A Complicated Record On Race

Students at the University of Chicago, where Obama lectured on constitutional law, do not recall his taking a simplistic position there, either. Erika Walsh, who graduated in 2002 and took Obama's Equal Protection and Due Process class, says she came away with no idea about his personal views on affirmative action, or any other hot constitutional issue. "The way he conducted the class, he wanted you to talk, and he would be provocative," she says. "He could always see where people were coming from, even if he didn't agree." Andrew Janis, who graduated in 2005, took Obama's class on Current Issues in Racism and the Law. Like Walsh, he has no recollection of even discussing affirmative action. Which suggests that either the issue wasn't important enough to make its way onto his syllabus, or Professor Obama wasn't all that fussed about it.

As a lawmaker Obama has never had to confront the issue directly. There haven't been any major votes on affirmative action since he joined the U.S. Senate, nor during his time in the Illinois Senate. When asked about his position, the campaign pointed to his previous statements on the subject, in which he has defended the practice in broad terms. He has called himself "a firm believer in affirmative action." In a 1998 Illinois National Political Awareness Test, Obama answered "yes" to questions asking whether state government agencies should take race and sex into account in "college and university admissions, public employment and state contracting." Following a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2003 that charted a middle ground on affirmative action, upholding the admissions policy at the University of Michigan Law School, Obama was quoted in the Chicago Defender celebrating the ruling and warning people that "George Bush is still looking to replace some members of the court, more conservative members who might end up reversing this opinion."

What Obama has done, as in his comments about his daughters, is try to broaden the question of increasing diversity beyond "race and test scores," as he writes in his most recent book, "The Audacity of Hope": "Affirmative action programs, when properly structured, can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing opportunities for white students." Gerald Kellman, who supervised Obama as an organizer in Chicago, says the two of them never discussed affirmative action specifically, but did talk about programs that "level the playing field." "Not so much advantages in being chosen," says Kellman, "but things like after-school programs, tutoring, summer jobs. Something needed to be done to make up for the things that poverty had denied [African-American and Hispanic kids]." He also says Obama preferred to work through community organizing and community programs wherever possible, rather than legislation.

Asked to speculate how Obama had managed to sidestep so many of the most sensitive issues about race until the Wright story exploded in March, Janis, his former student, says, "Obama never sees race as in its own special camp. For him race and class and gender are all different kinds of social inequality, and they are all interrelated." That nuance has led some opponents to hear what they want to hear in Obama's rhetoric. The Goldwater Institute's Clint Bolick, who is helping Connerly with his anti-affirmative-action propositions, says of Obama, "The fact is that he does not full-throatedly support race-based policies. What Obama is doing is opening the door to needs-based, rather than race-based, affirmative action."

Obama was able to bridge that gap at Harvard, says Ron Klain, who served as Vice President Al Gore's chief of staff and as president of the Law Review two years before Obama: "He did help the institution move forward in a less noxious and much less divisive way." But Klain, an informal adviser to Sen. Joseph Biden's presidential campaign, cautions that Obama's success was partly due to the fact that in such a small group, he could meet with everyone face to face. "In a country of 300 million people, that's a very different enterprise." Obama understands the complexities of race. But affirmative action is one of those issues where partisans tolerate few shades of gray.

With Eve Conant in Washington and Sarah Kliff in New York

© 2008