Discriminations

Obama is already sending not-so-coded messages to the civil rights establishment that his election will not reduce the need, and his support, for continued race preference policies. As Gregory Rodriguez writes today:

A Barack Obama presidency could end the Iraq war, transform our national energy policy, revive America’s standing in the world -- but please don’t expect the first black man in the Oval Office to move us above and beyond the civil rights era. At least that’s what Obama himself suggested last Monday in his speech to the NAACP. In a campaign fueled by high expectations, Obama seemed to be trying to lower his audience’s hopes that the election of the first black president would be anything more than a symbolic milestone.

“Just electing me president doesn’t mean our work is over,” he told civil rights activists.

Obama was no doubt reacting to predictions, one of which I discussed recently here, that his success to date portends the “death of affirmative action.” In March the Boston Globe reported that

[l]eading opponents of affirmative action are increasingly seizing on Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s historic run for the presidency as proof that race-based remedies for past discrimination are no longer necessary.

All of this is particularly interesting given the enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy in some conservative quarters. Anti-affirmative-action activists Ward Connerly and Abigail Thernstrom, for instance, are seeing greater historical significance in an Obama victory than many Obama supporters themselves. To them, large numbers of white voters willing to vote for a black man signals a welcome sea change in whites’ attitudes toward blacks. And to them, that means that what they’ve been saying all along is right: Race-based policies designed to redress inequality and past discrimination have outlived their usefulness. That’s an idea many Democrats are loath to accept.

It hasn’t been that long since the Sharptons were hinting, and many pundits were predicting, riots in the streets of Denver if Obama were deprived of the nomination. Will there be similar blackmail threats about what will happen if Obama loses the election?

This is supposed to be the year when even the Democrats can’t lose a presidential election. If Obama does lose, will there be a single “civil rights activist” who will doubt that his loss must be attributed to continuing, pervasive white racism?