Black in the Age of Obama

Alexandra Kennedy was on the inside looking out. For much of the evening, streams of Polo-clad students had sped east across the Princeton campus, flooding Prospect Avenue and breaking in waves against the row of imposing mansions, called eating clubs, where most upperclassmen "take their meals"—and where nearly all undergrads go for their regular dose of dancing, drinking and hooking up. Now hundreds filled Ivy, the oldest of the clubs. Among them was Kennedy. After a season spent clamoring at the door for admission like the rest of the rabble, Kennedy, a svelte, self-assured African-American sophomore with straight, shoulder-length hair and a fondness for cable-knit sweaters, had recently emerged from Ivy's Darwinian "bicker" process—a prim rendition of rush—as one of the chosen few: a member of the club.

It was a natural next step in the Kennedy family story. Alex's father, Henry Kennedy Jr., the son of Southern blacks, arrived at Princeton in 1966 from a middling Washington, D.C., public school. Now his daughter had joined a club where all-black waiters had, until recently, served an all-white membership—a place where, as a guest, her own father had "felt very uncomfortable."

Still, change creates its own complications. As a bouncer restrained the hopefuls and '80s rock blared on the sound system, Kennedy resolved to put her new status to use. Tonight, she decided, she would reach across Ivy's intimidating threshold and distribute her share of admission passes to a select group of beneficiaries: "the black people." "I thought about it," she says. "I know how hard it is for African-Americans to feel welcome in these clubs." But as Kennedy ushered the first lucky recipients inside, a cold voice cut through the crowd. "I was literally on my knees signing passes," she recalls, "and this black girl waiting outside was like"—Kennedy adopts a deeper, mocking tone—" 'This club's racist. They're not letting us in because we're black'." She rolls her eyes. "And for me, I'm like, 'I am standing out here trying to get you in. This isn't a race thing. It's a pass thing'."

Two elite African-Americans on either side of a velvet rope: one feeling excluded, the other exhausted. Such is life on the cutting edge of "post-racial" America, where race isn't supposed to matter anymore. Except when it does.

Linked in the public consciousness to Barack Obama, the term "post-racial" has now expanded to encompass the era his election has ushered in. But in the real world, post-racialism is something of a mirage. Detroit is not post-racial. Neither is Congress, nor Wall Street, nor prime-time TV. Black people pretty much refuse to utter the word, Obama included. For most Americans, it's little more than a convenient cable-news catchphrase.

It's only at places like Princeton—selective, self-sufficient institutions that have spent many years (and millions of dollars) cultivating climate-controlled biospheres of diversity—that anything even remotely resembling a post-racial America is supposed to have taken shape. A quarter century ago, the future Michelle Obama, then a Princeton senior, confessed that her time as a Tiger had left her feeling "black first and a student second"—the result, she wrote, of "a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society … never becoming a full participant." But decades of progress have proved that prediction wrong, propelling Michelle to the White House and creating for her descendants a university that boasts 17 tenured black professors, an ambitious new Center for African American Studies and a black population larger and more integrated than the one she left behind. In 1981, 18 percent of her fellow freshmen were minorities. Last year that number hit 39 percent. Back then the university had perhaps 1,000 black alumni; now it's more like 4,000. At Princeton, the periphery has become the mainstream.