By Antero Pietila
The media should quit referring to Barack Obama as the first black president. Enough is enough. We know already.
Newspapers and television never refer to the current occupant of the White House by race. (That’s not because of shame, either; they also never mentioned the race of previous presidents). The media owes the new president the same courtesy once the inauguration rituals and pontificating are over.
With Obama’s election, the whole country’s racial behavior should change. It’s time on all sides to get rid of simplistic, artificial labels and assumptions. This is now a different country. Old reflexes will no longer do. In just a few decades, whites no longer will be the majority.
The media’s obsession with Obama’s race in routine stories is intriguing because otherwise news coverage increasingly does not mention race, unless it is germane. And most news outlets no longer identify criminals by race.
Why am I hung up on this?
I grew up in Finland, where everyone was white and pretty much like everyone else — allowing for variations in eye and hair color. Most were Lutheran; most spoke the same language. Not a single black lived among 4.5 million Finns at that time; there were 1,500 Jews. So imagine my astonishment when I first visited New York in the summer of 1964. One day I found myself sweating in an old Finnish steam bath in Harlem operated by a professional masseur from Jamaica. I was working on an article about Harlem’s Finnish community. It had thrived from the 1910s until the 1950s, but few traces of that population of several thousand survived.
Thus I learned that Harlem had not always been black. Between the 1870s and 1910s, it went from an American-born white upper-class community to one populated by recent Irish, Jewish, Italian and Finnish immigrants before becoming African-American and Puerto Rican.
After I moved to Baltimore, I realized many neighborhoods here had made similar transitions.
Harlem remained an undervalued chunk of prime real estate until the 1990s. At that time, Manhattan’s overheated real estate market made homes irresistible to some whites, who began returning to live on streets north of Central Park. Thanks to indiscriminate lending, buyers received conventional mortgages at prime.
A similar trend occurred in other cities. The most striking example is Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco. It went from a majority black city to one where African-Americans account for roughly one-third of the population. Whites, Asians and Hispanics account for the rest.
Obama’s election showed how much race has ceased to be a deal-breaker issue in America. Hard economic times may yet flare up bigotry, but the trend is toward tolerance. That’s because of the Millennial Generation, born in the years from 1982 to 2003. The Millennials are the biggest and most racially diverse generation ever: 40 percent are of African-American, mixed race, Latin American or Asian origin, compared with 25 percent of the previous two generations. They see race differently and will soon rule the country.
Thanks to sophisticated survey techniques and constant polling, demographers predicted the Millennials’ pivotal role in this year’s presidential election. Two analysts, Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, even prophesied the outcome of the election 14 months before Nov. 4.
Obama was an outside shot when they submitted the final draft of “Millennial Makeover” to Rutgers University Press in the early summer of 2007. But his was the profile that matched the likely winner’s, based on shifting demographics.
What’s next? A political realignment as big as those following Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in 1932, the authors predict. The economic meltdown may make it ever bigger.
Antero Pietila is writing a book about how bigotry shaped Baltimore between 1910 and 1975.