Barack Obama and the White Problem

Barack Obama and the "White Problem"
Bruce Baum
bbaum@politics.unc.ca
The University of British Columbia

Vancouver, British Columbia
Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association,

San Antonio, Texas, April 21-23, 2011.
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

Barack Obama and the "White Problem"
Bruce Baum
"[I]f you don't know what Ray Charles is singing about, then, it is entirely
possible that you can't help me."
– James Baldwin, "Liberalism and the Negro" (1964) 1
This essay is not primarily about a white (or whiteness) problem that applies
uniquely to President Barack Obama. My concern is with a central problem of US
politics, the white problem, that arguably spans the course of US history. It just happens
to be playing out with respect to the presidency of Barack Obama in particular ways.
During the course of Obama’s campaign for the presidency, in August 2008, Matt Bai
wrote an article in The New York Times Magazine that raised the provocative question,
“Is Obama the End of Black Politics?” 2 This question is related to my topic, but I will
speak to it only indirectly. My aim is to show that, despite all of the related talk about
post-racialism with Obama’s election, substantial evidence during the 2008 presidential
election and during Obama’s first term in office confirms the persistence of what has
been long and aptly called the white problem – a damaging form of white identity politics
– in the United States. It is manifest in two significant ways. In particular, the elements of
post-racialism – symbolic and substantive – in Obama’s campaign and policies reinforce
a wider post-racial or “colorblind” tendency of US public policy, which reinforces a
continuing white normativity in US citizenship. The typical US citizen is conceived
effectively as a white person – a person who has not been oppressed or disadvantaged by
the history of US racism and, thus, has no need of, or rightful claim to, race-conscious
policies (such as affirmative action or reparations) to secure equal opportunity and social

justice (including racial justice) for all. In this regard, Obama’s Administration has
arguably also marked an at least tentative eclipse of a distinctly black politics – a politics
that vigorously champions black empowerment and racial equality – in much the way
Matt Bai suggested. My claim, however, is that this is a regrettable thing from a social
justice perspective.
Regarding the white problem, in August 1964, John H. Johnson, then the
publisher and editor of Ebony magazine, provided a succinct introduction to it in his
preface to Ebony’s special issue, “The White Problem In America.” Johnson countered
then prevalent popular discussions of the US “race problem”:
For more than a decade through books, magazines, newspapers, TV and radio, the
white man has been trying to solve the race problem through studying the Negro.
We feel that the answer lies in a more thorough study of the man who created the
problem. In this issue we, as Negroes, look as the white man today with the hope
that our effort will tempt him to look at himself more thoroughly. With a better
understanding of himself, we trust that he may then understand us better – and this
nation’s most vital problem can then be solved. 3
One of the chief reasons that US racism and its legacy have not yet been fully redressed, I
contend, is that white Americans have not “look[ed] at [themselves] more thoroughly” in
the way that the writers for the special issue of Ebony had hoped. The rise of critical
whiteness studies in the academy has not substantially changed this picture. My
contention is that the white problem – which in various manifestations spans colonial
American and US history – remains a central and disabling feature of, and barrier to,
struggles for social justice. Furthermore, it is not the case that the white problem was put
to rest by the US civil rights movement only later to reemerge with the election and
governance of Barack Obama, the country’s first black president. Nonetheless, I hope to
show that the white problem has surfaced in notable (and sometimes quite perverse) ways

during both the election campaign that brought Obama to office and during President
Obama’s first term in office – especially in the mid-term election of 2010.
This phenomenon, I suggest, can be understood as of version of the kind of status
politics that Richard Hofstadter insightfully discussed in a prescient essay, in 1954, on
“The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” Political life, he wrote, is marked not only by “the
conflicting interests of various social groups” concerning material benefits; “it is also an
arena into which status aspirations and frustrations are … projected.” The aspirations that
“underlie status politics,” moreover, “are only partially conscious; and, even so far as
they are conscious, it is difficult to give them a programmatic expression.” 4 Hofstadter
spoke at some length of the role of “ethnic prejudice” in the “the American race for
success.” Yet, despite writing just before the start of the civil rights movement in 1955,
Hofstadter glossed over a key aspect (arguably the key aspect) of US status politics.
Hofstadter said relatively little here about the role of white racialized identity (or
whiteness) and white racism in the American “ethnic hierarchy.” 5 Opportunities for
people to climb up the American ethno-racialized status hierarchy have long depended in
part on their ability to become accepted as white people.
According to its theorists, the white problem has several key features: the
determinative social and political power of “white” Americans when they act whitely,
that is, pursuing or defending “white” interests; widespread denial and moral evasion by
white Americans regarding the history and ongoing effects of white racism in the United
States; white people thinking about the historical and contemporary problems and
possibilities of US social and political life from a distinctly white perspective, as if the
challenges, opportunities, and freedoms faced by white Americans have been (or at least

have become since the civil rights movement) representative of the challenges,
opportunities, and freedoms faced by all Americans. 6
The persistence of the white problem continues to have a profound effect on US
politics. Partly because of it, since about 1966 (and decidedly since the election of
Richard Nixon as president in 1968), the goal of overcoming the legacy of US racism, of
racial justice, beyond the important but limited achievements of the civil right movement
has been set aside by the major actors in national politics. Indeed, one aspect of how the
white problem has become manifest in the post-civil rights era is that many (if not most)
white Americans believe that racial justice has already been achieved. And due to the
continuing electoral clout of white voters and politicians, along with some members other
racialized groups who act whitely, progress toward racial justice has largely been stalled.
This is so, moreover, despite the racial progress represented by election of Barack Obama
as the country’s 44th president and first black (and first non-white) president.
Finally, insofar as white racial identity is a political rather than biological identity
(a form of power, as Charles Mills says), it is politically shifting and historically
indeterminate. While the white problem is all too real, and has been rooted chiefly in the
belies and conduct of white Americans, this does not mean that all white people are
equally responsible for perpetrating it – consider, for instance, abolitionist John Brown
and later white civil rights activists who worked courageously for racial justice.
Moreover, we may be entering into an era in the United States when it is not just
identifiably “white people” who might act whitely to perpetuate the white problem.
I. The White Problem

In recent decades some white scholars have begun to pay sustained attention to
the character of white racial identity as a form of power rather than a meaningful racial
identity in the old biological sense, there is a long history in the United States of Black
thinkers who, as David Roediger says, “have answered pompous white pronouncements
on the ‘negro problem’ by identifying the ‘white problem’ at the center of American
ills.” 7 Several twentieth century writers – mostly black writers – explicitly theorized the
idea of the white problem to explain the creation and perpetuation of racialized
oppression and inequality in the United States.
The black novelist Richard Wright (1908-60) characterized the white problem
primarily in terms of white racism and the unmatched power in his time of the white
majority to set the country’s policies. In 1946, in response to a reporter in France who
asked him what he thought about the “Negro problem” in the United States, Wright said,
“There isn’t any Negro problem; there is only a white problem.” He explained: “The
problem is white because only whites can resolve it. Whites number 130,000,000
compared to 15,000,000 blacks. They hold the political, industrial, and social power. …
The problem is a white problem because it is whites who pose it every day.” 8 The Harlem
Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) advanced a view of the white
problem similar to Wright’s: “the main difficulty of the race question does not lie so
much in the actual condition of the blacks a it does in the mental attitude of the whites.” 9
Other writers, including Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and black American
writers James Baldwin and Lerone Bennett, Jr., further anatomized the white problem in
terms of white power and white psychology. While Myrdal spoke in his influential book
An American Dilemma (1942) of “the Negro problem,” it increasingly became clear to

him that the locus of the problem is the white population: “the white majority group that
naturally determines the Negroes ‘place’ [in American society]. All our attempts to reach
scientific explanations of why the Negroes are what they are and why they live as they do
have regularly led to determinants on the white side of the racial line.” 10
Bennett likewise conceived of the white problem largely in terms of palpable
forms of white racism and white power. “When we say that the race problem in America
is a white problem, we mean that the real problem is an irrational and antiscientific idea
of race in the minds of white Americans.” 11 The issue is fundamentally a white problem:
we need to “seek its source … in the white American (in the process by which he was
educated, in the needs and complexes he expresses through racism) and in the structure of
the white community (in the power arrangements and the illicit uses of racism in the
scramble for scarce values: power, prestige, income).” 12 To speak of the white problem is
to emphasize “that the white American created, invented the race problem and that his
fears and frailties are responsible for the urgency of the problem. … [R]acism is a
reflection of personal and collective anxieties lodged deep in the hearts and minds of
white Americans.” 13 Bennett maintained that the white problem involves a kind of
“magical thinking” that leads white Americans to misconstrue crucial features of social
reality because “their knowledge precedes their facts”: “millions on millions of white
Americans are unable to understand that slums, family disorganization and illiteracy
[among black Americans] are not the causes of the racial problem, but the end product of
the problem.” 14
In elucidating these aspects of the white problem, Bennett acknowledged that
these anxieties were either straightforward nor uniform among white Americans, and that

not “all white Americans” were racist. He maintained, however, that all Americans were
affected by white racism. Therefore, we need to learn “how white Americans exist in
their whiteness, and how some white Americans, to a certain extent, rise above early
conditioning through non-Communist radicalism or liberalism.” 15
Bennett also surmised that the impulse toward white racism reflected larger forces
in the dominant American culture:
There is evidence, for example, that the culture’s stress on success and status
induces exaggerated anxieties and fears which are displaced onto the area of race
relations. The fear of failure, the fear of competitors, the fear of losing ones status,
of not living in the ‘right’ neighborhood, of not having the ‘right’ friends or the
‘right’ gadgets: these fears weight heavily on the minds of millions of white
Americans and lead to a search for avenues of escape. 16
In short, the white problem is also, in part, “a mask for a much deeper problem involving
… the perpetrators” of racism. 17 Like W.E.B. Du Bois and Baldwin, Bennett saw in
white racism a means through which class divisions between poor and powerful whites
are negotiated and elided, building odd alliances between rich and poor whites. 18 “By
using racism, consciously or unconsciously, to divert discontent and boost the shaky egos
of white groups on or near the bottom [of the social hierarchy], men of power in America
have played a key role on making racism a permanent structure of our society.” 19
Bennett’s point was not that white racism is literally permanent, but that it is
deeply sedimented. We will overcome it thoroughly only insofar as we approach it from
the proper angle. Once we understand the race problem as “a white problem, this …
suggests that anything that hides the white American from a confrontation with himself
and with the fact that he must change before the Negro can change is a major part of the
problem.” 20

