Youth and the Myth of a Post-Racial Society under Barack Obama

With the election of Barack Obama, many have argued that the social state will be renewed in the spirit and legacy of the New Deal but the punishing racial state and its vast complex of disciplinary institutions will, if not come to an end, at least be significantly reformed.[1] From this perspective, Obama's presidency not only represents a postracial victory but also signals a new space of postracial harmony.In assessing the Obama victory, Time magazine columnist Joe Kline wrote, 'It is a place where the primacy of racial identity -and this includes the old Jesse Jackson version of black racial identity -has been replaced by the celebration of pluralism, of cross-racial synergy'.[2] Conservative commentator George Will suggested Obama was just another 'liberal on a leash' whose election win would 'bring down the curtain on the long running and intensely boring melodrama "Forever Selma," starring Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton'.[3]Obama won the 2008 election because he was able to mobilize 95% of African Americans voters, more than two-thirds of all Latino voters, and a large proportion of young voters under the age of thirty.At the same time, what is generally ignored in the exuberance of this assessment is that the majority of white Americans voted for the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket.What is also forgotten is the racism that permeated the McCain-Palin campaign, the racial furor expressed over Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and the rampant rise in white supremacist hate groups just before and after Obama's election.Of course, there are also the more obvious forms of domestic institutional racism ranging from the racial gap in income and wealth to an apartheid-based prison system.While 'post-racial' may mean less overt racism, the idea that we have moved into a postracial period in American history is not merely premature -it is an act of willful denial and ignorance.Paul Ortiz puts it well in his comments on the myth of postracialism:The idea that we've moved to a post-racial period in American social history is undermined by an avalanche of recent events.Hurricane Katrina.The U.S. Supreme Court's dismantling of Brown vs. Board of Education and the resegregation of American schools.The Clash of Civilizations thesis that promotes the idea of a War against Islam.The backlash facing immigrant workers.A grotesque prison industrial complex.[Moreover] ... while Americans were being robbed blind and primed for yet another bailout of the banks and investment sectors, they were treated to new evidence from Fox News and poverty experts that the great moral threats facing the nation were greedy union workers, black single mothers, Latino gang bangers and illegal immigrants.[4]Missing from the exuberant claims that Americans are now living in a postracial society is the historical legacy of a neoconservative revolution, officially launched in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and its ensuing racialist attacks on welfare 'queens'; Bill Clinton's cheerful compliance in signing bills that expanded the punishing industries; and George W. Bush's 'willingness to make punishment his preferred response to social problems'.[5] In the last thirty

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