Embodying the White Racial Frame: The (In)Significance of Barack Obama

INTRODUCTIONThe victory of Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election marked a significant historic moment in the United States. In a nation founded upon, and owing much of its economic growth and prosperity to the instimtion of racialized slavery, the election of the first African American president was a powerful symbolic challenge to a long and violent history of racial oppression and white supremacy. Immediately after Obamas election, within both popular and scholarly discourse, claims that his election signified a post-racial America emerged. Even among commentators who didn't go so far as to suggest that racial inequality or racism were now a thing of the past, Barack Obama's election was hailed as evidence of the decreasing relevance of racism in the fabric of our society. In support of this assertion, many commentators pointed to the fact that Obama received widespread support from whites, without which his victory would not have been possible. Yet the systemic racial inequality that characterized the United States social structure on November 4th 2008, did not disappear, or even lessen because of the election results. How then, as social scientists and public policy analysts, do we reconcile a symbolic racial victory in American politics and the resulting rhetoric surrounding it, which declares this victory as indicative of racial progress, with the persistent and deep structural racial inequalities that characterize the United States? Herein we suggest that, in fact, these phenomenon are not incompatible, but are instead deeply, and dangerously connected.As Joe Feagin (2000) has documented, the United States, in all its major instimtions, is characterized by racism and racial inequality. As a result of a history and legacy of legallyconstructed and -enforced racial oppression, deep structural inequalities permeate U.S. society today (Bell, 2000; Harris, 1993; Haney Lopez, 2006; Moore, 2008). The United States is the most residentially racially segregated country in the world, and this geographical segregation (which is the result of historical and contemporary legal, political and economic racist practices) corresponds to severe structural economic inequality (Conley, 2009; Jargowsky, 1997; Massey and Denton, 1993; Bell, 2000; Oliver and Shapiro, 2006). The history of racism, com- bined with contemporary structural inequalities affects nearly every facet of American society. Education in the K-12 system is as segregated and unequal in many instances as it was preBrown v. Board of Education1 (Kozol, 1992; Lewis, 2003; Orfield and Eaton, 1996). People of color are under-represented in higher education and historically white educational institutions remain demographically disparate and ideologically organized around white norms, making them fundamentally white institutional spaces in which students of color struggle to perform to their full capabilities (Feagin, Vera and Imani, 1997; Moore, 2008). Furthermore African Americans are vastly over-represented in jails and prisons and under the authority of the ever expanding criminal justice system (Davis, 2003; Glover, 2009; Tonry, 1995). Within such a clearly structurally unequal society, where does the suggestion of post-racialism or a declining significance of racial inequality come from?At least part of the answer to this question lies, we suggest, within a changing terrain of racial politics and ideology that emerged as dominant in the post-civil rights era. In reaction to the dramatic challenges of the Civil Rights Movement to the explicitly white racist structure and ideology of the United States, a new ideological framing of race emerged as dominant. The new post-civil rights ideological and discursive frame seemingly incorporates civil rights conceptions of color-blindness, equality and democracy, yet covertly protects white privilege, power, and wealth by rhetorically divorcing these concepts from the structural realities of racial inequality (Bell, 1987, 1992). …