great black artist, or so-and-so great black literary giant. What remains unsaid, but which forms the background noise of all this annual praise for the triumphs of black Americans (or, at other times, Latinos and Latinas, Asian-Pacific Americans, or the continent’s indigenous persons), is the systematic oppression that marked the society at the time when most of their achievements transpired. In other words, even in the midst of crushing oppression these hearty souls managed to find a way out of no way, as the saying goes. But that hardly suggests that their singular achievements, even multiplied hundreds of times over, actually rendered the system any less oppressive for all the rest. Thus, Madame C.J. Walker managed to become a millionaire developing and selling beauty products to black women in 1911. This achievement, though of importance in the history of American entrepreneurship, and to the narrative of black success, nonetheless fails to alter the fact that, on balance, 1911 was not a good year to be black in the United States, Madame Walker notwithstanding. Though I am hardly so naïve as to suggest that nothing has changed since 1911, the point still holds: the triumph of individuals of color cannot, in itself, serve as proof of widespread systemic change.
Although it is possible that the political success of Barack Obama could serve to open the minds of whites as to the potentiality of effective black leadership, it is also possible that it might deepen the denial in which so much of the white public has been embedded for generations. And although Obama’s success has had a measurable effect on young men and women of color, who appear empowered by his example—and this could lead to greater levels of accomplishment for still more persons of color, thereby producing a ripple effect when it comes to collective racial uplift—it is also possible that this sense of pride may be stalled if Obama is unable to deliver on his promise of “Change We Can Believe In,” thanks to the exigencies of Washington politics. Long story short, what the rise of Obama comes to mean, regarding race or any other subject, remains to be seen.
But what we can say, without fear of contradiction, is that it does not signify, as some would have it, a fundamental diminution of institutional racism in the United States at present. Contrary to the proclamations of conservatives, both white and of color—such as Abigail Thern- strom and Ward Connerly, who have been among the chief critics and organized opponents of affirmative action programs since the mid-1990s—Obama’s ability to attract white votes (and even then, let us remember, a minority of those) hardly suggests that we can put away various civil rights remedies and proclaim opportunities to be truly open and equitable. That white America may desperately want Obama’s success to serve as the final nail in the political coffin of civil rights activism—and even the media seems to have evinced this hope, as with the August 2008 New York Times article that asked whether Obama marks the “end of black politics” altogether—hardly speaks to whether it should be used as that nail, or whether there is evidence to support the notion that his individual victories are proxies for institutional transformation.7
Though the evidence about our nation’s progress says something else altogether, it turns out that white folks have never paid much attention to the evidence, and so denial has long carried the day. This, of course, is no shock in 2009. After all, it is not only the age of Obama, but the age of Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington, Colin Powell, Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters, J-Lo, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Russell Simmons, P. Diddy, and any number of dizzyingly successful folks of color in the worlds of entertainment, sports, and politics. Hip-hop is, for most youth of whatever race, at least part of the sound track of their lives. With such apparent signs of progress, who can blame white folks for thinking the work has been done, and that it is now time to move on to other subjects, leaving the stale topic of racism in the dustbin of history?
Given such a transformation of popular culture as we have seen in the past few decades, it should hardly surprise us to read that according to a summer 2008 Gallup/ USA Today poll, more than three in four whites say that blacks have “just as good a chance as whites to get any job for which they are qualified” (a proposition with which fewer than half of African Americans agree). Likewise, it can’t be much of a shock to learn that 80 percent of whites polled say blacks have “just as good a chance as whites to get a good education,” while fewer than half of blacks agree. Or that 85 percent of whites claim blacks have “just as good a chance to get any housing they can afford,” while only 52 percent of blacks agree. Or that only about a third of whites accept the proposition that discrimination has played a major role in producing income disparities between whites and blacks.8 Or that, according to a survey for CNN and Essence magazine, only one in nine whites believe racial discrimination against blacks is still a very serious problem, while nearly four times that many say it’s not a serious problem at all.9 And all this, despite a July 2008 New York Times/CBS poll, in which seven in ten blacks said they had suffered a specific discriminatory incident (up from 62 percent who said this in 2000).10 No, there is nothing particularly surprising about any of this. The outward trappings of major transformative change appear to be everywhere, causing whites and blacks both, in the wake of Obama’s victory, to announce their hope and expectations that race relations will improve in coming years.11 So white denial (and perhaps even a bit from persons of color themselves) makes sense. It fits the visuals beamed into our living rooms, incomplete as they are.
But as predictable as this denial may be today—and however maddening it must be to the persons of color whose very sanity and judgment, indeed life experiences are being called into question by such denial—it is far more enraging to realize that the inability or unwillingness of white America to see racial discrimination as a problem is a pathology with a lengthy and disturbing pedigree. Putting aside the fact that, as with the examples above, we seem to be able to name all the really powerful black and brown folks on a couple of hands—and this, one might suggest, indicates that they are, by definition, exceptions to a much different-looking rule—the bigger problem with white denial is that it isn’t a modern malady.
Though whites may now be seeking to use Obama as evidence of racism’s eradication, let us remember that long before he burst onto the national scene—indeed, even at a time when he was an infant, well before anyone could have foreseen what he would become, and even before the passage of modern civil rights legislation—white Americans were fairly nonchalant about the problems facing persons of color, choosing in most cases to deny what all their senses (and surely their eyes, fixed on the television as most already were by the early 1960s) had to be telling them: that they were living in an apartheid nation; that theirs was no land of freedom and democracy, no oasis of liberty, but rather a formal white supremacy, a racially fascistic state for millions of people.
And so, in 1963, roughly two-thirds of whites told Gallup pollsters that blacks were treated equally in white communities. Even more along the lines of delusion, in 1962, nearly 90 percent of whites said black children were treated equally in terms of educational opportunity.12 All of which is to say that in August 1963, as 200,000 people marched on Washington, and as they stood there in the sweltering heat, listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, most whites seeing the news that evening were, in effect, thinking to themselves, what’s the problem, exactly? Dream? Why dream? Everything is just fine now. Isn’t it?
Or consider the 1950s, and the way in which white denial manifested so prominently among the very per-sons who had been most implicated in the maintenance of white domination. So, for instance, when racist forc-es in Congress issued their “Southern Manifesto” in response to Supreme Court rulings invalidating racially separate schools, they noted with no apparent misgiving that the push for desegregation was “destroying the ami- cable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.”13
Although modern polling techniques weren’t in place in the 1930s one can imagine few whites at that time seeing racism and the oppression of black people as a major concern. Likewise, even at the height of overt white supremacist rule in the United States—during the 1890s, as Black Codes and massive violence against post-emancipation
