Political Racism in the Age of Obama Bruce Newman/Oxford Eagle, via Associated Press A crowd participated in a candlelit vigil, "We Are One Mississippi," at the University of Mississippi in Oxford on Wednesday. It was in response to a protest on campus after President Obama was re-elected. THE white students at Ole Miss who greeted President Obama's decisive re-election with racial slurs and nasty disruptions on Tuesday night show that the long shadows of race still hang eerily over us. Four years ago, when Mr. Obama became our first African-American president by putting together an impressive coalition of white, black and Latino voters, it might have appeared otherwise. Some observers even insisted that we had entered a "post-racial" era. But while that cross-racial and ethnic coalition figured significantly in Mr. Obama's re-election last week, it has frayed over time - and may in fact have been weaker than we imagined to begin with. For close to the surface lies a political racism that harks back 150 years to the time of Reconstruction, when African-Americans won citizenship rights. Black men also won the right to vote and contested for power where they had previously been enslaved. How is this so? The "birther" challenge, which galvanized so many Republican voters, expresses a deep unease with black claims to political inclusion and leadership that can be traced as far back as the 1860s. Then, white Southerners (and a fair share of white Northerners) questioned the legitimacy of black suffrage, viciously lampooned the behavior of new black officeholders and mobilized to murder and drive off local black leaders. Much of the paramilitary work was done by the White League, the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilantes, who destroyed interracial Reconstruction governments and helped pave the road to the ferocious repression, disenfranchisement and segregation of the Jim Crow era. D. W. Griffith's 1915 film, "The Birth of a Nation," which played to enthusiastic audiences, including President Woodrow Wilson, gave these sensibilities wide cultural sanction, with its depiction of Reconstruction's democratic impulses as a violation of white decency and its celebration of the Klan for saving the South and reuniting the nation. By the early 20th century the message was clear: black people did not belong in American political society and had no business wielding power over white people. This attitude has died hard. It is not, in fact, dead. Despite the achievements of the civil rights movement, African-Americans have seldom been elected to office from white-majority districts; only three, including Mr. Obama, have been elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction, and they have been from either Illinois or Massachusetts. The truth is that in the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black officeseekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim - in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president - is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors. But the coordinated efforts across the country to intimidate and suppress the votes of racial and ethnic minorities are far more consequential. Hostile officials regularly deploy the language of "fraud" and "corruption" to justify their efforts much as their counterparts at the end of the 19th century did to fully disenfranchise black voters. Although our present-day tactics are state-issued IDs, state-mandated harassment of immigrants and voter-roll purges, these are not a far cry from the poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements and discretionary power of local registrars that composed the political racism of a century ago. That's not even counting the hours-long lines many minority voters confronted. THE repercussions of political racism are ever present, sometimes in subtle rather than explicit guises. The campaigns of both parties showed an obsessive concern with the fate of the "middle class," an artificially homogenized category mostly coded white, while resolutely refusing to address the deepening morass of poverty, marginality and limited opportunity that disproportionately engulfs African-American and Latino communities. Steven Hahn is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of "A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration."