Chapter 1: Are We Post Racial Yet?

The presidency of Barack Obama defies simple analyses of racial progress in America. At precisely the same moment that a black man leads the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, African Americans and Latinos are grappling with their greatest loss of wealth in modern U.S. history. With ties to Islam and the Ivy League, Obama, the son of an immigrant Kenyan father and midwestern white mother, is the unquestioned and popular leader of a broad-based multiethnic coalition. And as we reflect on his historic electoral victory, we can’t help but wonder what Martin Luther King Jr., would have thought of an America that elects a black man to lead it but still fails to graduate over one-quarter of its young black men from high school.

So what is to be made of this conundrum?  Was “the last racial barrier in American politics”  swept away by Obama’s election as some pundits have suggested, ushering in, finally, the nation’s long-overdue post racial phase? Or, have Americans merely watched one remarkably gifted and fortunate person of color vault spectacularly over a wall, and concluded, mistakenly, that the wall is no longer there?  And, just as important, what does a black man’s success have to do with the growing Latino and Asian Pacific communities, particularly at a time when immigration has emerged as a preeminent civil rights issue and is fueling a stark demographic transformation that by the year 2042 will result in a new American majority in which people of color outnumber whites?

This book seeks to address the issue of race and the future of the United States and to illustrate why one depends on the other. In the midst of an epic financial crisis, dealing squarely with the question of racial justice, and narrowing significantly the gap between the affluent and the poor, is the only way America gets out of its jam—and stays out.

Racial justice was once the nation’s rallying cry, and social movements in the 1950s and 1960s went to work tearing down codified discrimination that blocked—by force of law—the path to full citizenship for people of color.  Racial “equality” is not the same as racial “equity.”   As a result of the antidiscrimination laws, people of color can, in theory at least, buy a home anywhere. But here’s the rub: most blacks can’t afford to buy in predominantly white neighborhoods, and even if they can, they are unlikely to be able to sign a comparable home loan. So an equity framework addresses race-based challenges by advancing policies and practices that consciously ask who might be left behind and crafting approaches that will include all.  As one of us has written (and all three of us agree), “Equal-rights legislation is rendered hollow without policies that comprehensively address those practical barriers to economic and social parity.  Equity, in essence, makes real the promise of equality.” (Blackwell, 2007: 245).  
 
This book does not abandon racial justice as a concept—it still maintains a currency and relevance—but  equity more precisely describes the modern-day challenge of expanding opportunity in America.