Black? So what?

It was extraordinarily moving to watch the faces of all those civil rights fighters on election night.  The people who grew up with real racism — mean, hard, uncompromising racism — and never thought they’d live to see this day.  America has come a long way in only 50 years; Martin Luther King’s dream has come far closer to realization.  And in the process people of all colors have been liberated.  Not least white people — liberated from their prejudices, their fears, their ignorance.

“The down-trodden rise up,”  is a classic story-line and of course it dominated the coverage of the major media outlets.  You have to be particularly cold-hearted not to be inspired by it.  I and Diane certainly went through half a box of tissues on election night …

Yet it seems to me the big story here isn’t that America got its first African-American president.  The big story is that millions and millions of voters didn’t care about issues of race.  These are the people who knew affirmative action but never Jim Crow — people under fifty, predominantly with college degrees — for whom race just isn’t a big deal.  “Yeah, he’s black.  So what?”

In this way, ironically, Obama’s victory closes the book on the civil rights era.  It pushes it right down into history; makes it irrelevant for our time and even more irrelevant for the future.  We cry when we see the tears on the faces of the old fighters, but our tears are theirs, they are not our own.

This is not to say that African-Americans have the same opportunities as white people.  Far from it.  American society is shot through with injustice and discrimination.  But these problems are not about race as much as about class.  What America needs now are equal opportunities not only for black and white, but also for rich and poor.