The election of an African American president has stirred excitement, but a leading black theologian says visions of a “postracial” America are premature and misguided.

The editors interview M. Shawn Copeland

At the root of her theology, says M. Shawn Copeland, is the pursuit of the question: What is the best, the most worthwhile way to live? While Christians understand that the reign of God is not an achievable result of human endeavors, we are called to make the world around us “our best hope this side of the reign of God.”

For Copeland that charge includes working for political transformation in service to the common good. She told last year’s Convention for the Common Good in Philadelphia, “It is only through the gift of grace realized in human lives and hearts that we can meet the effects of sin with healing and creative solidarity. We here are a little yeast.”

One way in which she works to increase the growth of this “little yeast” is through the teaching of an innovative service learning course at Boston College that combines social service or advocacy work with the study of philosophy and theology.

Copeland is one of today’s leading black theologians and in her most recent research has focused on the exploitation of black women and the lessons from their experiences for discipleship today.

She challenges Christians to let openness to and acceptance of the power of the Spirit lead us to become “more daring in our love of neighbor.”

Since Barack Obama’s election, there has been talk about a new “postracial” era. Some have quoted his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention: “There’s no black America. There’s no white America. There’s only the United States of America.” Is America becoming postracial?

That is wishful thinking. Certainly, given the history of the United States, Obama’s election has been a tremendously important step forward. But if you are asking me, is this “The end of white America?”—as a recent cover story in the Atlantic Monthly put it—the answer is no. I don’t think this is the end of white America, and I don’t think this is the resurgence of black America, whatever those categories might mean.

The enormous disparities around race and poverty in this country not only persist, they’ve hardened.

I don’t think there’s virtue in working toward a postracial anything. We keep thinking if only we could get beyond race, everything would be fine. My best take on this is that we need to acknowledge our differences, but we should not absolutize them. That’s kind of tricky in this country. We want people to be individuals, but we consign those in certain social cultural groups to all the negative stereotypes about that group.

To a certain degree we need to talk about ourselves in terms of our racial identities. But can we simply acknowledge that and then get on to the next thing? Skin pigmentation is one of the least important things about anyone, but in this country we’ve made it the most important thing.

How is race still important today?

Just think about how we’re all congratulating ourselves that we elected somebody black as president. Did we all congratulate ourselves when we elected white men? No, we just took that for granted. But suddenly the election of a black man means, “Oh, aren’t we wonderful? We have solved our race problems.”

The writer James Baldwin said many years ago that if there ever were a black president, that person would still be crippled by the existing structures and relations of power, which determine the way we carry on both our government and our lives together. That’s the challenge for any real change.

So what impact can Obama have on race relations? If nothing else, his presidency should help us to confront our continuing racial stereotypes about people.

But is he going to be held up now as the exception to the rule, with the underlying message, “If only all of you could be like him?.?.?.”? Part of what’s blurring the question is not just his upbringing by a white mother and white grandparents but also the fact that his father was Kenyan, an international student here.

Obama’s story bears features of an immigrant story, it’s not the story of African slaves and their descendants. As an immigrant story, it is more compatible with the typical mainstream American story. But if taken as the norm, the immigrant story, even the one we celebrate within our Catholic story, is truncated because it forgets about all sorts of other people who are not immigrants or descendants of immigrants.

We need to get away from homogenizing what it means to be American. It just perpetuates the notion that the dominant white culture is the standard that others need to blend into.

Americans don’t know enough about our history to develop a more complex alternative story. We remain ignorant of the contributions that different groups have made to our way of life. And because we don’t know other stories, we dismiss them as unimportant and instead focus on just “getting along” with each other.

Race is still being used to manipulate poor white people, so they won’t realize that they have more in common with poor black people than they have with wealthy whites. And to say that black money isn’t green is to say that even affluent black people wind up finding that race remains an obstacle for them despite all their achievements.

The president himself has written how people tossed him their car keys at a restaurant because they thought he was the valet. So there are whole sets of assumptions that we’ve all been operating under for a very long time, and it’s going to take a very long time to undo them.

What’s the greatest danger of pretending we live in a postracial world?

We may want to believe that the ugliest kind of racism is history now, but it’s not, and it’s not going to go away any time soon.

The very night of the election four young men in New York set out to beat up and kill African Americans in retaliation for a black man being elected president. They assaulted at least two black people and one Hispanic man with a metal pipe and then ran their car over another man in a hooded sweatshirt, who they thought was black but who turned out to be white. He ended up in a coma for several days.

The vicious way in which we have dealt with race in this country has not yet been completely redirected. Nobody is born a racist. Nobody is born with these negative ideas and images. But we’ve been bombarded with them everywhere, and so we need to figure out how to unlearn them.

Does lingering racism then serve some kind of a positive role in exposing the continuing existence of hard edges in society?

I can’t really see anything positive in racism, but if we were to think seriously about how we wanted to live together, we would come to some different decisions.

We would begin by asking ourselves why we make the choices that we make educationally, why we make the choices that we make in our personal relations, why we make the choices of where and how we live. Why is it that we have resegregated our schools?

And we would need to reflect on the continuing parallel order of privilege and power and injustice that runs right alongside race.

Having a black president is not going to change any of that. We have to change that.