As Races Blend, Political Groups Face A Recount

Barack Obama's presidential campaign was one of several successful, modern-day political campaigns to break through racial barriers. Is this an indication that our nation is experiencing a generational shift toward political color blindness? In Atlanta, long a nucleus of black political power, a December runoff election could result in the election of a white mayor for the first time in 30 years. Are the tenets of racial identity politics, or appealing to voters solely on the basis of race and self-interest, obsolete? Columnist Ruben Navarrette, who writes extensively on race politics, tells host Liane Hansen "there's a lot of folks that are just over it — they're just over the idea of racial differences." The idea of having a black stronghold like Atlanta is becoming less significant, Navarrette says. "That's a really refreshing trend, but it does seem to show up a lot more with younger people." New Voters, New Paradigm Yet the idea of racial identity politics is ingrained in our nation, Navarrette says. "This is just another version of a very old story in the United States, where other groups come along and sometimes they vote their interests, or they think it's important to have an Irish-American mayor of a city like Boston. It's pretty much in our fabric — it's as American as apple pie." In defense of those interests, efforts to allow people to choose more than one box for race on U.S. Census surveys was opposed by many civil rights leaders and groups like the Congressional Black Caucus. Navarrette says there's a concern about diluting the old paradigm of black and white. "We've become an increasingly multicolor, Technicolor society where people don't fit into either category," he says. If you belong to either one of those camps and someone like Barack Obama comes along, "rather than have him check a box that says multiracial or multicultural, you want him to be in the African-American box if you happen to be African-American." READ FULL STORY
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