Beinart’s Paradox

In his Washington Post column, Peter Beinart urges Barack Obama to urge the country to move from a system of race-based affirmative action to a class-based system. This, he says, will pay political dividends. What’s interesting is why he thinks it will pay dividends, namely that it will help Obama appeal to racists:

Notre Dame political scientist David Leege estimates that 17 to 19 percent of white Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents will resist voting for Obama because he is black. [...] Obama needs to bring Leege’s number down. That may be possible, because even racists can be wooed. Think about it this way: Many of the voters who right now won’t vote for Obama because he’s black would probably vote for Colin Powell even though he’s black. That’s because they don’t see Powell as a racial redistributionist, a guy who would favor his community at their expense. There’s no rational reason to believe Obama would, either. But because, unlike Powell, Obama is a liberal Democrat who enjoys overwhelming black support, that’s what many racially hostile white voters assume.

But of course on the merits of the issue, abandoning race-based affirmative action makes sense to the extent that we don’t think present-day racism — as opposed to economic issues that may in some cases reflect the legacy of racism — is a substantial problem. But if racism really is a huge barrier to Obama’s electoral prospects, that suggests that present-day racism really is a substantial problem and we should probably maintain some focus on race per se.