Joel Anderson says we’re so far from achieving a post-racial society that even using the term is harmful:
The roots of post-racialism reach back to the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Post-racialism, of course, is the belief that people of color — particularly those of African descent — have no need to keep agitating about discrimination or inequality. But the seeds truly started to sprout in November 2008, when about 69.5 million registered voters went into their respective booths, swallowed hard, and voted for a biracial man from Hawaii. Upon Obama’s election, people who should have known better started to speak of racism in past tense. Somehow, the thinking went, the U.S. had excised centuries of racial prejudice and discrimination. President Barack Obama was the living, breathing, signifying proof.