Obama and the Future of Identity Politics

Post-ethnic Obama?

This evening I went to a panel discussion put on by the Berkeley History Department on the significance of Obama’s election. The most interesting part of the event was an exchange between one of the speakers, Professor Waldo Martin, and an audience member and colleague, Professor David Hollinger. Martin was the third and most ambivalent speaker, and I think also the most emotional. He prefaced his talk by joking that although normally he spoke mostly of the cuff, he had prepared the entire speech tonight because otherwise he feared he wouldn’t “make much sense.” The talk itself he began by noting his own “failure of imagination.” As someone who had come of age during the “late Jim Crow era” and identified as part of the subsequent black power generation, he explained, he had not believed that the election of a black man to the presidency was possible in his lifetime.

Martin’s main point, however, was that Obama’s election did not signal that the struggle for racial equality was won. He used terms like “white power structure,” “white supremacy,” and “white racism”–I think very deliberately to emphasize that these terms were still relevant. He pointed out that Obama was not really a black leader because he did not represent black people specifically, and that for this very reason it was as necessary as ever to sustain an explicitly black politics.

As part of this argument, Martin alluded to the views expressed in his colleague David Hollinger’s controversial book, Post-Ethnic America, which came out in 1995 and is subtitled “Beyond Multiculturalism.” That book argued that identity politics was ultimately a dead end and tried to imagine a “post-ethnic” basis of identity. Martin, of course, was highly skeptical of the premise, contending that identity politics would continue to matter. After the talk Hollinger, who sat at the back, stood up to comment. With his typical diplomacy, he immediately seized on Martin’s somewhat uncertain tone and many qualifications of his views. “I particularly admired Waldo’s courage and typical display of intellectual honesty,” Hollinger said, “in admitting that he believed the election of a black president impossible.” Hollinger then said that part of the reason Obama had, in fact, won, was that there were people out there who could imagine a black president. Further, that was precisely what Hollinger and others like him were trying to do, that is, identify the signs of racial progress in order to embolden all of us to strive to eliminate the remaining barriers to racial equality, and thus to redefine the very meaning of race.

Interestingly, Martin did not respond, but allowed another presenter, Professor Robin Einhorn, to do so. Einhorn tried to enunciate clearly what she took to be Martin’s position: every time people start talking about progress in the fight against racism, she explained, others are ready to declare victory and go home, thus effacing the continuing importance of the issue. In other words, and this is certainly what Martin was saying, every progressive step potentially opens the door to regression and often does. In effect Einhorn was saying to Hollinger that, whatever it is you think or hope your are doing by claiming to get past race, your claims will end up as grist for the mill for those who simply want the issue of race to go away.

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