Wasserman on race

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: October 29, 2008

Speaking of race, Ed Wasserman has produced an interesting column about the impact of race on the presidential campaign. In short, Wasserman says race can’t help but be an issue in the campaign—but not in the way you might think.

What’s odd is that while this election is historic precisely because of the major-party candidacy of a man who, under U.S. standards of race, is black, race goes unaddressed. Instead, race is both everywhere and nowhere, overriding and unacknowledged, a presence rather than a set of concrete issues. It stalks the conference room, uninvited, and never gets to sit at the table with the subjects that matter.

It’s as if Obama’s candidacy has both made race a signature fact of the campaign, and removed it—and the policy concerns to which it’s normally linked—as an issue.

... But surely, how race might tilt the vote isn’t the only racial issue worth reporting. What about exploring what an Obama victory would do to race relations? What would become of the myriad, passionately divisive policy issues that have been inextricably tied to race for the past half-century: the huge population of young black males behind bars, early childhood intervention, job training, the war on drugs, poor housing, the whole reality of race-tainted social justice? We’re beyond those? Even the subprime lending debacle, which disproportionately hit minority homeowners, has been whitewashed into a race-neutral industry bailout.

Read the rest here.