Response to a post racial president article

This is a letter that I sent to Victor Davis Hanson, after reading his article entitled "What Happened to Our Postracial President?" in the National Review.

I appreciate your candor in the article "What Happened to Our Postracial President?", but your polarization of the "liberal" left is a bit shallow.  Personally, I grew up in a near majority white progressive town and believed in what could be characterized as "postracial" politics.  I aligned myself with minorities who were systematically kept from political power, jobs, housing and the common litany of discriminatory practices.  But, as a white post-civil rights child, I never felt that I had to understand the brutal past from the perspective of both the oppressor and the oppressed.  That soon came to pass as I arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans and found myself awash in Southern racial (racist) politics and history.  I never would have believed how racist people still are if I had not moved here.  To cut to the point, this country is still deeply racist (and by this I mean something different from what you meant in reference to Reverend Wright, which is prejudice—a point I would also argue against) and has many of the same structural segregationist practices of Jim Crow.   After deeply researching the history of the civil rights movement, the urban riots of the 60s, and housing segregation, it is clear that our national debate on race never actually took place.  All that ever happened was that Congress was forced to imbibe civil rights legislation and Southern states had to adopt pseudo effective anti-discrimination legislation.  White and black southerners still feel much the same as they did before, and discrimination in many sectors continued unabated by legal reforms. It's almost like a Reconstruction mindset, where whites are just waiting for the day when they can reinstitute Jim Crow laws in some backdoor way.  Read up on St. Bernard Parish’s blood relative housing ordinance if you want some food for thought.  Housing segregation, job inequalities, and poor education for a huge majority of segregated urban minorities is still an American reality.  Quite frankly, we as Americans are not ready for a postracial president because we never “understood” (or substitute “felt”) the past injustices that were inflicted.  When you say ”Barack Obama has consistently emphasized racial identity to further his own advantage, I fear others, both black and white, will be emboldened to follow his polarizing lead” you ignore the fact that he still grew up having a similar “black” experience as many Americans have.  He, as with just about every single black American, cannot just abandon “their” history (because it is very different than yours) because we need reconciliation.  Barack Obama is human, and he might not please everyone, but he has been the least polarizing—because your perspective is a white perspective on race—president on race that we might have ever had (even JFK hesitated on civil rights legislation, and Clinton attacked black activists to get Southern votes).  Unfortunately, your assertion that “the president asserted one racial narrative as truth, while most of multiracial America accepted quite another” is a bold-faced white lie.  White conservatives have a very different narrative than the so-called “multiracial America” and they account for the majority of President Obama’s detractors.  If you want a good example of how America missed the boat to really come to a postracial society, read the Kerner Commission report from 1968.  It is an eye-opening account of how reluctant white America is to learn from our “exceptionalism”.