With the ascendency of President Barrack Obama during the primaries and his election as the 44th president of the United States, on numerous occasions the media asserted that the United States can now be considered as a “post-racial” society, where the notion that “race” has lost its significance, and where our country’s long history of racism is now at an end.

For example, National Public Radio senior news analyst Daniel Schorr during the presidential primaries on Jan. 28, 2008, on “All Things Considered,” noted that with the emergence of Obama, we have entered a new “post-racial” political era, and that Obama “transcends race” and is “race free.”

And MSNBC political analyst Chris Matthews responded to Obama’s State of the Union message on Jan. 27 and said, “He is post-racial by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country, and past so much history, in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about.”

These commentators and others imply a number of claims in their statements. The first that we have become a “race-blind” or “color-blind” society — that race has become unimportant and that we don’t see“race anymore. The second implication states that racism (i.e., prejudice along with social power to enact oppression by white people over people of color) is a thing of the past.

Is the United States now a “color blind” society? Or, even more importantly, should the United States be a “color-blind/race-blind” society? The very notion of “race-blindness” is deeply problematic.

Though when we tell another that “I don’t see your race; I just see you as a human being,” may seem as a righteous statement, what are we really telling the person is, “I discount a part of you that I may not want to address,” and “I will not see you in your multiple identities.”

This has the tendency of erasing the person’s background and historical legacy, and hides the continuing hierarchical and systemic positionalities among white people and racially minoritized people.

In addition, the assertion that we have fully addressed and finally concluded the long history of racism in the United States with the election of Obama is simply unfounded.

Anti-racism consultant Valerie Batts discussed what she terms as “new forms of racism.” While the Brown vs. Board of Education decision (1954), the Civil Right Act (1964) and other judicial and legislative actions have criminalized a number of past realities (for example, slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, cross burnings, segregated educational, employment, business, governmental institutions and more), many forms of racism continue. While some of these conditions continue today on a de facto basis, Batts listed these new forms as “dysfunctional rescuing,” where white people help people of color in a condescending way believing they can’t help themselves. They blame the victims of systematic oppression for the oppression itself; “avoidance of contact” where white people self segregate in their personal and professional lives from people of color, and where white people show little interest in learning about the cultures of communities of color; “denial of cultural differences,” the notion of “color blindness,” which minimizes the cultural and behavioral difference among people, which simply masks discomfort with racialized differences and “denial of political significance of differences,” in which white people deny the profound impact regarding the social, political and economic realities of the lives of people of color.

I add to the list of conditions that perpetuate systemic racism the concept of stereotyping.

A stereotype is an oversimplified or misinformed perception, opinion, attitude, judgment or image of a person or a group of people held in common by members of other groups.

Originally referring to the process of making type from a metal mold in printing, social stereotypes can be viewed as molds of regular and invariable patterns of evaluation on others.

With stereotypes, people tend to overlook all other characteristics of the group. Stereotypes of outgroup members by in group members depersonalize them, in effect seeing them largely as members of a group and not as individuals with unique and distinctive qualities and attributes.

This often results in the tendency to diminish the humanity of out-group members relegating them to the category of “other,” and as “different.”

Individuals sometimes use stereotypes to justify continued marginalization and subjugation of members of that group.

In this sense, stereotypes conform to the literal meaning of the word “prejudice,” which is a prejudgment, derived from the Latin word praejudicium.

This is the case, for example, in actions explicitly intended as a mockery of Black History Month when a number of institutions around the country, and most recently a group of students at the University of California at San Diego, throw off-campus “ghetto themed parties.” Attendees are advised to come wearing chains, cheap clothing and speak very loudly, and where female students are urged to come as “ghetto chicks.”

In part, according to the invitation UCSD student organizers sent announcing what they referred to as the “Compton Cookout.”

The invite said, “For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks — ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama and wear cheap clothes, they consider Baby Phat to be high class and expensive couture. They also have short, nappy hair and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors, such as purple or bright red.”

The invitation continued, “We will be serving 40s, kegs of Natty, dat purple drank, which consists of sugar, water and the color purple, chicken, coolade and, of course, Watermelon.”

Students of color on the UCSD campus are banding together and are constructing a list of demands to ensure that these blatantly racist and sexist incidents are appropriately addressed by the administration and by the entire campus community. Many of them feel emotionally and physically unsafe on their own campus.

We must not and cannot dismiss these incidents as simply the actions of a few individuals, for racism and other forms of oppression exist on multiple levels, as enumerated by authors Rita Hardiman and Bailey Jackson, on the individual/interpersonal, institution and societal levels. These incidents are symptoms of larger systemic national problems.

In their book “Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society,” the authors show how the concept of “color blindness/race blindness” attempts to deny and further entrench hierarchical and deeply rooted systemic racial inequities and privileges accorded to white people that permeate throughout our society.

We must as a society get beyond this false and counterproductive notion of “color blindness/race blindness” and confront our past history and current realities of racism and transcend, to use Mica Pollock’s term, “color muteness” by engaging in honest and open conversations on the impact and legacy of race relations in our country.

Warren Blumenfeld is a professor of curriculum and instruction