James Baldwin developed one of the fullest accounts of the white problem.
"[B]efore one can really talk about the Negro problem in this country," he said, "one has
got to talk about the white people's problem." 21 He went further than Bennett to
illuminate how white people who had no direct role in creating the white problem,
including relatively poor and powerless white folks, share some responsibility for
perpetuating it. Baldwin did this by exploring how, in Bennett’s phrase, “white
Americans exist in their whiteness.” Baldwin emphasized two interrelated aspects of the
white problem: the dangerous illusion of white identity – of some Americans believing
that that are truly “white people”; and a common inability of white people to confront
squarely the role of white racism in US history and the US present. These problems are
bound together, according to Baldwin: “Because they think they are white, they do not
dare to confront the ravage and the lie of their history.” 22
Baldwin addressed the white problem by name in talk, "The White Problem"
(1963). Here he explored the problem of feigned white innocence with respect to United
States history. 23 Speaking in a centennial year marking "one hundred years of Negro
freedom" and in the shadow "of the crisis in Birmingham," he asked his audience to
consider how basic American myths were inscribed in two lines from the US national
anthem: "Oh, say does that star-spangled banner still wave/ O'er the land of the free and
the home of the brave." 24 He suggested that believing in this mythic America makes it
seem easy and uncomplicated for white Americans to be Americans as “the proper noun,
American,” signified “a catalogue of virtues.” 25 Yet insofar as Americans confront the
gap between the myth of America ("the land of the free and the home of the brave") and
the harsher reality of racist oppression that has deeply marked US history, they will be

forced to learn that being an American is a "complex fate." 26 "There is an illusion about
America," Baldwin wrote elsewhere, “a myth about America to which we are clinging
which has nothing to do with the lives we lead.” 27
The country was not established simply because a bunch of Europeans dedicated
themselves to establishing a free society. "They came here because they thought it would
be better here than wherever they were." 28 Now, however, "part of the dilemma of this
country is that it has managed to believe the myth it has created about its past, which is
another way of saying that it has entirely denied its past." White Americans in particular
are inclined to evade the fact that "a great many crimes were committed … to create the
country called America." 29 American mythology enables white Americans to deny or
minimize these crimes, which included the decimation of Native Americans and the
enslavement of Africans. Thus, one of the "hidden reasons for the tremendous popularity
of the cowboy-Indian legend in American life" is that these "stories are designed to
reassure us that no crime was committed." 30
Consequently, insofar as white Americans understand themselves as white
Americans, they live a morally disabling lie. "What is most terrible is that American
white men are not prepared to believe my version of the story, to believe that it
happened.” To sustain their belief in (white) American innocence, “they have set up in
themselves a fantastic system of evasions, denials, and justifications, which system is
about to destroy their grasp of reality, which is another way of saying their moral
sense." 31
Baldwin insisted that this evasive white posture towards United States history –
which is what I mean by white people thinking whitely – is quite at odds with how black

Americans regard the country’s history. He explained this in a later essay with reference
to his childhood experience of the Great Depression:
To be black was to confront, and be forced to alter, a condition forged in history.

To be white was to be forced to digest a delusion called white supremacy. Indeed,
without confronting the history that has either given white people an identity or
invested them in it, it is hardly possible for anyone who thinks of himself as white
to know what a black person is talking about. 32
This, I think, is the gist of Baldwin’s remark about Ray Charles with which I began: "[I]f
you don't know what Ray Charles is singing about, the, it is entirely possible that you
can't help me." 33 In other words, a basic challenge for white Americans is to comprehend
why Ray Charles (along with Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, etc.) sang the blues, a
musical form that was generated by the black American experience racism. 34
One specific aspect of the white problem concerns the erroneous tendency of
white Americans to assimilate the experiences of black (and other non-white) Americans
to the European immigrant experience. In a round-table discussion on "Liberalism and
the Negro," sponsored by Commentary magazine in 1964, Baldwin found this white
perspective reflected in comments by the philosopher Sidney Hook about "rising
expectations as to what decent conduct should be" for American citizens. Baldwin
explained that Hook’s notion of rising expectations concerning material well-being and
social status applied uniquely to European immigrants,
that is, [to] people who came to this country voluntarily and who came
managed, once they got here, to achieve a way of life and a whole attitude
toward reality and toward themselves which they could not have achieved if
they had remained wherever they came from in Europe. … [Y]ou leave the
famine-ridden farm in Ireland, you come to America, you fit into the American
scene, you rise, you become part of a new social structure. 35
10

Yet, the European immigrants’ experience is contrary to the experience of Black
Americans:
I was brought here. … And when I got here, I did not, like the Irish and the Jews
and the Russians and the Poles and the Czechs and the Italians, immediately
find myself in a slum and then by hard work and saving my pennies rise out of
the slum into a position of relative economic security so that my idea of reality
changed. … The black experience is entirely different. You find yourself in a
slum and you realize at a certain point that no amount of labor, no amount of
hard work, no amount of soap is going to get you out of that slum. 36
Baldwin overstated his case in saying that for black Americans “no amount of hard work
… is going to get you out of that slum.” Nonetheless, his basic point was and remains
valid: black (and in different ways other non-white) Americans have faced distinctive
obstacles to full and equal participation in American society. These obstacles have
includes white racism and exclusion from the possibility of becoming accepted as white
people (aside from those who could “pass” as white). Becoming accepted as white has
long been what Baldwin called “the price of the ticket” for full inclusion and equal
participation in American society. 37 Consequently, due to their naïve and self-serving
view of US history, white Americans – i.e., those who have become accepted as white
people and who think of themselves as white – are generally "far more hopeful, far more
innocent, far more irresponsible, far less aware of the terrible, black, ugly facts of life
than black people can afford to be." 38
Baldwin also located the white problem at a still deeper and less conscious among
white Americans. To assure their status, position, and sense of innocence, white
Americans “delude themselves into believing that they” actually are white people. 39 A
corollary to this delusion that they fail to recognize that America itself as "is not, and
never can be, white." 40 His point is easily misunderstood. Given the demographic
diversity of the country, including the continual contributions of “dark people,” the
11

United States simply is not a white country in a descriptive sense. Yet, Baldwin also
contends that politically it certainly became a white country – a country governed by
white supremacy and the privileged position of the people who came to “think they are
white”:
America became white – the people who, as they claim, settled the country became
white – because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the
Black subjugation. … White men – from Norway, for example, where they were
Norwegians – became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells,
torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women. 41
In short, according to Baldwin, there are two especially important aspects of the white
problem: a naïve investment in a politically sanitized (or “whitewashed”) mythology of
American history; and the psychological, social, and political investments of “white”
people in the illusion of their whiteness. 42 This led him to remark, “As long as you think
you’re white, there’s no hope for you.” 43 Baldwin was not speaking here of anti-racist
white Americans who understand themselves as “white people” only by virtue of the
racist history that needs to be overcome. His beef was with those “white people” who
“take refuge in their whiteness” so that “they are unable to walk out of this most
monstrous of traps.” 44
II. The White Problem Revisited: the Post-Civil Rights Ear
Before considering how the white problem has affected the election and
presidency of Barack Obama, it is important to consider how the white problem has been
reconfigured in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. Indeed, key features of the
politics of racial justice in the United States since the culmination of the civil rights
movement in 1964-65 have been shaped, as Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in 1967, by
what was “called the ‘white backlash,’” which was really “nothing new”: “It is the
12

surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there. …
The white backlash is an expression of the same vacillations, the same search for
rationalizations, the same lack of commitment that have always characterized white
America on the question of race.” 45 As King also emphasized, to say that the white
problem (with the “white backlash” just one incarnation of it) is “the surfacing of old
prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences” that have long characterized white Americans is
not to “imply that all white Americans are racists.” Likewise, it is not to suggest that the
white problem is an unchanging feature of US politics.
Soon after King spoke of a white backlash, in March 1968, the Report of the
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission
report), also called out the white problem, although not by name. The Kerner
Commission, filled by political moderates from the Democratic and Republican parties,
was charged with analyzing the causes of the urban unrest that swept through largely
black US inner cities in the mid-1960s. Rather than pinning blame on those who rose up
in frustration, the commissions report declared, “What white Americans have never fully
understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply
implicated in the problem of the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions
maintain it, and white society condoned it.” 46 The Commission insisted, “Only a
commitment to national action on an unprecedented scale can shape a future compatible
with the historic ideals of American society.… The major need is to generate new will –
the will to tax ourselves to the extent necessary to meet the vital needs of the nation.” 47
In his introduction to the paperback edition of the report, New York Times
columnist Tom Wicker, reiterated the view of the report’s authors that their document
13

was only “an honest beginning.” Wicker explained, “It can only be a beginning because,
patently, until the fact of white racism is admitted, it cannot conceivably be expunged;
and until it is far more eliminated than this Commission – or any fair man – could find
today, how can that great commitment of money and effort here recommended even be
approached, much less made?” The nation, he warned, was “nearly trapped” in a “vicious
cycle.” Wicker’s worries were prescient. In April and June of 1968, respectively, Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy – two major
leaders in the struggle for racial justice – were assassinated; in November 1968, Richard
Nixon, who called for “law and order,” was elected president with substantial white
support (see below). These developments ushered in a sharp turn in national policy away
from any serious effort to redress racial injustices, as President Lyndon Johnson had been
attempted with his civil rights acts and Great Society program of 1964-66.
Prior to this, for a brief period from June 1963 to August 1965, the civil rights
movement rallied substantial public support and a near consensus among northern liberal
Democrats behind its reform agenda. National civil rights laws ended de jure segregation
in the South, transforming key elements of southern race relations. 48 Between 1965 and
1966, however, the central issues of the civil rights movement shifted from de jure
segregation in the South to urban poverty and de facto segregation (in housing and
education) in northern cities and suburbs. As Gary Orfield explains, “the central symbols
changed, the northern wing of the Democratic party began to divide seriously on racial
issues as the Republican party moved into opposition, and the civil rights movement
began to lose in Congress.” 49 As a result, “Whites had turned notably less sympathetic to
the black movement by 1966.” 50
14

