Obama's shunning response to the racism debate

The Los Angeles Times
September 21, 2009
Opinion
Gregory Rodriguez

The president is smart to simply refuse to talk about whether racism motivates his critics.

Barack Obama had no choice but to disagree with Jimmy Carter. Carter called some of Obama's most hysterical critics racist. But our first nonwhite president once again tried hard not to be sucked into a racial uproar. As much as he and his liberal allies like to declare that Americans need to hash out racial issues publicly, the subject of race can only damage his presidency. On Wednesday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs categorically declared that the president did not think the criticism directed at him and his policies was "based on the color of his skin." The next day, Obama declined to answer a reporter who asked again about Carter's remarks. Over the weekend, the president insisted that the "biggest driver" of the vitriol was distrust of government.I don't interpret Obama's refusal to engage as a sign of passivity. In fact, after half a century of talking about race until we're blue in the face (so to speak), the president's silence is one of many signs that he is showing us a new, post-civil-rights, post-affirmative-action way to deal with America's racial divide.The worst thing about affirmative action -- or "positive discrimination," as the Europeans accurately call it -- is that it seeks to turn racial and ethnic stigmas into socioeconomic advantages. Rather than seeking to mute or erase the significance of racial distinctions, affirmative action turned what was perceived as bad into good. It spread the fallacy that being black, brown or, in some cases, yellow (although I've never really met a yellow person) allows anyone to somehow sail through school, careers and life. That's a crock, but the rationale behind it was summed up in 1978 by Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in his partial dissent in the Bakke case: "I suspect that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it successful," he wrote. "To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible. In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.... And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently."Blackmun figured, or at least hoped, that we'd only have to live with this counterintuitive logic for a decade or so, but he was wrong. This isn't to say that affirmative action wasn't justified -- at least on some levels -- or that it didn't help anybody. But as much as it helped minorities climb into the upper middle classes, it also institutionalized a racial glass ceiling.

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