Black americans debate the risks in obama's rise

On the night that Senator Barack Obama accepts the Democratic nomination for president, Roderick Rex Harrison plans to pop open a bottle of bubbly and sit glued to the telecasting with his wife and 12-year-old son.

Rex Harrison, a black demographist, says he expects to feel iciness when Obama becomes the first black presidential candidate to lead a major party ticket. But as the Democratic convention gets under way, Rex Harrison's expectancy is tempered by edginess as he ponders a inquiry: Will Obama's success further the impression that the long battle for racial equality has eventually been won?

Obama has received overwhelming support from black voters, many of whom say he will help span the racial divide in the United States. But even as they cheer him on, some black academics, bloggers and others who follow the race closely worry that Obama's historic achievements may make it harder to rally support for policies designed to armed combat racial favoritism, racial unfairness and urban poorness.

They fear that growth numbers of white voters and policymakers will look at Obama - who base within contact distance of the presidential term - and decide that the work of eradicating racial favoritism and ensuring equal chance in this state is mostly done.

"I worry that there is a section of the population that might be harder to reach, norm citizens who will say, 'Come on. We might have a black president, so we must be over it,"' said Rex Harrison, a 59-year-old sociologist at Leslie Howard University and a adviser for the Joint centre for Political and Economic Studies here.

"That is the danger - that we declare victory," said Rex Harrison, who said he feared that poor blacks would progressively be blamed for their problem. "Historic as this minute is, it does not signify a major victory in the ongoing, daily battle."

Such concerns have been percolating in black intellectual circles for months now, on talk radio and Internet blogs, in dinner conversations, academic meetings and in flurries of e-mail messages crisscrossing the country.

It can be an awkward discussion for Obama supporters who find themselves arguing that the success of their preferred candidate - the man who might become America's first black president - might actually make it somewhat more difficult to advance an ambitious public policy agenda that directly addresses blacks.

Some of Obama's black supporters say Obama himself often fuels the notion that the nation has transcended race by rarely focusing on issues of racial discrimination and urban poverty on the campaign trail.

Other supporters dismiss the notion that Obama's success might undermine support for race-based policies. They say black voters should focus on helping him win the presidency - instead of on speculative debates - because his emphasis on solutions to problems such as failing schools, unemployment and inadequate health insurance would clearly benefit blacks.

Last month, the debate bubbled up when The Root, a black American Web journal of politics and culture, published a provocative essay entitled, "President Obama: Monumental Success or Secret Setback?"

"If Obama becomes the president, every remaining, powerfully felt black grievance and every still deeply-etched injustice will be cast out of the realm of polite discourse," wrote Lawrence Bobo, a black sociologist at Harvard University, who supports Obama and was outlining the concerns of some of his friends in the essay. "White folks will just stop listening," he said.

Bev Smith, a black talk radio show host, whose program is based in Pittsburgh and syndicated nationally, said some of her listeners echo those worries.

"There's an assumption now that we've made it," said Smith, whose nightly news program airs in Atlanta, Chicago, Sacramento, and other cities. "Our concern is that we'll get lost in the shuffle," she said.

The concerns have been driven in part by opponents of affirmative action who argue that race-based preferences in education and the workplace are increasingly irrelevant given the accomplishments of Obama and the growing black middle class.

Others, like Abigail Thernstrom, the vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, say minority voting districts should be reconsidered, too, given Obama's success at wooing white voters in states like Iowa, Wyoming and Nebraska.

Thernstrom, who is white, said that black and white academics who worry about the impact of Obama's achievement - instead of celebrating it - were engaging in "habits of pessimism."

"People feel that there's something callous, something racially indifferent in saying, 'Wait a minute; we've come a long way,"' said Thernstrom, who is a longtime critic of affirmative action and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group in New York.