On the whole, white Americans continued to support abstract goals just as equal
treatment for black Americans along with integrated education and nondiscrimination in
employment, but many adopted the view that “government had already done enough for
blacks.” From then on “there was a growing gap between white and black views on
whether discrimination was still an issue.” Orfield observes:
Many whites gave priority to the need for laws to control urban violence. …
Particularly distressing was the tendency of white opinion to crystalize in a strongly
negative way around new issues of discrimination in the urban setting – issues
involving race-conscious remedies for deeply discriminatory practices. These
remedies included busing, affirmative action, scatter-site housing, and changes in
suburban zoning. No significant white support developed for policies that would
open to blacks the middle class schools and suburban neighborhoods and job
opportunities that were keys to mobility in metropolitan society. 51
Orfield notes that reactions among white Americans to the Watts (LA) riots of 1965,
shortly after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and subsequent US urban
unrest, were a turning point in northern white public support for the civil rights
movement. “[T]here was a sharp and steady rise in opposition among northern whites
beginning before the Watts riot and becoming the opinion of the majority by late 1966.
… The issues were changing from questions about the South to policies that could force
change on white urban constituents.” 52 Many white Americans in the north who
supported the end legal of racial segregation and discrimination in the south resisted
efforts to extend the movement’s aims to the north. There central issues included de facto
residential housing and school segregation, labor market discrimination, jobs, school
bussing, “welfare,” and affirmative action. 53
Increasingly, then, the white problem was no longer old style racism among white
Americans – e.g., belief in black inferiority and white superiority – but something more
15

subtle and intractable. White Americans increasingly have supported the principles of
equality and equal opportunity for black Americans and other non-white minorities. Yet
since around 1966, white Americans have largely opposed policies that aim to overcome
existing racialized inequalities, such as the disproportionate poverty, income and wealth
inequality, and education gaps experienced by blacks, Native Americans, and Latino/as.
While white Americans have largely abandoned explicitly racist explanation to explain
the continuing gap in black-white socioeconomic status, a large proportion of whites now
regard the gap in black-white socioeconomic status in strictly individualistic rather than
structural terms. That is, they attribute these inequalities not to racial discrimination and
systematic inequalities of opportunity but to differences in individual motivations to
succeed in education and employment. James Kluegel comments, “Seeing the black-
white economic gap in purely individualistic terms leads to categorical opposition to
government assistance to blacks, regardless of whether it involves a belief in blacks’
innate inferiority.” 54 In other words, holding to individualistic explanations of these
inequalities leads whites to oppose government efforts to redress the inequalities even in
the absence of explicit racism.
Recent critical scholars of whiteness have interpreted this post-civil rights era
form of white identity politics variously as “whiteness as property” (Cheryl Harris), a
“possessive investment in whiteness” (George Lipsitz), and a shift in white identity from
an exclusive form of social standing to “white normalization” (Joel Olson). 55 As Olson
explains his notion (which captures elements of the others), “As normalization, whiteness
continues to be a position of racial privilege in a democratic society,” but without state
sanction. “It remains an interest in and an expectation of favored treatment in a polity
16

whose fundamental principle is that all men are created equal.” 56 Whiteness now has a
peculiarly contradictory character. It is no longer experienced as it was prior to the civil
rights movement, “when every white person personally enjoyed standing over every not-
white” person. Now, whiteness in the US (and elsewhere) operates as a looser form of
social capital, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense. It operates on a group level in the context of
cross-cutting class inequalities, so that not all white individuals “will personally benefit
from the fact that whites as a group are statistically much less likely to go to prison or to
be victims of crime than other [racialized] groups or that whites are statistically much
more likely to go to college, buy a house, and be gainfully employed.” Not all whites
(particularly not poor and working class whites) experience what W.E.B. Du Bois called
the “wages of whiteness” in tangible ways in their daily lives. Nonetheless, whiteness
still structures unequally access among different racialized groups (notably, whites and
blacks) to resources and opportunities. It does so through continued racialized structuring
of such things as geographic residency, access to (or ownership of) home equity, labor
market discrimination, and access to quality education and health care. 57
The normalization of whiteness in the post-civil rights era also involves a re-
articulation of an aspect of the white problem that Baldwin identified during the civil
rights movement: a tendency of white Americans to believe that their racial experience
(or, sometimes, their self-perceived “raceless” experience) of status, acceptance,
opportunity, and structures of success is the “normal” or representative American
experience. Baldwin spoke of this when he said that white Americans “are not prepared
to believe my version of the story, to believe that it happened.” 58 Charles Mills makes the
same point a bit differently: “white normativity manifests itself in white refusal to
17

recognize the long history of structural discrimination that has left whites with the
differential resources they have today, and all of its consequent advantages in negotiating
opportunity structures.” 59 Research on white attitudes about racism in the US bears this
out. Kluegel explains, “Many white Americans now believe that since they are no longer
racially prejudiced there are no barriers to opportunity for blacks.” He adds that this
belief may follow from the related, widespread belief among white Americans “that there
are no class barriers to opportunity” in the United States. 60
More concretely, evidence indicates that the white problem has long been a
significant factor in US elections. Consider the following survey data on voting patterns
by “race” and ethnicity in US presidential elections from 1948 to 2004: Figure 1, white
voting from 1948-2004; and Figure 2, voting patterns of various groups from 1972-2008.
Figure 1. Presidential voting by white voters, 1948-2004. Data from the American
National Election Study. (Sorted by Richard Johnston, March 15, 2011.)
Year of | Party of presidential vote

election | Democrat Republ.
Wallace Thurmond/| Total
/other 61 other
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1948 | 193 171 12 193 | 569
| 33.92% 30.05 2.11 33.92 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1952 | 451 676 0 3 | 1,130
| 39.91 59.82 0.00 0.27 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1956 | 476 737 0 4 | 1,217
| 39.11 60.56 0.00 0.33 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1960 | 413 440 0 6 | 859
| 48.08 51.22 0.00 0.70 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1964 | 654 360 0 2 | 1,016
| 64.37 35.43 0.00 0.20 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1968 | 334 482 115 2 | 933
| 35.80 51.66 12.33 0.21 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1972 | 426 981 0 17 | 1,424
| 29.92 68.89 0.00 1.19 | 100.00
18

-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1976 | 531 624 0 20 | 1,175
| 45.19 53.11 0.00 1.70 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1980 | 271 471 77 13 | 832
| 32.57 56.61 9.25 1.56 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1984 | 407 735 0 10 | 1,152
| 35.33 63.80 0.00 0.87 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1988 | 373 582 0 11 | 966
| 38.61 60.25 0.00 1.14 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1992 | 544 498 284 3 | 1,329
| 40.93 37.47 21.37 0.23 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
1996 | 418 400 73 16 | 907
| 46.09 44.10 8.05 1.76 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
2000 | 417 465 0 32 | 914
| 45.62 50.88 0.00 3.50 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
2004 | 250 350 2 7 | 609
| 41.05 57.47 0.33 1.15 | 100.00
-----------+--------------------------------------------+----------
Figure 2. Voting by “race”/ethnicity in US Presidential elections, 1972-2008. 62

% of “Race”/ Party
elector- ethnic- vote
ate ity
in 2008 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008
74 White Dem 31% 47% 36% 35% 40% 39% 43% 42% 41% 43%
Repub 67 52 56 64 59 40 46 54 58 55
Indep – – 7 – – 20 9 3 – –
13 Black Dem 82 83 85 90 86 83 84 90 88 95
Repub 18 16 11 9 12 10 12 8 11 4
Indep – – 3 – – 7 4 1 – –
9 Hispanic Dem 63 – 56 62 69 61 72 62 53 67
Repub 35 – 35 37 30 25 21 35 44 31
Indep – – 8 8 – 14 6 2 – –
2 Asian Dem – – – – – 31 43 54 56 62
Repub – – – – – 55 48 41 44 35
Indep – – – – – 15 8 4 – –
Particularly notable was white voting in 1948 and 1968 (see Figure 1), along with the
general pattern of white voting since 1968, particularly compared to that of the other
groups. In 1948, the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates were joined by
19

two significant third party candidates – the Dixiecrat (and former Democrat) Strom
Thurmond and the Progressive Henry Wallace (the former Vice President under F.D.R.).
The overall character of the white problem cannot be readily gauged from the 1948
election, but the white voting for the Dixiecrat Thurmond is illuminating. (Thurmond,
then a staunch segregationist, broke away from the Democratic Party and in 1948
vigorously opposed President Truman and the Democratic platform of 1948, which
supported civil rights reforms.) We should be wary of placing too much stock in the fact
that 34% of a sample of only 569 white participants in the survey favored Thurmond.
Still, this was indicative of what actually happened with white voting for him. Thurmond
received just 2.4% of the overall national vote, but he was on the ballot in only 14 states
(including California, Maryland, and North Dakota, where he received few votes). He
won 39 electoral votes based on winning the most votes in Alabama (80%), Louisiana
(49%), Mississippi (87%), and South Carolina (72%). He also won between 9-20% of the
vote in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas. 63
Most importantly for present purposes, the white voting for Thurmond in the 1948
was not as exceptional as it seems at first glance. Consider white voting in the 1968
election. This was a three-way race between Republican Richard Nixon, Democrat
Hubert Humphrey, and independent George Wallace. Humphrey was a leading supporter
of the civil rights movement in the Democratic Party, and his party had become closely
associated with the movement since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights
Act of 1965. Nixon adopted a “southern strategy,” which involved strong criticism of
busing, a promise to “end cutoffs of federal aid that had been designed to impose
desegregation,” criticism of aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a promise to
20

appoint conservative “strict constructionist” justices to the Supreme Court. 64 Wallace, a
segregationist southern Democrat, ran a segregationist campaign. Together, Nixon and
Wallace won about 60% of the white vote. 65 This was after Democrat John Kennedy, in
1960, won about 48% of the white vote, and Lyndon Johnson, in his landslide victory of
1964, won about 64% of the white vote.
The Democratic presidential candidate has lost the white vote to the Republican
candidate in every presidential election since 1968, usually by significant margins.
Notably, the distribution of the white vote in the last three presidential elections has been
relatively consistent (with 42, 41, and 43% of whites voting for the Democrat in 2000,
2004, and 2008, respectively, and 54, 58, and 55% of whites voting for the Republican).
As I will explain later, the white problem played out in basically the same way in 2008 in
Democrat Barack Obama’s election victory over John McCain as it has since 1968. It
certainly did not disappear.
Democratic President Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996, an apparent anomaly, is
also telling. According to the New York Times exit poll, Clinton won 43% of the white
vote and Republican Robert Dole won 46%, with 9% of whites voting independent (with
most of that vote going to Ross Perot). 66 Thus, Clinton did relatively well among white
voters, despite his popularity among black Americans. Yet it is significant that Clinton
was a centrist Democrat who called for an “end to big government,” and in this vein (and
at odds with earlier “racial liberalism”) he championed welfare reform, enacted in August
1996, before his re-election campaign: in the Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. 67 On welfare policy, Clinton moved the national
Democratic Party in a direction that was congenial to the concerns of many white voters
21

by ending one of the most racially-charged (coded as “black”) federal public policies, Aid
for families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Therefore, Clinton’s relative success
among white voters is consistent with the persistence of the white problem. 68
Scholars have debated the extent of differences in the voting behavior of whites
from different regions of the country – e.g., northeast, Midwest, south, and west – in
presidential elections. There are indeed notable differences (see Figure 3):
Figure 3. White voting by region in US Presidential elections, 1972-2008. 69

1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008
Dem 34% 49% 38% 42% 45% 44% 51% 52% 50% 52%
Whites in
Repub 65 50 52 57 54 36 37 44 49 46
Northeast
Indep – – 10 – – 19 10 4 – –
Dem 32 46 37 35 42 40 45 44 43 47
Whites in
Repub 65 52 55 64 57 39 43 53 56 51
Midwest
Indep – – 7 – – 22 10 2 – –
Dem 29 47 35 28 32 34 36 31 29 30
Whites in
Repub 76 52 61 71 67 49 56 66 70 68
South
Indep – – 3 – – 18 8 1 – –
Dem 36 44 32 33 41 39 43 43 45 49
Whites in
Repub 60 54 55 66 58 37 44 51 54 48
West
Indep – – 10 – – 24 9 4 – –
Compared to other regions, whites in the South have voted the most solidly Republican in
every presidential election since 1972. 70 Various explanations have been given for this
difference, and some scholars have suggested that the southern difference has been driven
largely by factors other than white racism. 71 As Dan Carter says, while there is some
regional difference in this regard, recent research indicates that South is “not really
another country”; white racism still plays a significant role in southern politics, but in a
way that is not all that different from the role it plays in other regions. 72
This last point might seem to be contradicted by the relative success of
Democratic presidential candidates among white voters in the northeast since 1992 (see
22

