The Corporate Media Is Shamelessly Pretending Racism Died When Obama Got Elected

There were early indications that corporate media coverage of Barack Obama’s candidacy would be squirm-inducing, putting on display the elite (mainly white) press corps’ murky ideas about race much more than any straightforward reckoning of black Americans’ situation or what an Obama presidency might mean for their concerns.

Journalists were sometimes embarrassingly frank about how they interpreted Obama’s blackness and what they hoped his success might mean. “No history of Jim Crow, no history of anger, no history of slavery,” declared NBC’s Chris Matthews (1/21/07). “All the bad stuff in our history ain’t there with this guy.” “For many white Americans, it’s a twofer,” opined the New Republic (2/5/07). “Elect Obama, and you not only dethrone George W. Bush, you dethrone [Al] Sharpton, too.” (See Extra!, 3–4/07.)

Looking to find parallels for the “stuff” they did like, journalists turned to fiction, as when Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, 10/27/08) alleged that voters “decided they liked Obama when he reminded them more of Will Smith than Jesse Jackson,” or when CNN (6/22/08) told viewers that Michelle Obama “wants to appear to be Claire Huxtable and not Angela Davis.”

The fondest hope seemed to be that an Obama victory (if not his strong candidacy alone) would absolve us of any need to talk about racism any more. Newsweek’s Howard Fineman (5/14/08) wrote that, in announcing his run for office, Obama was making a statement: that his candidacy would be the exclamation point at the end of our four-century-long argument over the role of African-Americans in our society. By electing a mixed-race man of evident brilliance, moderate mien and welcoming smile, we would finally cease seeing each other through color-coded eyes.

It’s not clear if Fineman meant Obama said that exactly, or if it was just implied by the way he “radiat[ed] uplift and glorious possibility.” Alas, he continued: “Well, that argument did not end. He and we were naive to think it would.”

Of course, “we” didn’t all imagine that a nonwhite man running for president would mean an end to racism; that belief seems endemic only in a press corps with a myopic understanding of how racial inequality works.

Thus Fineman lamented, “far from eliminating racial thinking from politics,” Obama’s campaign actually drew attention to the subject—in part because Obama let the Finemans of the world down by having a “message” that was “race-aware, if not race-based.”

Fineman, like many pundits, seemed to think that acknowledging the distinct experiences faced by people of color is tantamount to claiming these differences trump all other factors in life. Talking about race equals harping about race, and, well, that’s being racist, isn’t it? The goal is to be “post- racial,” which seems to mean maintaining that racial differences have no impact, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

For some, last November 4 saw the disappearance of racial inequity in America (“Promised Land: Obama’s Rise Fulfills King’s Dream”—Oklahoman headline, 1/19/09), and with it the need for any countervailing measures.

Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg (Chicago Tribune, 1/22/09) suggested that “opponents of racial quotas and other champions of colorblindness on the right should be popping champagne,” not to mention “rubbing Barack Obama in [the] faces” of all those foreign “finger-waggers eager to lecture . . . America about race and tolerance.”

For those who don’t see racial inequity playing out every day in disparate joblessness, incarceration or mortality rates, the presence of a brown-skinned man in the White House means there’s no more structural work to be done; those struggling from now on have no excuse.