RONALD WALTERS, DIRECTOR, AFRICAN AMERICAN LEADERSHIP CENTRE: "Absolutely not. We were involved in the civil rights movement when I went to school at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. People like John Lewis were my classmates and many of the others who are household names today were involved in the movement came in and out of Nashville. And so we were involved in not only that, but many of them came to Washington, DC in the '60s when the voting rights bill was passed by president Lyndon Johnson. And that really was the act that began to protect the right of blacks to vote and what Martin Luther King Jnr and many of his colleagues fought for. And so even then, many of us did not believe that voting would result in a black president of the United States - having the right to vote."

LEIGH SALES: "How would you describe progress during your lifetime on African American rights and opportunities?"

RONALD WALTERS: "Well, I would describe it as slow but steady progress. The civil rights movement laid much of the framework for it. There's no way of getting around that. Many of the laws that were passed gave economic viability to African Americans, legal rights to African Americans and so we were on the way in the 1970s - this legacy of the '60s. We hit a problem in 1980 with the election of Ronald Regan and a lot of that progress began to slow down because there was a backlash against the civil rights movement. Nonetheless, African Americans kept moving and so we moved from a situation where you had half a million young kids in college in the 1960s to two million today. So all through the period of conservative politics, African Americans made great stride in creating a very viable middle class."

LEIGH SALES: "The Influential Economist magazine wrote this week, 'America can claim more credibly than any other Western country to have at last become politically colour blind.' Do you agree?"

RONALD WALTERS: "No, America is not colour blind and it's not going to be colour blind any time soon. America has a very tough challenge because if you look at the demography of this country, it's becoming more and more diverse. The projections are that by 2050 there will be no majority group in the United States. Those predictions have been revised, and so it's probably 10 years sooner than that. The big question is: how will the majority group now, which is white, react to that kind of a country? There've been some reactions and they have been reactions consistent with some of the old patterns of racism. And that's one of the things that tells us that it's not gonna go away anytime soon. When you have a Katrina that occurs, when you have blacks still being shot that don't have weapons, when you have blacks being dragged in the back of trucks, as one was just last month in Paris, Texas till the body came apart. Many of these things are still happening that give us pause to say that we are not entering a post-racial America."

LEIGH SALES: The numbers on election day on CNN showed that 80 per cent of people didn't consider race a factor in how they voted, whether they voted for or against Barack Obama. Doesn't that indicate that a majority of people in America don't view political issues through a racial prism?"

RONALD WALTERS: "Well, we have to look at this election not so much as a bellwether. This is an extremely unique election. And it's unique because what Americans are doing is privileging their private circumstances. We've now had 30 years of conservative government. And it's resulted in the lack of economic mobility by the American middle class. It's resulted in a war that's unpopular, even here at home, and a President who has the lowest popularity ratings in the modern history of this country. We have people who are losing their homes, losing their jobs, fearful about their retirement. So this is a very unique period in American history and individuals are choosing to privilege their personal circumstances over race."

LEIGH SALES: "That is an encouraging sign, is it not?"

RONALD WALTERS: "It is an encouraging sign because in some parts of the country, race is still a pretty strong factor. In the southern part of the United States, looking at the statistics of this election, it's very clear that Barack Obama was not getting anywhere near a majority of the white vote in the former slave states in the south. So, that is the sort of bulwark of the conservative social issues in this country. They stayed pretty with the Republican Party. And I think they probably will be with the Republican Party for some time to come. One hopes that the same forces of change will visit that region of the country and if it does, I think you will see more Barack Obamas as time goes on."

LEIGH SALES: "You worked on the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and then again in 1988. He was unsuccessful then. What's changed 20 years later that's allowed Barack Obama to succeed? What's different about American society?"

RONALD WALTERS: "Well, I've talked about the special conditions of this particular election and the feeling of the American people that something has to be done to change the course we're on. Jesse Jackson's campaign emerged in the black community. It was widely perceived in that conservative period as a black campaign. In 1984, he only got 5 per cent of the white vote. 1988, 12 per cent of the white vote. Barack Obama's campaign emerged in the middle of the electorate. It was interesting because it allowed him to run a race neutral campaign; except for a few blips along the way, he was able to pull it off. The special circumstances of his heritage and his message were extremely appealing to Americans. And so, they chose him to be their drum major for change, for the change that they wanted."

LEIGH SALES: "What do you mean exactly by a race neutral campaign?"

RONALD WALTERS: "The kind of campaign where one does not draw attention to race, one does not privilege issues coming from the black community. One does not, for example, invite to the stage in the images of the campaign prominent black officials. Throughout this campaign, one rarely ever saw a member, for example, of the congressional black caucus or any of the prominent civil rights leaders. So, what they tried to do was to tailor this campaign to an electorate that's 70 per cent white and that extended even to some of the cultural aspects of his running for president of the United States. The Reverend Wright incident was an incident involving his former pastor. He had to part company with his pastor, part company with his church and line up actually with that electorate that he's trying to represent."