Figure 3). In each presidential election since 1992 the Democratic candidate for president
won either a plurality or majority of the white vote in that region. Recall, though, that
since 1992, following the lead of President Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party has moved
to accommodate the white problem, especially the opposition of most white voters to
policies that aim to overcome racialized inequality. More generally, as Orfield notes, by
the late 1960s white racial liberalism, represented in Congress by the liberal wing of the
Democratic Party, had already “turned its back on the problem of the [urban] ghetto.” 73
Since then the Democrats have largely abandoned any serious policy efforts to redress
racialized inequality. 74
III. Obama and the White Problem
In this section I will address, finally, in two parts, the matter of Obama and the
white problem. First, I will discuss the 2008 election. Second, I will turn to the bigger
picture, with special attention to the mid-term Congressional elections of 2010.
The 2008 election
In 2008, Barack Obama faced the white problem in large part simply as a function
of being the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. As I have explained, since the late
1960s the white problem has become an ongoing challenge for Democrats. Beyond this
general factor, the most obvious way in which Obama confronted the white problem was
with respect to whether, as a black candidate, he could win enough white votes to win the
Democratic presidential nomination and then the November 2008 general election. Early
in the presidential primary season Obama garnered substantial support from whites
Democrats who participated in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, in
two overwhelmingly white states. And he continued to receive considerable white
23

support in subsequent Democratic primaries even as he became the favorite among black
voters in Democratic primaries. Nonetheless, questions about Obama’s viability in the
general election persisted. For instance, at an ignoble moment in Hillary Rodman
Clinton’s campaign against Obama for the Democratic nomination, in May 2009, Clinton
asserted that she would be the stronger candidate against the likely Republican nominee,
John McCain, because she would attract a wider base of popular support than Obama.
The crux of her case was that she would do better than Obama among white voters since
“Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans,
is weakening.” 75
Obama himself had exhibited an awareness of the white problem even before his
presidential campaign. In his political memoir, The Audacity of Hope, in 2005, Obama
wrote, “Rightly or wrongly, white guilt has exhausted itself in America.” Even
sympathetic whites who genuinely wished “to see racial inequality ended and poverty
relieved” tended to resist “race-specific claims based on the history of discrimination in
this country.” 76 During his presidential campaign he self-consciously distanced himself
from a black “grievance based politics that alienated white support.” 77 Obama gave one
striking example of his stance in 2007, before he entered the presidential race. He
suggested that it now made sense to revise affirmative action to take account of class-
based disadvantage alongside race-based (or racism-based) disadvantage. This would
involve, on the one hand, extending affirmative action to “white kids who have been
disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty” as well as to middle-class and poor African
American kids. On the other hand, in light of how “race and class still intersect” in our
society, this might mean that some African Americans, such as his daughters, should be
24

treated as “pretty advantaged” with respect to such things as university admissions
policies. 78
Then, in March 2008, in the wake of media attention given to fiery statements
continuing anti-black racism in the US by his pastor in Chicago, the Reverend Jeremiah
Wright. Given how his association with Wright might have might have undermined his
claims to be a post-racial candidate, Obama gave a major speech on race, “A More
Perfect Union,” in Philadelphia to distance his views from Wright’s. As Sugrue
comments, Obama used the moment to deliver what for a major US political figure was
an unusually “learned disquisition on race.” He addressed directly “the nation’s deep-
rooted divisions by acknowledging the troubled past and its current legacy.”
Simultaneously, his speech was an “endorsement of normative colorblindness,” affirming
his departure from black grievance based politics.
Sugrue usefully summarizes four major themes in Obama’s speech. The themes
enabled him to confront the country’s history of racism, but within limits conditioned by
the white problem:
First, Obama acknowledged ongoing racial divisions – although, notably, he mostly

put them in the past tense. Second, he suggested the moral equivalence of black
anger at discrimination and white backlash. Third, he celebrated hybridity and,
building on the themes of his autobiography, branded himself as the embodiment of
an alternative America where racial distinctions blur into something new. Fourth,
he called for a “more perfect union” of black, white, and Latino, working-class and
middle-class, bound together by a common national purpose. 79
For present purposes, the way Obama joined the first two themes is especially significant.
He emphasized that past racism has deeply shaped the present reality for African
Americans: “So many of the disparities that exist in the African American community
today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from the past.” And, using scholarly
25

research, he drew out links between such things as discriminatory policies of the Federal
Housing Administration, from 1934-68, and the current black-white wealth gap. 80 He
maintained that the anger and skepticism that black Americans sometimes feel towards
white America regarding ongoing discrimination and disrespect “is real; it is powerful”;
and it is a mistake “to condemn it without understanding its roots.” 81 Simultaneously, to
convey his sympathy with working class whites, Obama undercut his message about
ongoing racial injustice by suggesting a moral equivalence between black anger and
white racial grievances. 82
Shortly before the general election, Frank Rich addressed the white problem in his
column in the New York Times in an uncritical manner that was instructive for what he
missed about it. Rich cited recent racially-coded missteps by white Republicans – the
collapse, in 2006, of the re-election campaign of George Allen, the US Senator from
Virginia, when he called a 20-year-old Indian America ‘macaca’ before a largely white
audience; and, in 2008, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s “odes to
‘real’ and ‘pro-America’ America” and Republican presidential candidate John McCain
calling Obama’s tax plan “welfare.” The ineffectiveness of these racially resonant appeals
to white voters, Rich said, demonstrated that the Republican Party was out of step with
most white Americans, who are not racist. 83 “As we saw in the Democratic primary
results and see now in the widespread revulsion at the McCain-Palin tactics, white
Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. … It’s past time
to come to the unfairly maligned white America’s defense.” 84 In short, Rich maintained –
rightly, it turned out – that Obama did not face the kind of white problem that would
undermine his ability to win the election. As Tim Wise puts it, by 2008 “old-fashioned
26

bigotry” had retreated sufficiently among white Americans so that too few voted against
him for racial reasons to ensure his defeat. 85 Yet, as Wise also notes (speaking in terms of
“white denial”), this does not mean that the white problem has fully abated, particularly
in its more subtle aspects.
Relatedly, during the 2008 campaign some black scholars, bloggers, and activists
who supported Obama’s candidacy expressed some worries about possible negative
consequences for the goal of racial justice if he succeeded in becoming the country’s first
black president. Chiefly, they worried that his victory might, in the words of New York
Times reporter Rachel Swarns, “make it harder to rally support for policies intended to
combat racial discrimination, racial inequities and urban poverty.” 86 Roderick Harrison, a
black sociologist who supported Obama, said, “I worry that there is a segment of the
population that might be harder to reach, average [white?] citizens who will say: ‘Come
on. We might have a black president, so we must be over it.’ … That is the danger, that
we declare victory” even as the struggle that has not been completed. Harrison also
worried that (in Swarns’s words) “poor blacks will increasingly be blamed for their
troubles.” As Swarms explains, the concern is that “growing numbers of white voters and
policy makers will decide that eradicating racial discrimination and ensuring equal
opportunity have largely been done.” Consequently, Obama’s success may make it
“somewhat more difficult to advance an ambitious public policy agenda that helps
blacks.” 87 As I will discuss in the next section, there is some evidence to support these
worries; and as some of Obama’s black supporters have said, Obama himself has
reinforced the idea that the country “has transcended race … by rarely focusing on racial
discrimination and urban poverty while campaigning.” 88 Yet the larger narrative here also
27

misses what Frank Rich missed in his “defense of white Americans”: since 1968 a
majority of white Americans persistently have mobilized and voted – even while
affirming basic equality of all persons before the law – in ways that already have made it
nearly impossible to advance an ambitious public policy agenda to eradicate racial
inequality and secure equal opportunity.
In the actual election, despite speculation about whether he might lose the election
due to weak support white voters, Obama did relatively well among white voters
compared with other recent Democratic presidential candidates. He won 43% of the
white vote nationally (against Republican John McCain’s 55%) compared to John
Kerry’s 41% of the white vote in 2004 (against Republican George W. Bush’s 58%) and
Al Gore’s 42% of the white vote in 2000 (against Bush’s 54%). There are a variety of
estimates of how Obama fared among white working class voters in particular (based on
different definitions of “working class” 89); it seems pretty clear that he lost to John
McCain among this group, which before the late 1960s was a core part of the Democrat’s
New Deal coalition. In Michael Tomasky’s summary, CNN’s exit polls, which reported
results with reference to both income and education categories, found that “among whites
making less than $50,000 (25 percent of the electorate), Obama ran respectably, losing to
McCain by just 51 to 47 percent nationally. However, among ‘white – no college’ (39
percent of the electorate), McCain won by 58 to 40 percent.” 90 Focusing on class
differences alone, Andrew Gelman and John Sides note that “on average, Democrats, not
Republicans, do better among low-income voters.” 91 In the present context, however, this
fact is misleading. It has been true in recent elections only when all low income voters
are included, so that the Democrats relative weakness among low income non-Hispanic
28

white voters is made up for by their relative strength among low income black, Hispanic,
and Asian voters. Obama beat McCain solidly among all of the latter groups taken as a
whole (across all income groups). He won among black voters 95% to 3-4% for McCain;
among Hispanics (and/or Latino/as), Obama beat McCain 66% to 31% McCain; and
among Asians, 62% to 35%. (Democrats Al Gore, in 2000, and John Kerry, in 2004, also
won handily among these groups. See Figure 2, above).
The significance of Obama’s modest gain among white voters nationally
compared to Gore and Kerry is called into question, however, once we consider that 2008
was a quite unfavorable election year for Republicans. The economy was weak (and
turned for the worse shortly before the election) and President George W. Bush was
becoming increasingly unpopular along with the war in Iraq. 92 Michael Lewis-Beck and
Charles Tien have even calculated, plausibly though controversially, that given the
“unparalleled economic crisis … the Obama victory should have been much bigger” than
it actually was. They suggest that “a portion of the electorate could not bring itself to
vote for a black candidate.” 93
In the end, one thing is clear about white voting in 2008. Running as a moderate
racial liberal, Obama did not avoid the white problem and it has not vanished. 94 While he
won the overall popular vote against McCain by a comfortable margin (53-46%), he lost
by an even larger among white voters (43-55%). What enabled him to win the popular
(and electoral) vote was both his strong margin of victory among non-white voters
(including Hispanic or Latino/a voters who might identify racially as “white”) and the
fact that the white portion of the electorate shrunk and non-white portion of the electorate
expanded in 2008 compared with previous presidential elections. 95 Among white voters,
29

