Is race dying?

More than a third of black Americans no longer believe that blacks are a single race. This finding has alarmed some -- but it could help America out of its racial mess.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Racial Issues, African-Americans, Race, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Barack Obama

Nov. 27, 2007 | Ever since 9/11 and President Bush's response to it, all other issues in the United States have faded into insignificance. When jets were smashing into skyscrapers and U.S. troops were invading an Arab country, it was hard to care about anything else. And one of the things that America stopped paying attention to was race.

It's hard to believe that just a few years ago, issues of black vs. white dominated the national discourse. The Rodney King riots and the O.J. Simpson case inspired endless discussions and reams of editorial soul-searching. Affirmative action and racial preferences, multiculturalism, and political correctness were fraught topics. Then the twin towers fell, and suddenly we had a completely new enemy to worry about.

During the Katrina debacle, images of thousands of impoverished blacks jammed into the New Orleans Superdome brought the scandalous reality of black poverty back into view. But the moment passed. Today's most charged racial issue, immigration, doesn't involve blacks at all, but Latinos. The painful legacy of slavery -- which, along with our de facto genocidal campaign against its native inhabitants, is America's primordial racial trauma -- is no longer at the center of the national consciousness.

In some ways, this timeout from race is a positive development. The old black-white dialogue was going around in circles, trapped by rigid assumptions and stultifying formality. The great breakthrough of the civil rights movement, sadly, failed to erase the subtlest and most powerful barriers: internal ones. Whites learned to acknowledge the history of racism, foregrounding their own racial guilt. That was necessary but insufficient. It resulted not in racial enlightenment but racial politeness. Politeness is far better than open bigotry, of course, but it is still a superficial response, an early stage on the road to Martin Luther King's dream of a society in which people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. By taking a break from race, we gave simple human interaction a chance to work.

But the sidelining of race has also been calamitous. Regardless of the progress made in racial attitudes, the existence of the black underclass is an ongoing scandal. More than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education ended de jure racial segregation in this country, poor urban blacks continue to be a group apart, plagued by disproportionately high rates of crime, incarceration, drug use, and poor health. Inner-city black children go to bad schools, live in substandard housing, eat bad food, are disproportionately raised by single mothers, and are exposed to a pathological street culture in which aggressive demands for "respect," ugly misogyny and the crudest markers of male machismo are valorized, while education, self-discipline and personal responsibility are dismissed as "acting white."

It's a peculiar moment. The white reaction to Barack Obama shows that the old I'm guilty, you're innocent, everyone-bow-and-return-to-their-corner two-step is no longer useful. Obama's race is still a factor, of course, but it is far less of one than anyone could have imagined even 10 years ago. Many whites are not just ready but eager to embrace a black man who has opted out of that worn-out racial dance. Yet the crisis of the black underclass rages on, and America seems less interested than ever in tackling it. And until that crisis is addressed, it will continue to cast a shadow over all black-white relations.

But this split reality contains within it the possibility of a breakthrough. After spending billions of dollars to try to stabilize neighborhoods in Baghdad, perhaps now Americans will be prepared to invest in the war zones in their own country. This may sound like pie in the sky, but there's reason for hope. Something amorphous but potentially transformative is happening -- and, critically, it's happening within the black community itself. According to a recent NPR/Pew poll, 37 percent of blacks agreed with the statement that blacks today are so diverse they can no longer be considered a single race. Among the youngest respondents, aged 18 to 29, a staggering 44 percent agreed.

This is extraordinary. More than a third of the blacks who responded, and almost half of the young blacks, have rejected the cornerstone of American racial politics: black racial solidarity. If the poll is accurate, the most emotionally charged and immutable racial truth, the one-drop rule, is no longer sacrosanct for a large number of black people.

Next page: Race itself is beginning to fade away