Abetting inequality in post-racial U.S.

Among other race-baiting, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has referred to the nation's first African American president as a "food stamp president," and someone who engages in "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior," a coarse reference to President Obama's African father and a nod to "birtherism."

Not content merely to demean the president, Gingrich has said that poor black children lack role models and a work ethic - a broadside against millions of black, working-poor parents who each day serve as shepherds for their children and instill in them work and other ethics.

Yet the only person who has responded more passively to the former speaker's racialism than his Republican rivals has been President Obama himself. The irony of having a black man in the White House is that he is disarmed from responding to white opponents who flirt with a revivification of the Republican Party's Southern strategy. Indeed, Obama has been disarmed, or has unilaterally disarmed himself, from sustained engagement with questions of race during his first term.

The concern on Obama's part appears to be that middle-of-the-road white voters will not tolerate a black politician focusing on race, even if his purpose is to upbraid someone like Gingrich for making racially inflammatory comments. This concern is not unfounded, yet in succumbing to political reality, Obama has simply reinforced a different iteration of white racial intolerance.

Obama's systematic avoidance of race, and the Republican primary electorate's at times lusty embrace of racial code, is symptomatic of the paradox of race in the age of Obama. Race can still be deployed as a sword by troglodytes seeking to prime white voters' latent - and in some cases, active - stereotypes of blacks. Yet race cannot be part of a national dialogue or policy agenda about racial equality.

Thus, Rep. Michele Bachmann can opine with electoral impunity that black children had a better chance of living in a two-parent household in slavery than they do today. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum can make the ridiculous claim that as a black man, Obama has no right to support abortion rights. And neither Rick Perry's "Niggerhead" controversy nor Ron Paul's anti-black newsletters are sufficient to derail their political careers or presidential campaigns.