought of it yet; or, more to the point, no one has seen any political advantage in organizing people who fall into that category. To those who think that one's accidental membership in some demographic group trumps our common American citizenship, there is in principle no limit to the fragmentation of the American people.
As Naomie Emery, writing in the Weekly Standard, pointed out, Obama and Clinton have the common misfortune of running for president in the same year while each of them seeks to be the historic candidate, the former to be the first black president and the latter to be the first woman president. It is difficult enough for rivals for the same office to concede defeat, but it is particularly difficult when their claims are based upon a nonnegotiable issue like race or gender.
We can date the beginning of the corrupt practice of classifying the American people by race and gender with the resort to affirmative action (read: racial preference) in hiring, college admissions and contracting in the 1960s, and ultimately sanctioned by the United States Supreme Court in Fulilove v. Connecticut in 1980 (although encouraged by judicial winks and nods in the meantime). It became settled legal doctrine that members of groups who had suffered discrimination in the past were politically impotent and needed "heightened judicial scrutiny" because of those groups' "discrete and insular" status.
Fortunately, Americans dedicated to human equality fought back, as voters in several states, beginning with California in 1996, adopted measures that reinstated the original color-blind, non-preferential principles of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ward Connerly, a former regent of the University of California, continues to lead the fight, having won other victories in Washington and Michigan, and seeking another in Missouri this year.
But so powerful is the race preference faction that, while the people generally vote against it, leading politicians in both major political parties are reluctant to take it on. Sen. Bob Dole, running for president, ran away from Connerly's civil rights initiative 12 years ago, and Sen. John McCain, the current presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is doing the same in his home state of Arizona. And we have to add President George W. Bush to the list, for his Justice Department failed to oppose racial quotas in principle in two Supreme Court cases involving university admissions in Michigan.
Given these facts, it is clear that more people than Sen. Obama have failed to "get beyond race" in our politics. Democrats have sold their souls to racial preference in public policy, and Republicans have been the "me too" party for fear of losing the votes of members of racial minorities. The question in both cases is why.
It is the "elephant in the living room": the abandonment of the fundamental principle that "all men are created equal," either out of brazen opposition or cowardly calculation. Of course, whatever the motive, the effect is the same, so Americans who are not members of "discrete and insular minorities" suffer real discrimination (which Sen. Obama openly admitted), and the presumed beneficiaries of racial preference are patronized as if they were incapable of succeeding without biased outcomes.
Legal preference for any persons because of their race or gender simply cannot keep house with equal rights. That is why Martin Luther King Jr. famously called for persons to be judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." We will "get beyond race" in our politics only when we put more stock in our common humanity than in our accidents of birth.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Richard Reeb taught political science, philosophy and journalism at Barstow College from 1970 to 2003. He is the author of "Taking Journalism Seriously: ‘Objectivity' as a Partisan Cause" (University Press of America, 1999). He can be contacted at rhreeb@verizon.net.