Obama also received strong support in one age group – he beat McCain 54-44% among
white voters 18-29 years old. (Obama lost to McCain 41-57% among Whites 30-44 years
old, 42-56 among Whites 45-59 years old, and 41-57% among Whites 60 and older. 96)
Gelman and Sides suggest that this strong Democratic voting among young voters might
echo across subsequent elections “[b]ecause political preferences are formed and
developed during early adulthood and tend to be stable over the lifespan.” 97 There is little
reason to conclude, however, that this solid support for among young white voters for
Obama heralds an upcoming end to the white problem. On the whole, young white
Americans (steeped in hip hop popular culture) appear relatively comfortable with the
idea of a “multi-racial” America and supportive of the Democrats’ social liberalism. Yet,
given Obama’s caution with respect to racial issues, including the way he has continued
the Democrat’s retreat from policies to explicitly redress racialized inequalities, the
electoral support for Obama among young whites is consistent with the perpetuation of
the white problem in the form of white normativity: the refusal among white Americans
to recognize and redress the long history and continuing effects of structural racial
discrimination in the United States.
The bigger picture
Beyond the 2008 election, the white problem persists in ways and that have had a
significant on public policies goals and possibilities in Obama’s presidency. The white
problem, as I have already suggested, continues to work (especially through white voting
patterns) to block policy initiatives aimed at overcoming racialized inequality and
ensuring equal opportunity. I suggest, moreover, that the white problem exemplifies a
30

form of status politics of the sort that Richard Hofstadter compellingly identified as a key
element of US politics in the mid-1950s.
The Obama administration has been constrained in its policy initiatives by the
financial crisis and recession of 2008-09. His major domestic policy achievement in his
first term has been his health care reform, a major domestic policy initiative but also a
“colorblind” rather than a race-conscious (or specifically anti-racist) policy. Less noticed
has been how his administration, through the Department of Justice, has stepped up
enforcement of existing antidiscrimination law. 98 More widely noticed has been Obama’s
inability to quickly turn around the recessionary economy, arguably for reasons largely
beyond his control. 99
The popular response to these developments in the first two years of the Obama
administration recalls some of the more intemperate earlier manifestations of the white
problem. Obama’s leadership and governance has spurred the growth of the
overwhelmingly, white, anti-tax, and anti-government Tea Party movement. 100 One
outrageous expression of the white problem was the claim by former Fox News network
host Glenn Beck, in August 2009, that President Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for
white people or the white culture." 101 Yet Beck’s comments, while extreme, appear to be
indicative of widespread social status anxieties among white Americans for which
Obama may be serving as a lighting rod. 102 The political commentator Christopher
Hitchens addressed this after the rally in Washington, on August 28, 2010, organized and
promoted by Glenn Beck (held on the 47th anniversary of the epochal civil rights
movement March for Jobs and Freedom, in 1963). Hitchens said that one feature of “the
American subconscious” was surfacing:
31

It is the realization that white America is within thinkable distance of a moment
when it will no longer be the majority. This awareness already exists in places like
Texas and California, and there have even been projections of the time(s) at which
it will occur and when different nonwhite populations will collectively outnumber
the former white majority. … [N]obody with any feeling for the zeitgeist can avoid
any feeling for the symptoms of white unease and the additionally uneasy forms
that its expression is beginning to take. 103
Hitchens noted that the summer of 2010, before that mid-term congressional elections,
was marked by a series of events that highlighted this “new anxiety”: “beginning with the
fracas over Arizona’s immigration law, gaining in intensity with the proposal by some
Republicans to amend the 14th Amendment so as to de-naturalize ‘anchor babies, cresting
with the continuing row over the so-called ‘Ground Zero’ mosque,” and culminating with
Beck’s Christian religious revival rally in August at the Lincoln Memorial. 104 All this has
been supplemented, moreover, by continuing allegations “that Obama is either foreign-
born or a Muslim.” Gil Scott-Heron would say that this “ain’t no new thing.” 105
Further evidence to this effect came from a survey done by the Public Religion
Research Institute in November 2010, which found “significant divides over attitudes
toward discrimination, particularly over the question of whether whites currently face
significant discrimination.” The Institute summarized its findings as follows:
Forty-four percent of Americans believe that today discrimination against whites

has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.
A majority of those identifying with the Tea Party (61%) and Republicans
(56%) say that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination
against blacks and other minorities, a view shared by only 28% of Democrats and
49% of independents. White evangelicals are the only religious group in which a
majority (57%) agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a
problem as discrimination against minorities. 106
Again, this is no new thing. Sugrue notes that by the 1970s, most whites maintained “that
blacks were equal,” and “by the 1980s and 1990s, a sizable majority went even further
32

and contended that blacks enjoyed advantages over whites in many arenas of life because
of programs like affirmative action in hiring, college admissions, and government
contracting.” 107 The pervasiveness of such beliefs among white Americans reveals the
tenacity of the white problem in the form of white ignorance. As Charles Blow
commented in The New York Times shortly after the publication of the report by Public
Religion Research Institute, “There’s a mound of scientific evidence … that documents
the broad, systematic and structural discrimination against minorities [in the US].
Where’s the comparable mound of documentation for discrimination against whites.
There isn’t one.” 108
These anxieties seem to have congealed in white voting during the November
2010 mid-term congressional election when, as President Obama said, voters gave a
"shellacking" to him and the Democrats. 109 Republicans picked up 63 previously
Democratic seats in the US House of Representatives to take control of the House with a
majority of 242 Republican seats to 193 Democratic seats; and Republicans picked up 6
Democratic seats in the Senate to narrow what was a large Democratic majority to a
small Democratic majority of 53 seats (including two independents who caucus with the
Democrats) to 47 Republican seats. 110 One key factor in the voting – along with low
turnout among black and young white Americans – was a notable shift among a sizeable
portion of white Americans who had supported Obama in 2008 to supporting Republican
candidates in 2010. In an election in which proposals to redress racialized inequality were
nowhere on the agenda, the results offer at least tentative support for another aspect of the
white problem: the ongoing and short-sighted way that many (but certainly not all) white
Americans have come to associate almost any redistributive taxation and social welfare
33

provision by the federal government (such as Obama’s health care policy) with the
promotion of black or “minority” interests at the expense of white interests. 111
Writing in The New Republic shortly after the mid-tern election, John Judis
suggested that Obama himself deserves some of the blame for the magnitude of the
Democratic loss. Deep structural crises, like the recent financial crisis and recession,
Judis says, “present presidents with formidable challenges, but also great opportunities.”
And in the current case, President Obama arguably failed in two respects: “His economic
program … was too timid, as many liberal economists recognized; and Obama proved
surprisingly inept at convincing the public that even these efforts were necessary.” 112
Judis may be right that some shortcomings in Obama’s leadership likely explain at least
part of the Democrats’ “shellacking” in the 2010 election. For my present purposes, what
is more important is the shift in white voting between 2008 and 2010.
Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin summarize the voting among white voters and
“minority” voters in 2010 as follows:
Minorities: Voters in 2010 were 78 percent white and 22 percent minority. The
minority figure represents a decline of four percentage points from the 2008 level
of 26 percent. This is a sharp drop by recent standards. … Congressional
Democrats carried Hispanics 64-34 percent in 2010, not far off their 68-29 percent
performance in 2008 and their 69-30 percent showing in 2006. Black voters were
even stronger for Democrats—90-9 percent—which is in line with their votes of
93-5 percent in 2008 and 89-10 percent in 2006.
White Voters: White voters were a different story. They supported
congressional Republicans by 60-37 percent. This 23-point margin compares to an
eight-point margin for congressional Republicans in 2008 and a four-point margin
in 2006. The 23-point margin among whites is also higher than it was in two other
very good Republican congressional years: 19 points in 2002 and 16 points in 1994.
And the 60 percent share of the white vote is higher than that attained in either one
of these years—or in any other recent year. 113
34

Judis adds, “Republicans increased sharply their margin among white voters without
college degrees, who made up 39 percent of the electorate. In 2008 House races,
Republicans carried this group by 54 to 44 percent; this year, it was 62 to 35 percent.” 114
In short, compared to 2008, the Democrats in 2010 lost considerable support among
white voters. This stands in contrast to their relatively steady appeal to non-white voters
in the two elections.
Certainly, we should be cautious about projecting the white problem too quickly
on to these results. Yet, it is important to recall that the white problem continues to
operate, often unnoticed (at least among white Americans), as a powerful background
feature of US electoral politics. Moreover, further evidence about the 2010 election,
when joined with the previous point, strongly suggests that the 2010 election results (i.e.,
the Democrats’ “shellacking”) should indeed be understood in light of the white problem.
According to a more detailed public opinion exit poll data for 2010 (by Edison Research)
reported in the National Journal,
white voters not only strongly preferred Republican House and Senate candidates
but also registered disappointment with President Obama’s performance, hostility
toward the cornerstones of the current Democratic agenda, and widespread
skepticism about the expansive role of Washington embedded in the party’s
priorities. On each of these questions, minority voters expressed almost exactly the
opposite view from whites. 115
In addition, as some black activists and commentators worried before the 2008 election,
there is some evidence that among some white Americans Obama’s presidential victory
in 2008 has been taken as an indication that the legacy of racism in the US is no longer a
problem. Those who hold this view also believe that there is less need than there was
previously for policies to remedy racial injustice. 116 Once again, the prevalence of such
35

political and public policy views among white Americans is no new thing. Rather, it is
the continuation of a pattern – a post-civil right era re-articulation of the white problem –
that goes back to the late 1960s. 117
IV. White Status Politics
This re-articulation of the white problem, I suggest, exemplifies the kind of status
politics that Richard Hofstadter examined in the mid-1950s. Hofstadter argued that
“intense status concerns of present-day politics” in the US were especially resonant
among members of two groups: “old-family, Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” members of the
once dominant ethnic group who were losing their special status; and “many types of
immigrant families, most notably … the Germans and Irish, who are very frequently
Catholic.” 118 Members of the former group perceived slippage in their relative social
status in the American status hierarchy, and members of the latter group, the “new-family
Americans,” “had their own peculiar status problem.” These people, who came en mass
to the United States (more than 23 million of them), mostly from southern and eastern
Europe, between 1881-1920,
have been … made to feel inferior by the ‘native stock,’ commonly being excluded
from the better occupations and even from what has bitterly been called ‘first-class
citizenship.’ Insecurity over social status has [for them] thus been mixed with
insecurity over one’s very identity and sense of belonging. Achieving a better type
of job or a better social status and becoming ‘more American’ have become
practically synonymous. 119
This status politics has special salience in the United States, as a nation of immigrants,
Hofstadter adds, “because a very large part of the population suffers from one of the most
troublesome of all status questions: … they are tormented by the nagging doubt as to
whether they are really and truly and fully American.” 120 Furthermore, changes in social
36

mobility at mid-century triggered a “pseudo-conservative” revolt that was a chief effect
of the new status politics – an aggressive right wing political activism that pre-figured the
current Tea Party movement. The history of American political and economic
development, including successive “waves of new immigrants, each pushing the
preceding waves upward in the ethnic hierarchy[,] … made it possible to satisfy a
remarkably large part of the extravagant status aspirations that were aroused.” Yet this
pattern was changing: “Today that elevator no longer operates automatically, or at least
no longer operates in the same way.” 121
Hofstadter offered important insights into the American status politics, but he
whitewashed a key aspect of the history that non-white commentators like Baldwin and
Vine Deloria, Jr. have corrected. 122 Although Hofstadter spoke at some length of the role
of “ethnic prejudice” in the “the American race for success,” he said little about the role
of white racism in the American “ethnic hierarchy.” 123 And writing before the emergence
of whiteness studies, he did not consider how “American-ness” had come to be associated
with racial whiteness. 124 Moreover, while he discussed perceptively the search for
identity and belonging among many Americans (“many people do not know who they
are,” he says 125), he did not consider that those groups he called the “new-family
Americans” were in the process of becoming accepted as full-fledged white people and,
therefore, as full-fledged Americans. 126
In the mid-1950s, when Hofstadter was writing, opportunities for Americans to
work their way “upward in the ethnic hierarchy” were significantly conditioned by
whether or not they were regarded as white people. This situation persists in different
ways for different groups of non-white Americans. 127 At the same time, as Baldwin
37

noted, two groups, African Americans and Native Americans, have long been stepping
stones over which other groups have climbed the American ethnic (or ethno-racialized)
status hierarchy. 128 In this vein, the psychologist Kenneth Clark, writing a decade after
Hofstadter, regarded the white problem as a central feature of American status politics:
Americans insist that they have developed a classless society at the same time that
they contradict their claims of absolute democracy and equality every day living. …
… The white Americans’ espousal of the American creed … is the expression of
their desire for equality, security, and status – for themselves. The presence of the
American Indian, and the continued presence, pressures and demands from the
American Negro provide for the American white not only an irritation, but in a
complex, paradoxical way, a basis for subjective satisfaction. … It would probably
be a psychological calamity for the average American white, for the Negro either to
disappear or for him to succeed in translating the words and promises of democracy
into day to day reality. 129
Clark’s remarks undoubtedly captured something basic about the white problem,
circa 1964, in the fading moments of the Jim Crow era, but they now seem overdrawn.
Even so, he highlighted some ongoing facets of the white problem. For instance, evidence
that I have discussed already indicates that in the post-civil rights era many white
Americans routinely join a commitment to the “American creed” of equal opportunity
and equal justice under the law with a whitewashed reading of American racial history.
And they combine social status anxieties with beliefs about the classlessness of American
society. Accordingly, they typically regard white racism and racialized inequality are
things of the past; and the election of Barack Obama as the US President confirms this
picture. In this spirit, the day after Obama’s election an article in the New York Times
declared that Obama’s victory swept “away the last racial barrier in American politics
with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.” 130
Status politics operates now, in our age of austerity, in league with widespread
economic insecurities and deepening class-based inequalities. These economic anxieties
38

make it difficult for working class and middle class white Americans to regard
themselves as racially privileged; and they make it relatively easy (and convenient) for
them to deny or evade black (and other not white) experiences of American history. So,
the white problem persists. It persists when white Americans regard affirmative action in
education and employment as “reverse discrimination” (harming white people); when
they regard programs to address urban poverty and racial inequality as necessarily
placing unfair burdens on “hard working white Americans”; and when they insist that
redistributive taxation and public spending (e.g., for education, health care, and housing)
necessarily entails excessive government interference with an already achieved equality
of opportunity. 131 And in the face of demographic changes within the US (e.g., a
shrinking of the white majority) and a gradual eclipse of US global dominance, the white
problem also persists in the difficulty that white Americans have – given the myths of
America – in accepting that, as Baldwin says, “America [and the wider world] is not, and
never can be white.” 132
V. Conclusion
Regarding the enduring character of the white problem in the Obama era, Thomas
Sugrue makes an crucial point in his assessment of how Obama played to the prevailing
racial dynamics of US electoral politics during his 2008 campaign: Obama’s caution
concerning racial issues throughout the campaign “was evidence of his realpolitik, but
more importantly a reminder of how the persistence of how the rhetoric of color
blindness obscured the persistence of the color line and marginalized those who had the
audacity to challenge it.” 133 This is another way to say that the white problem continues
39

to constrain and distort debates in US politics about racial justice, equal opportunity, and
the proper role of government, often in ways that go widely unnoticed.
Several responses to the problem have been offered, each of which has either
moral (i.e., social justice) or practical political limitations. I will briefly discuss three
such proposals – two related proposals, by Thomas Byrne Edsall and William Julius
Wilson, and James Baldwin’s more radical proposal to end the white problem. Edsall’s
proposal in his book (with Mary D. Edsall), Chain Reaction, is the most conservative. He
maintains that many white voters – especially suburban whites – routinely interpret
economic challenges as well as debates about “moral values” through a “racial filter.”
They regard Democratic policies “as favoring blacks and as redistributing declining
resources to blacks,” this this often leads them to favor Republicans over Democrats at
the expense of more egalitarian public policies. 134 From this Edsall draws the following
lesson. If the Democrats hope to succeed electorally to enact more egalitarian tax,
spending, and regulatory policies, then they need to develop “a conscious awareness of
precisely what the electorate will politically support, what it will not, and when – if ever
– something more important is at stake.” 135 On the surface, this sounds like a
commendable (small d) democratic proposal, and it resonates with the outcome of the
2010 mid-term – that the Democrats will fail to advance their goals as long as they
advance policies that diverge too much from what a majority of the electorate will
support politically. That said, while it is consistent with the moderate racial liberalism of
the Obama administration, it is morally objectionable: it involves continued pandering to
the white problem of white Americans and, thus, to accepting the perpetuation of racial
injustice.
40

William Julius Wilson’s proposal is similar to Edsall’s and also consistent with
the policies of the Obama administration. He contends that for progressives to pursue
successfully a relatively egalitarian politics, they need to adopt a largely “race-neutral
strategy … to build support for a mass-based economic agenda.” The goal would be to
develop a multiracial coalition that would “emphasize the benefits to all groups who are
struggling economically in America, not just poor minorities.” 136 Progressives need to
“acknowledge racially distinct problems and the need for remedies like affirmative
action,” but they should emphasize “transracial solutions to shared problems.” 137 Even
while supporting affirmative action, however, Wilson proposed a revised version of it –
taking account of class-based as well as racial disadvantages (along the lines that would
later advocate Obama). Overall, this amounts to a plausible if not yet fully successful
political strategy: to put aside a distinctly “race-conscious” (or racial justice) emphasis to
bring more white voters into an effective multiracial electoral coalition that could enact
policies (like Obama’s health care reform) that would stem rising social inequality. Yet,
like Edsall’s approach, Wilson’s strategy arguably would sacrifice claims of racial justice
(or anti-racist claims of social justice) to political expediency.
Finally, in the wake of the political tragedies and disappointments of the 1960s,
Baldwin offered a more utopian vision: that to overcome the white problem white
Americans stop thinking of themselves as white. 138 He maintained that the interplay of
"race" and class inequalities undermined the achievement of an "American dream" that
would be worth celebrating. In "An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" (1971),
Baldwin refined his view of white American innocence: "The will of the people, in
America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but …
41

sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically
… victimizes whites and blacks alike.” Most white people were reluctant to “admit this
(though they suspect it) and this fact contains a mortal danger for the blacks and a tragedy
for the nation." 139 Faced with this situation, white Americans’ self-deluded identification
as white threatens not just the equal dignity and well-being of black Americans, but also
the freedom and well-being of most white Americans and of the nation as a whole:
[A]s long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness … they will allow
millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into
and surrender themselves to what they will think of – and justify – as a racial
war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance
between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel
themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible
for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. 140
The deeper battle going on in the United States was more of a class than a “race war – a
struggle between "the forces that rule this country" and the majority of people, Black and
white, who were carrying out the slaughter in Vietnam and working as "the instrument[s]
of someone else's profit": "What [white] Americans do not realize is that a war between
brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the
American delusion is not only that the brothers are all white but that all whites are their
brothers." 141
Ultimately, Baldwin’s proposal is a revolutionary call for working class
mobilization across artificial racial divisions. Its “transracial” aspect aligns with the
proposals of Edsall and Wilson. Yet Baldwin’s view has implications that are more
consistent with the demands of racial justice than the proposals of Wilson and Edsall, but
also more politically improbable. Most important his Baldwin’s claim that the struggle
for social justice – and racial justice, specifically – demands that white Americans stop
“Americans tak[ing] refuge in their whiteness.” A peaceful democratic equalitarian
42

revolution that overturn racial capitalism would be the ultimate aim. More modestly,
though, white Americans would have three immediate tasks before them to achieve a
more just society: first, to recognize their whiteness for what it chiefly is, a forms of
power and social capital that upholds a social order of racialized inequities; second, to
acknowledge the reality of Baldwin’s “version of the [American] story”; and, third,
integrating these insights substantively into their understandings of social and racial
justice.
The white problem remains deeply entrenched, however. For the foreseeable
future, the prospects for anything resembling Baldwin’s radical strategy may depend in
part on imminent demographic changes to the US population. Tomasky notes, “The white
population, around 68 percent today, is expected to be 61 percent by 2020 and 50 percent
by 2050.” 142 This indicates the possibility of a social justice coalition comprised on non-
white Americans along with anti-racist whites (or “whites”). Yet this is only a possibility.
Just as likely, perhaps, is a new divide among blacks and not-black people in which many
non-white (but not black) people would increasingly come to act whitely – that is, to
ignore or evade the racial contours of the American ethno-racial status hierarchy – to
perpetuate white normativity and continue the white problem.
1
James Baldwin, in Baldwin, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Gunnar Myrdal, "Liberalism and the
Negro: A Round-Table Discussion," Commentary 37 (March 1964), p. 37.
2
Matt Bai, “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?,” The New York Times Magazine (August 2008), at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10politics-t.html?_r=1 (accessed September 24, 2010).
3
John H. Johnson, “Publisher’s Statement,” Ebony, August 1964, p. 27.
4
Richard Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” p. [5].
5
Ibid., p. [9].
6
Part of this historical evasion concerns ignorance or misrecognition about the fraught history of how
various ethnic groups now accepted unquestionably as white people were not always so readily counted as
white (e.g., Irish, Italian, Greek, and eastern European Jewish immigrants at different times in the 19th and
20th centuries). Conversely, part of this historical forgetting or denial has been manifest in a recognition
that not all “white ethnic” groups in the United States have been equally accepted or affirmed as
“Americans” combined with the false belief that the challenges faced by members of these groups were
43

