File: powell final for Darby 2009] Created on: 3/15/2009 12:55:00 PM Last Printed: 4/3/2009 10:11:00 AM POST-RACIALISM OR TARGETED UNIVERSALISM 789 both the conservative colorblind proponents and the liberal post-racial proponents assert is that we are all but beyond race. According to this perspective, a few old-style racists may remain, especially in the South, but they, like many civil rights activists, are still stuck in the old paradigm from the past. Apparently, neither of these groups has realized how much conscious racial attitudes have changed, even since Barack Obama was elected President. The post-racialists see the civil rights activists and the explicit racists as locked in a struggle that has already been won. According to this view, it is not just a distraction, it is a divisive. The alternative to this old, tired battle is post-racialism.19 The question of where we are with regard to race then becomes binary. We are either in a divisive space from the past where we continue to assert the dominance of conscious racism, or we are in a post-racial world where race really does not matter to most Americans. To post-racialists, white Americans’ support of President Obama is proof positive that we are in, or rapidly approaching, a new, post-racial era. They argue that young people do not even see race, and that only those persons over forty are still likely to think in racial terms. All we must do is wait patiently, and post-racialism will grow as the older generations pass on. They further assume that there is a direct connection between improved racial conscious attitudes, meaning race-blindness and ending racial inequality.20 While there is a certain intuitive logic to this assumption, it turns out that is often clearly wrong. One way of expressing this racial blindness is to be neutral on the issue of race. There are several problems with this approach. The proponents of this position are apparently most interested in race blindness or neutrality in the design of policy and programs. Less attention is paid to the administration or implementation of policies and programs, and more importantly their effects. It is clear that something that is neutral in design is not necessarily neutral in its effect.21 Yet, the courts and the public are all but obsessed with the design, and even more narrowly with 19. Adolph Reed asserts that we should stop using race and deal with the real issue of class. See Adolph L. Reed, Jr., The Real Divide, PROGRESSIVE, Nov. 2005, at 27, available at http://progressive.org/mag_reed1105. Some post-racialists also use the changing demographic to support the claim that we are beyond race. See RICHARD J. PAYNE, GETTING BEYOND RACE 78 (1998); GWEN IFILL, THE BREAKTHROUGH: POLITICS AND RACE IN THE AGE OF OBAMA (2009). 20. As racial attitudes improved, there has been a move from expressed racial hostility to racial resentment. DONALD R. KINDER & LYNN M. SANDERS, DIVIDED BY COLOR: RACIAL POLITICS AND DEMOCRATIC IDEALS 92-93 (Univ. of Chicago Press 1996). There was also a period where many young Americans rejected materialism. Many assumed that this would lead to a country where materialism would decline as the young became the leaders of the country. But the counter-culture hippie movement did not develop into a less material America. Likewise, we should not assume that the hope we now have will naturally lead to racial nirvana. 21. See Douglas Laycock, Formal, Substantive, and Disaggregated Neutrality Toward Religion, 39 DEPAUL L. REV 993 (1990), and Liza Weiman Hanks, Note Justice Souter: Defining “Substantive Neutrality” in an Age of Religious Politics, 48 STAN L. REV. 903 (1996), for a similar discussion of formal and substantive neutrality in the First Amendment Free Exercise Clause. Justice Souter is critical of approaching neutrality from only a formal perspective. Id. at 922.