“The Irony of the Second Reconstruction Reforms”
Michael Omi and Howard Winant write, “In sum, after World War II a system of racial hegemony was substituted for the earlier system of racial domination. It took a great amount of blood, sweat, and tears to accomplish these limited reforms, this “Second Reconstruction.” To do away with official Jim Crow, to end the 1924 McCarran-Walter immigration restrictions, as well as ending the Vietnam War and legalizing abortion, were enormous triumphs, but they were not definitive…To outlaw de jure segregation did not prevent the preservation of segregation de facto by other means. To overturn the highly restrictive immigration policies that had lasted from the 1920s to the 1960s did not prevent the continuity, and indeed increase, of the draconian system of immigrant deportation and imprisonment that continues to this day.” The “Second Reconstruction’s” failure to triumph in deracinating all formulas of racialism in the Postmodern epoch is ironic. Although the de jure policies are not legitimately endorsed, they disseminate the discrimination which was innate during the Jim Crow epoch . Altering of laws is not material in unequivocally exterminating racism which surmises that the “Second Reconstruction” is an unconditional failure for it has not emphatically accomplished the staple end of annihilating racism.
The Irony of “Successful Racial Reform Policies”
Michael Omi and Howard Winant explain, “The success of racial reform policies- the various civil rights acts and court decisions of the 1960s- worked to incorporate and thus defies movement opposition. This incorporation required that tangible concessions be made without altering the underlying structural racism that was characteristic of the United States.” If the ‘racial reform policies’ were an unqualified accomplishment, they would have wholly undone the ubiquitous structural prejudice. The triumph of the reforms is categorically artificial because it is projected to obscure the realism of persistent prejudice.
The irony of “Painted the White House Black”
Michael Omi and Howard Winant observe, “Americans may have ‘ painted the White House Black’ but race remains a fundamental category of ( dis) empowerment in the United States. As a nation, we appear deeply unable to challenge or even address the significance of race in our own lives, as well as enduring forms of racism and the attitudes, policies, and practices that sustain them.” Although Obama allegorically "painted the White House Black," his painting has not rehabilitated the deep seethed racial concerns that linger in America. A black president is not a downright dissolution to America's inherent racialism.
