[The rhetoric of post-racial liberalism] wasn’t something invented by the current President[,] [r]ather, it has its roots in the period immediately following the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s. It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for instance — an advisor to President Johnson before becoming a United States Senator — who first suggested that the nation would do well to engage in “benign neglect” when it came to the issue of race.

According to Moynihan, persistent inequities between whites and blacks could best be addressed by the passage of race-neutral, universal programs to help all in need; that, in addition to focusing on presumed cultural defects in the black community, from single parent families to crime to an inadequate attachment to education and the labor market. While conservatives made some of the same arguments about so-called black cultural pathology during this period, what distinguished post-racial liberalism from the new cultural racism of the right was its stated commitment to reducing racial disparities, albeit by non-racial means.

By the late 1970s, the leading herald of post-racial liberalism was University of Chicago sociologist, William Julius Wilson, an African American scholar (now at Harvard) whose books, The Declining Significance of Race, and later, The Truly Disadvantaged, put forth the two main pillars of post-racial thought. The first of these was that racial inequities were now mostly the result of race-neutral factors like deindustrialization, the mismatch between jobs (increasingly in suburbs) and people of color (who lived mostly in cities), and inadequate investment in education and other public goods. The second pillar of Wilson’s position was the political calculation that white backlash to things like affirmative action now made it necessary to push universal, race-neutral solutions to those problems, rather than race-specific programs and efforts. In short, we needed to talk less about racism, and more about class.

It is this race-neutral approach (which involves both a rhetoric of racial transcendence and a colorblind public policy agenda), which Barack Obama advocated in his best-selling policy book, The Audacity of Hope. And it is this same approach that he endorsed all throughout the campaign for the Presidency, and which he has articulated consistently since winning the election. When asked about persistent health disparities between whites and blacks, for instance, Obama has maintained that universal coverage and making health care more affordable for all is the best way to close those gaps. When asked about the depression-level job situation in communities of color (in which even blacks with college degrees are nearly twice as likely as their white counterparts to be out of work, and college educated Latinos 2/3 more likely than similar whites to be unemployed), Obama has insisted that a “rising tide lifts all boats,” and so the stimulus package and other measures to get the economy “moving again” are the best remedies for the suffering of folks of color.

But as I show in my new book, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity, President Obama and other adherents to the post-racial liberal philosophy are flatly wrong. In fact, not only are they wrong about the ability of “universal” programs to reduce racial disparities in health, income or education; they are also wrong about the political value of race-neutral approaches. At the end of the day, avoiding conversations about race will not boost support for progressive social policy, and may in fact undermine it.

Written in 2010, Tim Wise’s commentary and analysis on this topic was dead on. Having been taught by critical race theorist Derrick Bell at Harvard Law, President Obama knows very well that taking a race-neutral approach in a highly-race conscious society is not the solution to address the racial inequality that pervades all aspects of our society. His choices are very political and well calculated. Of course he doesn’t want to piss off racist whites any more than he’s already have by being a person of color in the White House. Notice that less than a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s passage, many of the so-called “liberals” were advocating that “the nation would do well to engage in ‘benign neglect’ when it came to the issue of race” and basically ignore things such as institutional, systemic and societal forms of racism. 40 years later, they are still trying to do same while still believing in the myth that they are racially superior to blacks and other people of color! Smdh. Unfortunately, this is all happening at the expense of the African American community and it must stop. Many of the gains made during the civil rights movement have been eviscerated and given that we have no real political power in this country, we cannot realistically expect that things will ever get better for us unless we mobilize our efforts and follow in the footsteps of our ancestors.  Honestly, based on this country’s history, particularly when it comes to race, I don’t think that there is any person better than Obama or time than now, to address and help  eradicate global white/”Jewish”supremacy once and for all.

Source: http://www.timwise.org/2010/06/colorblind-ambition-the-rise-of-post-racial-politics-and-the-retreat-from-racial-equity/.