The Unspoken Topic

Geraldine Ferraro put race back on the front burner in the Democratic primaries this week by claiming that Barack Obama owes his success to his skin color. But while racial politics have bubbled up from time to time during the contentious Democratic primary, the two historic candidates thus far have had very little to say about a substantive topic that impacts both women and blacks: affirmative action. Neither Clinton nor Obama (much less John McCain) list affirmative action under the "issues" link on their campaign Web sites, and the subject has gone virtually unexamined during the debates. The silent streak may snap this fall when candidates are forced to take a side on initiatives to ban preference programs in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma--but don't hold your breath, says Walter Benn Michaels, the author of "The Trouble with Diversity," a trim account of how the ideal of racial diversity obscures a larger problem facing the country: the yawning gap between rich and poor. In a recent interview with NEWSWEEK's Tony Dokoupil, Michaels, an English professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, discussed why Ferraro was right, and why affirmative-action reform should be on the national agenda. EXCERPTS:

NEWSWEEK: Do you think it's true that Obama owes his campaign success to the fact that he is black?
Walter Benn Michaels: It's completely true that Obama wouldn't be having the kind of success he's having now if he weren't black. For one thing, he wouldn't be getting 90 percent of the black vote. But, of course, it's also true that Hillary Clinton being a woman matters as much as Obama's being black. How else--under current law--could she be married to Bill, which is what brought her to national attention in the first place?

For a so-called postracial primary season, race certainly seems to be on the tip of everyone's tongue. What do you think of the way the race card has been played?
The reason the postracial primary is so much about race is because you can't get all celebratory about blackness no longer mattering unless a black person is the one who's saying it doesn't matter. And since the Obama campaign understands this very well, they are delighted to attack anyone who suggests or who even appears to suggest that his race does matter. But they're wrong to act as if Ferraro's comments are motivated by racism, and Ferraro's wrong to suggest, as she appears to be doing, that the response to those comments is some kind of discrimination against white people.

This calls to mind the once roaring debate around race-based preference programs. Why has affirmative action been such a non-issue in this primary season?
It's a delicate issue for everybody--but especially for Obama, whose candidacy inevitably plays the postrace card. His advantage is that he is the only person whose success itself suggests that the fundamental issue of inequality in the United States today is no longer race--but class. It's not that racism is over. It's that the major social divide is now between rich and poor, not white and black. It's the problem of the bottom line, not the color line. Therefore, economic-based affirmative action makes a hell of a lot more sense, and if I were Obama, I would come out in favor of it. Will he? Will any one else? I don't think so.

Why not?
A lot of middle- and upper-class black people have an emotional commitment to race-based preference programs as a symbolic issue. Plus those programs produce the pleasant illusion of a national meritocracy: affirmative action guarantees that all cultures will be represented on college campuses and, therefore, that the white students on campus can understand themselves to be there on merit because they didn't get there at the expense of black people. Of course, the idea that we have a meritocracy is delusional. Most kids born today have zero chance of going to Harvard, and not because of their intelligence or their race, but because of their comparative poverty. Their pre-college educations don't qualify them to get through the door.

There was a time when class-based affirmative-action programs had broad support, including backing from civil-rights-era heroes Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Why did the political status quo shift to race-based programs?
The default position in America has always has been that our fundamental issue is race. The reason it remains the default position is that it's more comfortable. A world where some of us are black and some of us are white is a world where our differences present a solution: appreciating diversity. But a world in which some of us don't have enough money is a world where the differences between us present a problem: how to end poverty--or justify it.