thus comparable to those faced by non-white Americans. See James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority,” in
Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell Publishing, 1961); Baldwin, “Introduction to Notes of
a Native Son, 1984,” in Baldwin: Collected Essays, pp. 808-31; David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness;
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; and Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White
People.
7
David R. Roediger, “Introduction,” to Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White, ed.
Roediger (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), p. 9. Roediger’s book is a valuable collection of such
writings from 1830 to the 1990s. Charles Mills has developed the idea that whiteness does not designate a
biological race or color but a form of power in The Racial Contract.
8
Raphaël Tardon, “Richard Wright Tells Us: The White Problem in the United States” (from Action
[Paris], 24 October 1946, pp. 10-11), in Conversations with Richard Wright, ed. Keneth Kinnamon and
Michel Fabre (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), p. 99.
9
James Weldon Johnson, quoted in Lerone Bennett, Jr. “The White Problem In America,” Ebony, August
1964, p. 30.
10
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, quoted in Bennett, “The White Problem,” p. 30. In 1967, calling
for continued reform, Myrdal said, “the fundamental fact is that the power in this country is on the side of
the whites.” See Donald McDonald, “An Interview with Gunnar Myrdal,” Britannica Annals of American
History, at Answers.com, at: http://www.answers.com/topic/an-interview-with-gunnar-myrdal (accessed
February 2, 2011).
11
Bennett, “The White Problem,” p. 32.
12
Ibid., p. 29.
13
Ibid., p. 29.
14
Ibid., p. 32.
15
Ibid. In noting that white Americans live their whiteness in different ways, including even anti-racist
ways, Bennett makes a point that anticipates a point that Charles Mills makes about the closely issue of
“white ignorance” (which may be another way to speak of the white problem): “White ignorance is not
indefeasible …, and some people who are white will, because of their particular histories (and/or the
intersection of whiteness with other identities), overcome is and have true beliefs on what their fellow
whites get wrong.” See Charles W. Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Race and the Epistemologies of
Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: The State University of New York Press,
2007), p. 23.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
W.E.B. Du Bois did not use the phrase “the white problem,” but he perhaps developed the most
comprehensive account of it, including an incisive account of the interplay of white racism and class
division within US capitalism. See W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction; Joel Olson; … .
19
Bennett, “The White Problem,” p. 36.
20
Ibid.
21
Baldwin, "Liberalism and the Negro," p. 27.
22
James Baldwin, "On Being 'White' … and Other Lies" (1984), in Black on White, p. 180.
23
For a more complete account of Baldwin’s view of the white problem, see Bruce Baum, “James
Baldwin’s ‘Discovery of What it Means to be an American,’” in Racially Writing the Republic: Racists,
Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity, eds. Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 263-80.
24
James Baldwin, "The White Problem," in 100 Years of Emancipation, ed. Robert A. Goldwin (Chicago:
Rand McNally, 1964), p. 80.
25
Ibid., p. 82.
26
Ibid.
27
Baldwin, "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel," p. 126.
28
Baldwin, "The White Problem," p. 83.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid., p. 84.
31
Ibid., pp. 84-86.
32
James Baldwin, “Dark Days” (1980), in Baldwin: Collected Essays, p. 788.
33
Baldwin, "Liberalism and the Negro," p. 37. See also Baldwin, "WP," p. 87.
44

34
See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks.
35
James Baldwin, in Baldwin, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Gunnar Myrdal, "Liberalism and the
Negro: A Round-Table Discussion," Commentary 37 (March 1964), 25-42, at p. 32.
36
37
James Baldwin, "The Price of the Ticket" (1985), in Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New
York: Library of America, 1998), p. 835.
38
39
Baldwin, "The Price of the Ticket" (1985), in James Baldwin: Collected Essays, p. 835.
40
Baldwin, "The Price of the Ticket," p. 836.
41
Baldwin, "On Being 'White',” pp. 180, 178-79.
42
On “whitewashing,” see Michael Eric Dyson, Pride (New York: Oxford University Press/ New York
Public Library, 2006), pp. 53-54.
43
James Baldwin, quoted in Roediger, “Introduction,” to Black on White, p. 22.
44
Baldwin, "An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis," in Angela Y. Davis (and other political
prisoners), If They Come in the Morning (New York: Signet/ New American Library, 1971), p. 22.
45
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press,
[1967] 1968), p. 68.
46
p. 2.
47
{Find quote from rpt, quoted in Wicker, p. ix.}
48
Gary Orfield, “Race and the Liberal Agenda: The Loss of the Integrationist Dream, 1965-1974,” in The
Politics of Social Policy in the United States, ed.,Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 314.
49
Ibid.
50
Orfield, “Race and the Liberal Agenda,” p. 334.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., 336, 338.
53
Edsall, Chain Reaction.
54
James R. Kluegel, “Trends in Whites’ Explanations of the Black-White Gap in Socioeconomic Status,
1977-1989,” American Sociological Review 55 (August 1990), p. 521. Kluegal notes that some of those
whites who oppose policies to promote racial equality based on individualistic understanding of the black-
white economic gap may in fact be racist but “unwilling to give socially undesirable responses” in a survey
(p. 524).
55
Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review; George Lipsitz, The Possessive
Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Joel Olson, “Whiteness and the
Polarization of American Politics,” Political Research Quarterly 61 (December 2008), pp. 704-18.
56
Olson, “Whiteness and the Polarization of American Politics,” p. 709.
57
See Harris, “Whiteness as Property”; George Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness.
58
Baldwin, “The White Problem,” p. 86.
59
Mills, “White Ignorance,” p. 28.
60
Kluegel, “Trends in Whites’ Explanations of the Black-White Gap in Socioeconomic Status,” p. 513.
61
The “Wallace/other” category includes the independent candidacies of Henry Wallace (1948), George
Wallace (1968), John Anderson (1980), and Ross Perot (1992, 1996).
62
This chart is adapted from the New York Times National Exit Polls Table, November 5, 2008.
See http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national-exit-polls.html (accessed April 3, 2011).
63
See John Woolly and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, for 1948 election:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1948 (accessed April 3, 2011). In the southern
states the electorate at the time was almost exclusively a white electorate. Thurmond’s segregationist
campaign in 1948 has had an instructive afterlife. Most recently, speaking at a 100th birthday and retirement
celebration for Thurmond, in December 2002, Senate Republican leader Trent Lott of Mississippi provoked
strong criticism by saying the United States would have been better off Thurmond had won the presidency
in 1948: "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him.
We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these
problems over all these years, either." Controversy over Lott’s remark led him to resign from his position
as Senate Republican leader. See Thomas B. Edsall, “Lott Decried For Part Of Salute to Thurmond,” The
45

Washington Post, December 7, 2002, p. A06, at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-
dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A20730-2002Dec6 (accessed April 6, 2011).
64
Orfield, “Race and the Liberal Agenda,” pp. 347-48.
65
Orfield uses the estimate of 60%. The American National Election Study estimated that Nixon and
Wallace together won about 64% of the white vote compared to 36% for Humphrey (see Figure 1, above).
The Gallup Poll estimated that Nixon won 47% of the white vote, Wallace 15% (for 62% together), and
Humphrey won 38%, while 85% of “nonwhite” voters voted for Humphrey, 12% for Nixon, and 3% for
Wallace. See http://www.gallup.com/poll/9457/election-polls-vote-groups-19681972.aspx (accessed April
3, 2011).
66
The American National Election Study, which is probably a bit less reliable, had Clinton winning 46% of
the white vote and Dole 44% with Perot winning 8%.
67
In his first presidential campaign, in 1992, Clinton had already defined himself as a centrist Democrat in
part by promising to "end welfare as we know it." See Dan Froomkin, “Welfare’s Changing Face,”
Washington Post, July 23, 1998, at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/politics/special/welfare/welfare.htm (accessed March 25, 2011).
68
On Clinton, see Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 84-85.
69
Figure 3 is adapted from the New York Times National Exit Polls Table, November 5, 2008. See note 63,
above.
70
The midwestern white vote in 1976 was a minor exception to this trend. The way that whites in the
Midwest allocated their votes between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates that year was
nearly identical to how just Southern whites allocated their votes.
71
For an argument about the decline in southern exceptionalism due to the primacy of economic
development and an associated class politics in southern voting, see Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston,
The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Harvard
University Press, 2006).
72
Dan T. Carter, “Is There Still a South? And Does it Matter?,” Dissent 54 (Summer 2007), online version:
http://dissentmagazine.org/article?article=870 (accessed February 16, 2011).Carter, “Is There Still a
South?,” pp. 2, 6. Gary Gerstle notes that the history of “northern white antipathy towards Blacks” – for
instance, among working-class and lower-middle-class whites in Detroit and Chicago – actually goes back
“not to 1963, but to the very dawn of the integrationist era – the 1940s.” See Gary Gerstle, “Race and the
Myth of the Liberal Consensus,” The Journal of American History 82 (September 1995), p. 583.
73
Orfield, “Race and the Liberal Agenda,” p. 314.
74
There was also a notable gender gap between male and female white voters and it is likely that the
overall relative success of Democratic presidential candidates among with voters in the northeast in these
elections is attributable to strong support among white women. Consider the following: Figure 4.
Aggregated voting nationally of white men and women (all regions), 1992-2008. (Adapted from the New
York Times National Exit Polls Table, November 5, 2008.)
1992 1996 2000 2004 2008

Dem 37 38 36 37 41
White
Repub 40 49 60 62 57
men
Indep 22 11 3 – –
Dem 41 48 48 44 46
White
Repub 41 43 49 55 53
women
Indep 19 8 2 – –
75
Kathy Kiely and Jill Lawrence, “Clinton makes case for wide appeal,” USA Today, May 8, 2008, at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-05-07-clintoninterview_N.htm (accessed April
6, 2011). See also Andrew Hacker, “Obama: The Price of Being Black,” The New York Review of Books
(September 25, 2008), at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/sep/25/obama-the-price-of-
being-black/ (accessed February 2, 2011).
46

