Post-Racial Leadership: Racialized Mass Incarceration in the Age of Obama

Ian Haney López
Official URL: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=maccivicf

Abstract: President Barack Obama‘s election has inspired many to marvel that we now live in a ―post-racial‖ America. Obama himself seems to embrace this notion, not perhaps as a claim about where we are now, but as a political stance that dictates how best to approach society‘s persistent racial problems. In this essay, I assess Obama‘s post-racial politics. To do so, I use the lens of racialized mass incarceration. Because race is so central to the contemporary administration of criminal justice, it constitutes a particular challenge to the post-racial narrative. When measured in light of mass of imprisonment, what does the claim to be post-racial mean? Obama rejects this term as a temporal claim that we have come to the end of history as far as race is concerned, or as a descriptive claim that race in the United States no longer corresponds to advantage and disadvantage. ―You know,‖ the President recently remarked, ―on the heels of [my electoral] victory over a year ago, there were some who suggested that somehow we had entered into a post-racial America; all those problems would be solved.‖ Then he deadpanned, ―That didn‘t work out so well.
The rejection of post-racial as a temporal or sociological claim seems entirely appropriate, as even the most cursory engagement with American criminal justice at the start of the twenty-first century demonstrates. The United States puts people under the control of the correctional system at an anomalously high rate, shutting behind bars an overwhelmingly disproportionate number of black and brown persons. A 2009 report shows that one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison or on parole or probation; broken down by race, that is one in every 11 African Americans, one in 27 Latinos, and one in 45 whites.
Race remains a stunningly powerful predictor of super- and subordination, ensuring that race has not nearly played itself out in America‘s long struggle for a more perfect union.