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Shades of GrayBarack Obama has gotten past affirmative action. Have we?

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Monday, March 31, 2008, at 7:39 PM ET

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As a lawmaker, Obama has never had to confront the issue directly. There haven't been any major votes on affirmative action since Obama joined the U.S. Senate or during his time in the Illinois Senate. When asked about his position, the campaign points to his previous statements on the subject, in which he has defended the practice in broad terms. He has called himself "a firm believer in affirmative action." In a 1998 Illinois National Political Awareness Test, Obama answered "yes" to questions asking whether state government agencies should take race and sex into account in "college and university admissions, public employment and state contracting." And following the Supreme Court decision in 2003 in which the court charted a middle ground on affirmative action in upholding the admissions policy at the University of Michigan law school, Obama was quoted in the Chicago Defender celebrating the ruling and warning that "George Bush is still looking to replace some members of the court, more conservative members who might end up reversing this opinion." Tanya House Clay, senior deputy director for public policy at People for the American Way, works closely with Obama's office on electoral reform and other issues. She says her organization "has no reason to worry" about his commitment to affirmative action because of his clear dedication to providing equal opportunity to all.

But what Obama has done—as in his comments about his daughters—is to try to broaden the question of increasing diversity beyond "race and test scores," as he writes in his most recent book, The Audacity of Hope: "Affirmative action programs, when properly structured, can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing opportunities for white students." Gerald Kellman, who supervised Obama during his days as an organizer in Chicago, says the two of them never discussed affirmative action specifically but did talk about programs that "level the playing field." "Not so much advantages in being chosen," says Kellman, "but things like after-school programs, tutoring, summer jobs." Obama wanted something done to make up for the things that poverty had denied African-American and Hispanic kids. Kellman also says Obama preferred to work through community organizing and community programs wherever possible, rather than legislation.

Asked to speculate about how Obama managed to sidestep so many of the most sensitive issues about race until the Wright story exploded this month, Janis, his former student, said, "Obama never sees race as in its own special camp. For him, race and class and gender are all different kinds of social inequality, and they are all interrelated." That has led some opponents to hear what they want to hear in Obama's rhetoric. The Goldwater Institute's Clint Bolick, who is helping Connerly with his anti-affirmative-action propositions, says of Obama and his comments about his own daughters: "The fact is that he does not full-throatedly support race-based policies. What Obama is doing is opening the door to needs-based, rather than race-based, affirmative action."

Try as one may to decode the tea leaves of Obama's handful of statements and writings about affirmative action, the truth is that you can find evidence that Obama is for race-based affirmative action and class-based affirmative action. That's not necessarily because he tells folks what they want to hear. The deeper truth seems to be that he's not that interested in affirmative action at all. People close to Obama consistently say he doesn't talk about it all that much. He wants to get beyond race as a singular, defining category in America. The folks who know Obama predict that he will not, if elected, be on a crusade to repeal or eliminate existing federal affirmative-action programs, but they're also clear that he wouldn't seek to expand them or use race to define them in new or significant ways.

As is so often the case with Obama, his political and constitutional views are almost inextricable from his personal history. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in his recent book, My Grandfather's Son, describes having stuck a "fifteen-cent price sticker" on his diploma from Yale Law School and stowed it in his basement, because it bore the "taint of racial preference." Obama chooses to look at his differently. In 2001, he told the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, "I have no way of knowing whether I was a beneficiary of affirmative action either in my admission to Harvard or my initial election to the Review. If I was, then I certainly am not ashamed of the fact, for I would argue that affirmative action is important precisely because those who benefit typically rise to the challenge when given an opportunity." Thomas never seems to have gotten past affirmative action. Obama seems not to have gotten into it. Obama proved in Philadelphia that he can understand and even transcend the hardest questions about race. Affirmative action may be one of a handful of issues on which partisans tolerate few shades of gray.

A version of this piece appears in this week's Newsweek.

With Eve Conant in Washington and Sarah Kliff in New York.