And, not just among the members of the less-than-equal group. Related to your point about correcting disparities vs. living your own life, acting as though there *is* no disparity is an excellent means of causing embarrassment for those ’subliminal discriminators’ who seem to expect that the discriminated-against party should just get the picture and go home quietly. On any given feminist blog, this debate seems to resurface every couple of years, focused on whether women should deal with sexual harassment/discrimination by overt resistance (reporting, taking legal action, fighting the good fight) or by simply refusing to conspire in the subtle cultural messaging that women still require special protection and help to achieve parity. Sometimes merely enacting the role of a perfectly equal human being is very disturbing to the subconsciously biased mind, producing embarrassment and discomfort, which I say is an important element of social change.

Another component of Obama as role model is that he’s unambiguously in charge. Even within domains in which African Americans have traditionally found successful role models there can be a lingering suspicion that, say, black athletes are still discriminated against or have to work harder for respect compared to their white peers (black quarterbacks having to be ‘mobile’, etc). Obama has no white peers, so it’s hard to find any foundation for a grievance.

But this is actually an interesting point. The obvious reason Obama might move the poll data is people look at the result and say: “Wow, lots of white people voted for a black president. Maybe there really has been a dramatic decline in prejudice, and the deck is less stacked against black folks than it previously appeared.”

The slightly less obvious mechanism is that Obama suddenly becomes the most visible black role model. And however much low-grade bias might adversely affect the job prospects of most ordinary African Americans, it seems like it’s probably pretty hard to simultaneously entertain the thoughts: “I can aspire to be president one day too!” and “White America is systematically hostile to me.”

We know that people tend to imitate and adopt the ideas and behaviors of visibly successful people. So if the more successful members of a community tend to be those who (mistakenly) believe that chances are equal, or who at least act as though they believe this, then that attitude is likely to spread.

Unless there is a sufficient surfeit of visibly successful people in one’s social or identity group that emulating the behaviors of the successful requires emulating the behaviors of those outside the group, and thus encountering suspicion and accusations of betrayal. The story of improving race relations in this country is the story of the slow evolution of a population of successful (and universally regarded as such) African Americans, first through music, then sports, now hopefully politics, that provide model behaviors that can be emulated without suffering accusations of selling out.