The Republican National Committee had this picture of President Obama posted on their Facebook page for nearly a week.  Since Obama’s election, public and pundits alike have been grappling with the idea of America being a “post-racial” society; a society that supposedly no longer needs the benefits of inclusionary or equal opportunity programs.   After all, we must have achieved equality if a man of mixed-racial heritage with a name like Barack Hussein Obama can be elected President.  Right?  But what if instead of equality, we have achieved a liberation of racism and its many incarnations?

In this NPR interview, the participants shared their unique perspective on race and racism in America since Obama’s election.  Each had a personal experience to share and perhaps surprisingly, most of their experiences were with the types of overt racism that the majority of America might attribute to a time long before the day when we could elect a black President.  Raymond Winbush, Director of The Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University shared the following experience:

“Well, I had a rather mundane experience that happened about a week after Obama’s election. And I got into a taxi in New York, and people were still in this kind of euphoric state. And this white cab driver turned around, you know, rather matter-of-factly and said well, now that you guys have the country, what are you going to do with it?  So I asked him, you know, I started deconstructing the language. I said: Who are you guys? I thought we all had the country, and what did you guys do with it? And it was a fairly heated discussion, and I was surprised because it was kind of like a drive-by racial moment that I had to, you know, talk about quickly in the length of time it took to get from Lower Manhattan to, you know, Midtown. And that to me epitomized how people feel the racial divide: It’s your country or my country. And this our-country stuff is more – you know, it depends on who you talk to. ” (emphasis added).

Mr. Winbush describes the current climate in American racial politics as almost a win/lose situation, each side feels like they lost when the other appears to win control or power or influence.  More striking though is Mr. Winbush’s experience at a broader level- what made that taxi driver feel that he could or should address Mr. Winbush in that manner?  Has racism come out of the closet once again?   Keli Goff, a political blogger at theloop21.com attributes the more blatant use of racism to the growing fear that America is being “taken over” or “occupied” by minority populations.

“And so there is something that sort of struck me about the fact that when someone gets so angry that they feel the need to put in writing -call someone of color a banana-eating jungle monkey, you know, which is the type of language that I don’t think even David Duke would have been so silly as to put in writing, and yet when someone feels so angry they need to do that, when someone feels so angry they need to rip up a poster of Rosa Parks, when someone feels so angry that they need to call a member of Congress the N-word and put it in writing, that says to me that that’s someone who’s angry – not just angry but afraid that they’re losing their country.”

This anger and fear has led to a distinct phenomenon which Mr. Winbush identified later in the talk, “people are feeling freer now to talk about race in some of the most ugly ways.” Clarence Page, syndicated columnist from the Chicago Tribune, responded to Mr. Winbush and said that Obama’s election seems to have essentially liberated people from the burden of political correctness.   The question then becomes, what is it about the election of a non-white President that led to people feeling more free to express their feelings about race, racism and racial disparities?  And where will that freedom lead us in the future?  Will we become a more open society willing to dialogue about difficult racial issues, or will the incidence of hate crimes rise?