From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Cynthia Tucker

Would the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States prove that racism is dead? Of course not. An Obama victory would merely serve as symbolic confirmation of what we already know: Over the past several decades, racism has been beaten back and severely diminished. It isn’t dead, but it is dying.

An Obama victory would also serve as a potent reminder of something else we already know: While race may once have automatically determined everything from life expectancy to job prospects, it doesn’t any longer. Class is much more likely to determine outcomes than race. And affluent black Americans have more in common with other affluent Americans — white, black or brown — than they do poor Americans of any race.

Condoleezza Rice has more in common with Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, than she has with a never-married mother of several living in the ‘hood. Colin Powell would be more comfortable associating with other high-achieving public figures, regardless of race, than with the average black high school dropout.

My 9-year-old niece attends a trendy private school and has her own passport. All of her friends — and they come in every conceivable color — read at grade level or above, take the requisite music and dance classes and know how to use computers. They live worlds apart from the children whose homes have no books, no computers and no bedtimes.

On the whole, black Americans no longer see themselves as a coherent group bound by a common culture or limited by a common enemy. Last year, the Pew Research Center released a remarkable survey of black Americans in which a stunning 37 percent said that, given divergent attitudes within the community, blacks should no longer even be thought of as a single race. In the study, 61 percent said they believed that the values of poor blacks have become “more different” from the values of middle-class blacks in recent years.

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