The Post-Postracial Presidency

Lots of people agreed. Everyone from Newsweek to the New York Times commended Obama for his “‘post-racial’ approach” and the manner in which he “transcended race.” Even George Will cooed about the political implications of the Obama’s “transcendence of confining categories.”

Yet Obama was never as post-racial as advertised. Despite its charms, Obama’s first memoir, Dreams from My Father, is filled with racialist moments–from his attraction to Jeremiah Wright’s church to the admission that he once broke up with a girlfriend because she was white. Even during the presidential campaign, Obama would occasionally lapse into race-consciousness. The week before the South Carolina primary, the first contest with a substantial number of black voters, he worked a direct reference to Malcolm X into his stump speech, telling predominantly black audiences, “That’s what they do. They try to bamboozle you, hoodwink you.”

During the presidential campaign, Obama made noise about how McCain and Republicans were going to attack him for his race. After the McCain campaign ran its “Celebrity” ad, suggesting that the Democratic nominee was famous for being famous, like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, Obama suggested that the ad was a racial provocation. “What they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” he said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.” At an earlier rally, Obama was even more explicit: “They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

It was a successful strategy, and when the Reverend Joseph Lowery used the benediction at Obama’s inauguration to pray, “We ask You to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right,” people laughed, thinking it was a charmingly homespun tribute to the end of the race issue.

But the first black president has been anything but postracial as chief executive. His first major piece of legislation, the $800 billion stimulus bill attached racial considerations to some of its largesse. In February, Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, said in a speech to Justice Department employees that America is “a nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing race. Obama disavowed Holder’s choice of words, but later told the New York Times, “We’re oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race until there’s some sort of racial flare-up or conflict. We could probably be more constructive in facing up to sort of the painful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.” When a vacancy opened on the Supreme Court, Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor without even pretending that she was the most impressive liberal legal mind available. Her primary qualification was her “life experience” which made her a “wise Latina.”

Another of Obama’s hires was now-departed Van Jones as the “green jobs czar.” Jones was forced to spend more time with his family because he showed sympathy for a group which believes that the Bush administration was complicit in 9/11. But Jones’ background as a community organizer and radical environmentalist was just as disturbing. He founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which made a business out of launching race-based complaints against the San Francisco police department in the late 1990s. Shortly before Obama appointed him, Jones explained environmental racism thus: “White polluters and white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities because they don’t have a racial-justice frame.”

Obama’s Justice Department has also been quite keen on racial justice. The president’s budget requested an 18 percent increase for the department’s civil rights division for the express purpose of hiring more lawyers to work the racial discrimination beat. During the Bush administration, the office had shied away from the blanket pursuit of racial discrimination law, choosing to tackle individual discrimination cases as they arose and focusing on other kinds of crime, including human trafficking and religious discrimination. Holder told the New York Times that the civil rights division was now “getting back to doing what it has traditionally done.” Namely, sussing out “disparate impact” violations in housing, employment, lending, voting rights, and other areas of American life.

Obama’s nominee to head the division, Tom Perez, is certainly preoccupied with race and quotas. (He worked in the civil rights division during the Clinton years before entering Maryland state politics.) In 2003, as a councilman in Montgomery County, Perez pushed for quotas. “We have made great strides in attracting minorities to the county within the last 30 years,” Perez said at the time. “We need a workforce in the Department of Fire and Rescue Services that reflects the diversity of the county.”

The reason Perez was so concerned was that 46 of the 48 members of the fire department’s recruiting class that year were white. The class was chosen based on an aptitude test, in which the white applicants scored highest. “These statistics are unacceptable,” Perez said. “But I have confidence that we can get back up to the original number of minorities in the department, and develop a comprehensive plan to recruit diversity.”

Three years later Perez published an article in the University of Maryland’s Journal of Health Care Law and Policy in which he argued for a more rigorous quota system as part of medical school admissions. Perez’s stated goal was not just to buttress the current affirmative-action regime, but to erect a new system of quotas should the diversity rationale eventually run afoul of the Supreme Court. He proposed an “access” rationale: Since minority doctors tend to serve minority patients, medical school quotas weren’t just important for would-be minority doctors. Not having quotas for minority medical school students would create a disparate impact for all minority patients.

Perez’s confirmation has lingered in the Senate, but the acting head of the civil rights division, Loretta King, has already filed 10 amicus briefs in private discrimination lawsuits. In July, she sent a memo to all federal agencies calling for more aggressive enforcement of Title VI regulations–forbidding discrimination by federal agencies. King encouraged “each federal agency to examine anew all aspects of its compliance program.” The highest-profile matter to come across her desk is the case of three New Black Panther party members who were charged with voter intimidation at a polling place in Philadelphia last November. (Video surfaced of the thugs harassing voters and brandishing a weapon.) After consulting with another senior official at Justice, King decided to downgrade the charges against the Black Panthers.

Obama’s most celebrated presidential moment of race consciousness came this summer when he eagerly injected himself into the dispute between Harvard’s Skip Gates and the Cambridge police department. Asked about the incident in which a white police officer arrested Gates, Obama said the officer had acted stupidly and added, “What I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.” After the officer in question was defended by numerous black colleagues, a “beer summit” ensued with Obama, Gates, the officer, and Joe Biden–heretofore totally unconnected with the affair–called in as racial ballast.

Shortly before the summit, Obama had spoken to the NAACP, where he claimed that while discrimination may be at an all-time low, it’s still a terrible burden:

It would be nice if our first -postracial president would begin the postracial phase of his presidency.

Jonathan V. Last is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.