Folding the race card: as an open, divisive political issue, race isn't dead--but it's dying.

• Author: Sleeper, Jim

"RACE IS OVER," THE WRITER STANLEY Crouch has declared, meaning that it no longer drives American public discourse--not that it no longer matters in public housing, schooling, policing, or the job market. Even in those realms, though, racial rhetoric and remedies that seemed sacred for decades are being sideline by demographic and cultural sea changes (multiracial families and immigrants whose notions of race are fluid) and by economic currents that have made many nonwhites "middle class" Even amid ethnic pluralism, color no longer works well as a marker of cultural differences now that Americans are shedding the racial apartheid of the past.

Yet racial thinking can remain perversely comforting: It can seem to make instant sense of suffering when actual causes are more complicated. It can simulate "community" and social purpose for "people of color" and for others whose formative political commitments were shaped by race. Playing the race card still works sometimes for ideologues and opportunists--black as well as white, left as well as right--who would turn racial victimization (white against: black or vice versa) into a weapon and suspicions into self-fulfilling prophecies of racial Armageddon. We need not only better social conditions but also statesmanship wise enough to advance self-fulfilling prophecies that are positive, not destructive.

Two new books by young political scientists hold out hope for such leadership by cutting through the racial pieties and opportunism that have framed too many election campaigns. Matthew Streb's The New Electoral Politics of Race and Jeremy Mayer's Running on Race don't revive leftist hopes that blacks will lead some revolutionary or even just progressive or multicultural politics; nor do they vindicate conservative hopes that "the black vote" is up for grabs or, failing that, irrelevant to the Right. Rather, these two dry-eyed but sharp analyses of how racial issues have played in seven states' pivotal gubernatorial elections (Streb) and in the presidential contests since 1960 (Mayer) raise the possibility that race as an open, divisive political issue is dying, if not dead.

Streb's close-grained but accessible account of gubernatorial contests in Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Virginia in the South, and in Ohio, Iowa, and Massachusetts in the North, poses "the racial puzzle" that even where voting remains racially polarized, race is now "the missing issue" in campaigns. It has always been...