76
Barack Obama, quoted in Sugrue, Not Even Past, p. 116.
77
Sugrue, Not Even Past, p. 118. See also Eduardo Bolilla-Silva, “When Whites Love a Black Leader:
Race Matters in Obamerica,” Journal of African American Studies 13, nos. 2 (2009), p. 178.
78
See Jeff Zeleny, “Obama Says He’d Roll Back Tax Cuts for the Wealthiest,” The New York Times, May
14, 2007, at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/14/us/politics/14talk.html?ex=1336795200&en=820edcad112bb051&ei=
5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss (accessed April 7, 2011); Kevin Drum, “Obama and Affirmative
Action,” The Washington Monthly, May 14, 2007, at:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_05/011305.php (accessed April 7, 2011). As
one commentator noted, this marked a notable shift among recent Democratic presidential candidates away
from firm support for race-based affirmative action. See David Paul Kuhn, “Obama shifts affirmative
action rhetoric,” Politico, August 10, 2008, at: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12421.html
(accessed April 7, 2011).
79
Sugrue, Not Even Past, p. 118.
80
Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” quoted in Sugrue, Not Even Past, p. 119.
81
Ibid.
82
83
Frank Rich, “In Defense of White Americans,” The New York Times, October 26, 2008.…
84
Ibid.
85
Tim Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009), p. 9.
86
Rachel L. Swarns, “Blacks Debate Civil Rights Risk in Obama’s Rise,” The New York Times, August 25,
2008…
87
Ibid. For a critical discussion of such worries, see Lawrence Bobo, “President Obama: Monumental
success or secret setback?,” The Root, July 17, 2008, at:
http://www.theroot.com/views/president-obama (accessed April 14, 2011).
88
Ibid.
89
See Michael Tomasky, “How Historic a Victory?,” The New York Review of Books (December 18, 2008),
at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/dec/18/how-historic-a-victory-2/ (accessed April 10,
2011); Andrew Andrew Gelman and John Sides, “Stories and Stats: The Truth about Obama’s victory
wasn’t in the papers,” The Boston Review 34 (September/October 2009), p. 16.
90
Tomasky, “How Historic a Victory?”
91
Gelman and Sides, “Stories and Stats,” p. 16.
92
Ibid., p. 15.
93
Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien, “Race Blunts the Economic Effect? The 2008 Obama
Forecast,” PS: Political Science and Politics 42 (January 2009), p. 21.
94
See Timothy Noah, “What We Didn't Overcome: Obama won a majority of votes. He didn't win a
majority of white votes,” Slate, November 10, 2008. See http://www.slate.com/id/2204251/ (accessed
March 13, 2011).
95
Michael Dawson notes, “The 2008 electorate was nearly 25 percent non-white; t was only 20 percent
non-white as recently as 2004. In 1976 the non-white percentage was only 10 percent.” See Michael C.
Dawson, response to Gelman and Sides, “Stories and Stats,” Boston Review 34 (September/October 2009),
p. 22.
96
See http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/national-exit-polls.html (accessed April 3, 2011).
97
Gelman and Sides, “Stories and Stats,” p. 19.
98
Sugrue, Not Even Past, pp. 129-30.
99
The official US unemployment rate was 6.8% in November 2008, 7.8% in January 2009, 9.4% in May
2009, 9.7% in August 2009, 10.1% in October 2009, 9.7% in January 2010, 9.5% in July 2010, 9.7% in
October 2010, and 9.8% in November 2010. The rate declined in December 2010, to 9.4%, and in March
2011 to 8.8%. See the United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Unemployment rate,
March 2008–March 2011, at: http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110406_data.htm (accessed April
10, 2011).
100
Cite NYTimes article on Tea Party demographics.
101
Beck made his remarks in response to President Obama's reaction to the arrest of Harvard University
Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who is black, outside of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gates
47

was arrested by a white policeman for disorderly conduct due to a misunderstanding that stemmed from a
report that someone – who happened to have been Gates – was attempting to break-in to Gates' home.
Obama initially said that he thought that the police had acted “stupidly” in the case. See “Fox News host
says Obama is ‘a racist,’” Today Television, MSNBC, at:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/32197648/ns/today-entertainment/ (accessed April 10, 2011).
102
David Owen makes a compelling related argument that much of the aggressive criticism of Obama’s
health care reform in the summer of 2009, while superficially non-racial, served “the reproduction of …
norms of whiteness.” That is, it reinforced “the norming and privileging of the interests, needs, and values
of whites.” See David S. Owen, “Othering Obama: How Whiteness is Used to Undermine Authority,” Altre
Modernità: Rivista di studi letterari e culturali, nos. 3 (2010), pp. 116, 115.
103
Christopher Hitchens, “White Fright: Glenn Beck’s rally was large, vague, moist, and undirected – the
Waterworld of white self-pity,” Slate, August 30, 2010, online at: http://www.slate.com/id/2265515/
(accessed March 12, 2011).
104
Hitchens, “White Fright.”
105
Gil Scott-Heron, “Ain’t No New Thing,” from Free Will (Flying Dutchman/RCA Records, 1970).
106
“Old Alignments, Emerging Fault Lines: Religion in the 2010 Election and Beyond,”
Findings from the 2010 Post-Election American Values Survey, Public Religion Research Institute,
November 17, 2010, at: http://www.publicreligion.org/research/published/?id=428 (accessed March 12,
2011).
107
108
Charles M. Blow, “Let’s Rescue the Race Debate,” The New York Times, November 19, 2010, at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/opinion/20blow.html (accessed March 12, 2011).
109
Matt Spetalnick and Steve Holland, “UPDATE 2-Subdued Obama says suffered a voter ‘shellacking,’"
Reuters, November 3, 1010, at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/11/03/usa-elections-obama-
idUSN0312598020101103 (accessed April 10, 2011)
110
Republicans also picked up six previously Democratic governorships (to give them 29 to the Democrats
20, with one independent seat). See 2010 Election Results, The New York Times, at:
http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/governor; http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/house;
http://elections.nytimes.com/2010/results/senate (accessed April 10, 2011).
111
See Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness, p. _____.
112
John B. Judis, “A Lost Generation: Obama deserved to lose—but the country doesn't deserve the
consequences,” The New Republic, November 3, 2010,
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/78890/a-lost-generation?page=0,1. Judis notes the curious fact that
when voters were asked in exit polls “who was most to blame for ‘current economic problems,’ a plurality
of … [them] said ‘Wall Street bankers’ rather than George W. Bush or Barack Obama. But amazingly,
these voters backed Republicans by 56 to 42 percent.” (p. 2).
113
Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, “Job Loss and Liberal Apathy: A new interpretation of the 2010 election
results,” The New Republic, November 5, 2010, http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/78936/jobs-and-
apathy-drove-the-election (accessed Nov. 9, 2010).
114
Judis, “A Lost Generation.”
115
Ronald Brownstein, “White Flight,” National Journal, January 7, 2011, at:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/in-2012-obama-may-need-a-new-coalition-20110107 (accessed
January 11, 2011). To give one example: “The vast majority of minority voters said that they wanted
lawmakers to expand the health care (54 percent) or maintain its current form (16 percent), while only 24
percent said they wanted Congress to repeal it. Among with voters, the sentiments were almost inverted: 56
percent said that lawmakers should repeal the law, while much smaller groups wanted them to expand it
(23 percent) or leave it alone (just 16 percent)” (ibid., p. 3).
116
Cheryl R. Kaiser, Benjamin J. Drury, Kerry E. Spalding, Sapna Cheryan, and Laurie T. O’Brien, “The
ironic consequences of Obama’s election: Decreased support for social justice,” Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology 45 (2009) 556–559.
117
Lipsitz, Possessive Investment, pp. 18-23.
118
Hofstadter, “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” [p. 6?].
119
Ibid., [p. 6].
120
Ibid., p. 7.
121
Hofstadter, “Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” [p. 9].
48

122
See Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins.
123
Ibid., p. 9. He makes passing reference prejudice against Jews and “Negroes” (p. 8).
124
This blind spot was itself perhaps a symptom of the white problem. As I noted earlier, blacl writers in
the US, like Du Bois, had long understood how “American-ness” was associated with whiteness. See
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks.
125
Ibid., p. 5.
126
See Roediger, Frankenberg, Brodkin Sacks, Jacobson, Olson, Painter.
127
George M. Fredrickson, “America's Diversity in Comparative Perspective,” The Journal of American
History 85 (December 1998), pp. 859-75; Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities, chs. ___.
128
Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority.” Likewise, writing ten years after Hofstadter, the psychologist
Kenneth Clark, argued that with the exception of Native Americans and Africans, the United States was,
indeed, a “haven” and “land of opportunity” for many oppressed minorities who “were driven to become a
part of this new nation by some sort of personal or group insecurity.” See Kenneth B. Clark, “What
Motivates American Whites?,” Ebony, August 1964, p. 71.
129
Clark, “What Motivates American Whites?,” p. 73.
130
Adam Nagourney, “Obama Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls,” The New York Times, November
4, 2008, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/05elect.html (accessed April 12, 2011).
131
Charles Gallagher on aff action; Edsall.
132
Baldwin, “Price of the Ticket,” p. 836; Baldwin, “The House of Bondage,” in Baldwin: Collected
Essays, pp. 801-07. See also Ronald Dworkin, “The Historic Election: Four Views,” The New York Review
of Books, December 9, 2010.
133
134
Edsall, Chain Reaction, pp. 27-28, 4-7.
135
Ibid., p. 31.
136
William Julius Wilson, “Bridging the Racial Divide,” The Nation 269 (December 20, 1999), pp. 22, 21.
137
Ibid., p. 22.
138
Baldwin, "On Being 'White' … and Other Lies."
139
James Baldwin, "An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" (1971), in Angela Y. Davis et. al., If
They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, with a foreword by Julian Bond (New York: Signet
Books, 1971), p. 22. The context for this was Davis's imprisonment at the time and the US government's
continuing war against Vietnam.
140
Baldwin, "An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis," p. 22.
141
Baldwin, "An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis," pp. 22-3.
142
Tomasky, “How Historic a Victory?”
49

Barack Obama and the White Problem

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Barack Obama and the White Problem

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Barack Obama and the "White Problem"

The University of British Columbia

Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association,

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

– James Baldwin, "Liberalism and the Negro" (1964) 1

uniquely to President Barack Obama. My concern is with a central problem of US

post-racialism – symbolic and substantive – in Obama’s campaign and policies reinforce

a wider post-racial or “colorblind” tendency of US public policy, which reinforces a

continuing white normativity in US citizenship. The typical US citizen is conceived

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

publisher and editor of Ebony magazine, provided a succinct introduction to it in his

then prevalent popular discussions of the US “race problem”:

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

Obama’s first term in office – especially in the mid-term election of 2010.

This phenomenon, I suggest, can be understood as of version of the kind of status

politics that Richard Hofstadter insightfully discussed in a prescient essay, in 1954, on

they are conscious, it is difficult to give them a programmatic expression.” 4 Hofstadter

part on their ability to become accepted as white people.

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

opportunities, and freedoms faced by all Americans. 6

The persistence of the white problem continues to have a profound effect on US

(a form of power, as Charles Mills says), it is politically shifting and historically

I. The White Problem

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

oppression and inequality in the United States.

An American Dilemma (1942) of “the Negro problem,” it increasingly became clear to

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

Bennett likewise conceived of the white problem largely in terms of palpable

In elucidating these aspects of the white problem, Bennett acknowledged that

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

conditioning through non-Communist radicalism or liberalism.” 15

in the dominant American culture:

deeply sedimented. We will overcome it thoroughly only insofar as we approach it from

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

dare to confront the ravage and the lie of their history.” 22

American,” signified “a catalogue of virtues.” 25 Yet insofar as Americans confront the

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which has nothing to do with the lives we lead.” 27

country called America." 29 American mythology enables white Americans to deny or

reassure us that no crime was committed." 30

Consequently, insofar as white Americans understand themselves as white

themselves a fantastic system of evasions, denials, and justifications, which system is

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

to his childhood experience of the Great Depression:

To be black was to confront, and be forced to alter, a condition forged in history.

to the European immigrant experience. In a round-table discussion on "Liberalism and

perspective reflected in comments by the philosopher Sidney Hook about "rising

social status applied uniquely to European immigrants,

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participation in American society. 37 Consequently, due to their naïve and self-serving

than black people can afford to be." 38

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contends that politically it certainly became a white country – a country governed by

problem: a naïve investment in a politically sanitized (or “whitewashed”) mythology of

II. The White Problem Revisited: the Post-Civil Rights Ear

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

white problem is an unchanging feature of US politics.

National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission

commitment to national action on an unprecedented scale can shape a future compatible

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

the black movement by 1966.” 50

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1767048

whether discrimination was still an issue.” Orfield observes:

bussing, “welfare,” and affirmative action. 53