Greg Hollingsworth

The election of Barack Obama to the office of the presidency has many people talking about the end of racism in the United States, Dave Hill (a writer for the Britsh newspaper The Guardian doesn't think so, and I am forced to agree:

Hopes that Barack Obama's win means defeat for racism are both legitimate and naïve. Their legitimacy derives from the most basic observation of history: no "brown-eyed handsome man" of the type Chuck Berry described could have occupied the White House in the age when he wrote that piece of rock 'n' roll code. Their naivety lies in the exaggerated significance invested in stars - of politics or anything else – and assigned to the slow rise of a black middle class. Dave Hill: Obama and post-racial society | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

I think the most glaring example of this is the fact that Senator Obama's ascension to the presidency is not being hailed as the election of a Democrat, or as the election of a progressive, but as the election of a black man, and that is the single largest landmark event of the election. If we had moved into a post-race state of mind we would not have a laser-focus on the fact that the President-elect is a black man. I'm not attempting to imply that this is not an event of historic proportion, it is most  definitely the most historic election we have had in a very long time, but it does not equal out to the end of racism in this country. There are other signals as well, the defeat of a constitutional amendment in Colorado that would have outlawed Affirmative Action programs in the state. A post-racial society would not need these programs, because there wouldn't be any consideration of an individuals race in any situation. The continuation of systems that seek to level the playing field between the races spotlight the inherent status that race has in our society.

There is only one venue in our society that has become post-racial, where, on average, minorities are on equal footing with whites, and that my friends is sports. Minority athletes are the only group that earn at the same (if not an accelerated) pace as their white counterparts. I haven't checked,, but last I knew, the three highest paid players in the NBA, MLB and the NFL were all minorities (2 African-American and one Latino). In the NBA, there isn't a single white player in the top 10 highest paid players. While the election of Barack Obama certainly signals a watershed change in the relationship between blacks and whites in the US, it doesn't mean that anything has changed among the older generations of Americans who grew up in a segregated society. Senator Obama's election signals that racism is less prevalent amongst the younger generations in America, and that racism doesn't seem to be filtering down to the same degree as in the past, but it is certianly not gone, and as President-Elect Obama has said over and over again, the climb will be steep.