Looking Backward and Forward from Election Day, 2008

Most American voters appear to support Barack Obama for the presidency. The fact that the presumed winner is a young man with little national governing experience, a middle name shared with a notorious villain, and a last name only one letter away from that of the United States’ public enemy number one is extraordinary. Add to that, of course, that his mother is white and his father African, so our presumed next president will be nonwhite, or even “black.”

Unsurprising as these observations are, it still seems worthwhile to underscore just how astonishing this outcome will be if it occurs. Here are a few facts that might help those under age 25 understand better why those of us over age 50 are walking around with dropped jaws.

In my lifetime, blacks in some southern communities were in grave physical danger if they did not step off the sidewalk when a white person approached them. During my childhood, Virginia’s governor and many educators closed entire public school systems for years so that schools could not be desegregated. When I was in my teens, black and white activists were murdered for trying to ensure the franchise for black citizens. As recently as my young adulthood, three-fourths of whites agreed in a national survey that “blacks shouldn’t push themselves where they’re not wanted.”

The idea that a black man would within a few decades be elected president with strong white support would have seemed ludicrous to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. just as much as to Malcolm X or George Wallace.

Almost as astonishing to people of a certain age is the fact that Obama’s main rival in the Democratic primaries was a woman. Here too it is worth recalling a few facts to remind those under 25 how much the world has changed since their faculty were young.

In my teens, a best-selling book, “The Feminine Mystique,” amazed and shocked readers by asserting that women were not fully satisfied by submerging their identities completely in the wishes and actions of their husbands and children. When I entered college, women’s dormitories had housemothers, midnight curfews, open-door requirements for dorm rooms, and sign-in sheets for male guests. When I entered graduate school, the female students held their annual meeting to inform newcomers which male faculty could be trusted always, sometimes, or never (we took careful notes). Just a few years later, a prominent professor wondered in a faculty meeting if female graduate students were like the wolf children of Avignon, and never would overcome their unsatisfactory childhood socialization. Over a third of both men and women agreed in the General Social Survey as late as 1974 that “women should take care of running their homes and leave running the country up to men”

No wonder that we cannot stop reading political blogs, obsessing about the newest poll, and struggling to find something in the political science literature to explain this election.

Questions remain, of course, about the long-term impact of Obama’s presumed election. Here are a few that will keep me busy in research and teaching:

How much of Obama’s ability to obtain whites’ support was due to his unusual racial heritage—the grandparents from Kansas, the father in the United States on a student visa, the visible and unembarrassed biraciality? Is it now possible that white voters will be equally enthusiastic about an African American candidate descended from slaves?

Will Obama be constrained to maintain a race-neutral political and policy persona in order to keep other minorities’ and whites’ support? After being elected, if he is, can he discuss illegal immigration, the achievement gap, black male incarceration, or affirmative action without alienating too many voters? More generally, can he talk openly about racism, nativism, and structural impediments to nonwhites’ success, along with talking about parental responsibility and personal excellence?

Might an Obama presidency “push the prospect of a Latino Democrat getting elected further into the future than it would have been otherwise,” as one scholar has observed in an e-mail listserv? More generally, how will political coalitions or, conversely, electoral competition among people of color be affected by an Obama presidency?

How will daily interactions between whites and nonwhites change? Will there be less discriminatory treatment in jobs, health care, education, or the criminal justice system? Conversely, will people of color see racial consciousness as more optional and less necessary, so that their identity as an economic conservative or stamp collector can come to the fore?

Might the worst-off blacks (say, young men in inner cities) be just as badly off, or even worse off in relative terms, under a Democratic administration that “spreads the wealth around?” That is, even if the top four economic quintiles, say, are made better off over the next few years, can those gains reach down into the few American communities that are deeply poor, dangerous, ill-educated, jobless, and isolated?

Even Barack Obama will not solve all of America’s problems of race, class, and gender in the United States over the next few years. Nevertheless, we can pause to savor how far our nation has come in recent decades, before tackling the huge and fascinating questions that lie before us as students, scholars, and citizens.

Jennifer Hochschild is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government , Professor of African and African American Studies, and Harvard College Professor.