A transformation on race: Barack Obama's "post-racial" posture reflects a quiet but radical shift in liberal ideas about race in America.

• Author: Moynihan, Michael C.
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Critical essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, by Randall Kennedy, New York: Pantheon. 228 pages, $22.00

Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, by John L. Jackson, Jr., New York: Basic Civitas, 274 pages, $26.00

WHEN New York magazine's "race issue" hit newsstands in early August, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama held a formidable, though hardly insurmountable, lead over Republican rival John McCain--49 percent to 41 percent, according to Gallup's daily tracking poll. Despite Obama's advantage, an article titled "The Color-Coded Campaign" by New York political correspondent John Heilemann, wondered why Obama wasn't "doing better" and warned that it was because of an "answer that no one wants to hear."

Contrary to Heilemann's claims of originality, this "answer" has been parsed endlessly on blogs, talk radio, and Sunday chat shows. It goes roughly like this: Almost 50 percent of American voters backed Barack, but this transcendent, inspirational politician hasn't yet reached Vladimir Putin levels of popularity, where Heilemann and New York think he belongs, because too many Americans are racists. Whether or not most voters realize it, Obama's supporters explain, his campaign provides an opportunity for a long-overdue reassessment of American attitudes toward an integrated, multiracial society.

Lacking clear-cut examples of racist campaigning against Obama, the defenders of this position turned to what we might charitably call nonobvious examples. Those Brithey Spears ads accusing Obama of vapidity and "celebrity," we were told, transmitted a racial code, because the juxtaposition of the candidate with young white women subconsciously stoked fears of miscegenation. The phallic monument in Berlin where Obama gave his speech? The ad included that icon to play on old stereotypes of black male supersexuality. "Race will be central to this campaign because McCain needs it to be," former New Republic Editor Peter Beinart wrote in The Washington Post. "He simply doesn't have many other cards to play." The media sophisticates, having long been warned about unconscious and subterranean racism, knew the racial attacks would happen, even if they weren't visible to the naked eye.

As television pundits debate the unquantifiable American racial subconscious, the more interesting question of how Obama would lead on the issue of race has received significantly less attention on the O'Reilly-Olbermann circuit. Would the first African-American president herald the beginning of a "post-racial America" as his boosters promise, or would he hew closer to the standard views of the post-Martin Luther King civil rights movement? And if Obama ascends to the White House, what will black Americans make of his complicated racial politics?

Entering the home stretch, both candidates have treated race gingerly, though during the Democratic primaries questions of ethnic identity were far more pointed. A questioner in the July 2007 YouTube presidential debate wondered whether Obama, the half-Kenyan, half-white Harvard law graduate, was "black enough" for African Americans. Was he, as PBS shout lest host John McLaughlin bluntly inquired, "an Oreo"? Writing in the New York Daily News, columnist Stanley Crouch declared, "When black Americans refer to Obama as 'one of us,' I do not know what they are talking about." The Los Angeles Times wondered if the candidate was "really black," and 60 Minutes inquisitor Steve Croft pushed the candidate to admit that he had grown up identifying as white. It was a common enough question that Obama felt compelled to respond, relating that even his "black activist friends from here to Boston say that you are not black; you are multiracial."

So the first broad discussion of the "race issue" was not whether white Americans would accept Obama as an African-American president but if blacks would. That question has receded into the...