President Obama rejected the “post-racial” label that enchanted supporters in his 2008 campaign, as he warned that “complicated” race relations would not be resolved by his presidency.
“I never bought into the notion that by electing me, somehow we were entering into a post-racial period,” Obama told Rolling Stone in an interview released this week. “My view on race has always been that it’s complicated. It’s not just a matter of head – it’s a matter of heart. It’s about interactions.”
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In 2008, Obama offered his campaign as an opportunity “to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America,” in the tradition of the civil rights movement. He ended the speech by pointing telling people “where the perfection [of the union] begins,”
But Obama also warned against believing “that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle.”
His supporters and political analysts alike missed that part. “An element of Barack Obama’s success was always his use of the idealism implied in these questions as political muscle,” wrote Shelby Steele in the L.A. Times after Obama’s victory. “His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America — and then to have that vision define political decency.”
Obama maintains that the ideal is nearer. “I’ve seen in my own lifetime how racial attitudes have changed and improved, and anybody who suggests that they haven’t isn’t paying attention or is trying to make a rhetorical point,” he said in Rolling Stone. “When I talk to Malia and Sasha, the world they’re growing up with, with their friends, is just very different from the world that you and I grew up with.”
