The Ruse of Postracial America

It's ironic that in the same week that ESPN aired The Ghosts of Ole Miss, a documentary about the University of Mississippi riot surrounding the integration of the first black student, contemporary Ole Miss students tossed out racial slurs over the re-election of President Obama. New York Times contributor Steven Hahn parses their reaction in the context of the idea of postracialism in the Obama age. Perhaps the idea itself is a myth.

By the early 20th century the message was clear: black people did not belong in American political society and had no business wielding power over white people. This attitude has died hard. It is not, in fact, dead. Despite the achievements of the civil rights movement, African-Americans have seldom been elected to office from white-majority districts; only three, including Mr. Obama, have been elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction, and they have been from either Illinois or Massachusetts.

The truth is that in the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black officeseekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim -- in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president -- is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors.

But the coordinated efforts across the country to intimidate and suppress the votes of racial and ethnic minorities are far more consequential. Hostile officials regularly deploy the language of "fraud" and "corruption" to justify their efforts much as their counterparts at the end of the 19th century did to fully disenfranchise black voters.

Read Steven Hahn's entire piece at the New York Times.

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