The racist comments of L. A. Clippers owner, Donald Sterling, and now his lifetime ban from any affiliation with the NBA, have captured America’s attention, including President Obama’s.
The ban is a decisive statement about the consequences of overt racism in today’s America.
But we should not think for one minute it means we live in a “post-racism” America.
“Post-racism,” a term even President Obama likes to use, is another name for “colorblindness.”
“Colorblindness” has been the basis for several successful court challenges to Affirmative Action such as the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding a voter-approved law in Michigan banning the use of racial preferences in higher education admissions.
Treat everybody equally, colorblindness or post-racism says. The playing field is now level. No preferential treatment for anyone. Equal opportunity rules.
It sounds reasonable, a path to a non-racist America, except for two major hiccups.
One is that the playing field being level doesn’t solve the problem. Let me use an analogy.
Let’s say you sponsor a mile race for kids that is open to everyone regardless of color…except the white kids have already run three laps. So they win even though everyone has an equal chance to be in the race.
That is the problem Affirmative Action tries to remedy. It’s called present advantages/disadvantages because of past discrimination. Colorblindness pretends like no such advantages and disadvantages still exist, but they do and we know they do.
The other hiccup re this post-racism era we are supposed to be living in is the fact that we all know that condemnation of public racism doesn’t eliminate private racism still at work in our society.
Cliven Bundy, the Nevada racist rancher who was in the news until Sterling pushed him aside, is a perfect example. His racism runs so deep he doesn’t even see it in himself. And he is not alone.
Which brings me to my primary reason for writing. I want to recommend a book by Ian Haney Lopez, Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. The title tells it all: Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.
This is the most important book about the moral problem of racism and its continuing effects on our collective life I have ever read. It should be read by every American. In future Blogs I will discuss some of what he says.
For now it is enough to say that anyone who reads his book will see how utterly naive it is to believe colorblindness is a path to racial justice or that we now live in a post-racism America, Donald Sterling suffering the consequences of his public racist remarks notwithstanding.