LEIGH SALES: "They may have tailored the campaign to a white electorate, but he still won the black vote as well. How was he able to do that?"

RONALD WALTERS: "Well the black vote votes not just on race. If you look at the 2004 election cycle, you had two blacks running for president, Reverend Al Sharpton; former senator, ambassador Carol Moseley-Braun. Neither one of them attracted many black votes. Blacks didn't really support Barack Obama until he won in Iowa. And, what I say is that blacks in South Carolina received permission from whites in Iowa to support him and that's precisely what happened."

LEIGH SALES: "But why would blacks be motivated by that? Why would blacks in South Carolina be motivated by what whites do in Iowa?"

RONALD WALTERS: "It's a question of credibility. The 2004 election was very much influenced by who could be commander-in-chief, who could manage a war that the United States was in, and so they wanted somebody with military credentials. African Americans wanted the same kind of leader. This time around, we were talking about a country that wants to change course. They wanted a leader like Barack Obama, who had announced that he was against the war, that he could lead change, that his whole life represented change. And that was attractive to people."

LEIGH SALES: "Professor Shelby Steele, the noted conservative African American academic, describes Obama as being a 'bargainer' in his campaign, that he has the attitude that, 'I won't use America's history of racism against you white people in America if you promise not to use my race against me.' Is that how you see Obama?"

RONALD WALTERS: "No, I don't. I don't see Barack Obama as a threatener. He is a negotiator, not a bargainer, in that sense. If you look at the fact that when he was in Harvard University he was kind of a decision-maker who would bring everybody together and try to negotiate out a solution rather than simply bargain. To bargain one has to use power and leverage in order to exact an outcome. That's not his style. His style is bringing people together, a unity kind of style. This was the face that he presented to America and that was also appealing. We are a United States of America, as he said so many times. So, this is a kind of leader that I think America is looking for at this moment in history, someone who can include everyone in the picture and not sort of rule as the conservatives have done for 30 years, on sort of one side of the fence."

LEIGH SALES: "Does that mean that the era of the more challenging black leader like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton is now over?"

RONALD WALTERS: "No, it doesn't because racism in America has taken 400 years to insinuate itself into the political culture. It will not go away any time soon and therefore if it doesn't, you will need a Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton, the people who raise their voices, bring these tough issues of racism to public attention, demand that they're taken care of. We don't expect Barack Obama to do those things. He's president of the United States; means that he's head of the public policy system in this country. He's not going to be sailing out of the White House to try to deal with those sorts of issues. So, we have a variety of leaders in different roles and that I think that is the message that we see."

LEIGH SALES: "But now that a black man is about to move in to the White House, isn't racism dismissible as an explanation for black disadvantage?"

RONALD WALTERS: "No, I don't think we can take the achievement of one person in American society and use that as the socio-economic condition of a whole group of people - 40 million people. What that proves is, as I said, these are unusual times and people privilege their personal situation over race. The question is: will they continue to do that? What happens, for example, when the economic crisis is resolved, when there is no more home foreclosure and when things come back to what one considers normal? I think that's the atmosphere in which one can really test the proposition of how far we've come with respect to race and racism, not in unusual circumstances like this."

LEIGH SALES: "As you mentioned, race was not really overtly discussed during the election campaign except when the Reverend Wright controversy came up, at which point Obama was prompted to make a speech about race called 'Towards a More Perfect Union'. In it, Obama spoke out against a victim mentality among African American communities and he said that people needed to take more responsibility for their own lives. Do you think African Americans will rally behind Obama on that philosophy?"

RONALD WALTERS: "Not really, because that's what African Americans have been doing since they've been here. The Government of the United States has been on the side of African Americans only a few times in the history of this country. Once, briefly, during reconstruction; once, briefly, during the Roosevelt period; once, briefly, during the 1960; and once, briefly, in the second term of Bill Clinton. Now, we have not been a community that has been led by the Government of the United States. We have been a community where individuals have gotten up, done what they're supposed to do, raised their families, sent their children -- nearly 60 per cent of blacks in the labour force and we have individual responsibility of lifting ourselves into a tremendous place in this country. So, we're not wards of the Government and I don't count as anyone giving us advice to exercise personal responsibility because that's what we've been doing all along."

LEIGH SALES: "In that same speech, Obama said that black anger about past injustices is not always productive, ... 'indeed all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems, it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition and prevents the African American community from forging the alliances it needs to to bring about real change.' Do you disagree with that?"

RONALD WALTERS: "I disagree with it because it would be strange if a group that had the kind of experience that African Americans had had in America and they didn't exhibit any anger. That would be very strange. To the extent that we have, I think America really is the beneficiary of a group of people who have not exhibited the kind of anger that they could have. There've not been sort of wholesale revolts in this country. Blacks have not taken up arms against the Government. We have been, essentially, if you look at the history of this country, a community that's used the Constitution of the United States, used it to try to carve out a democratic path to equality and that's been really the forte of our leadership. We had a very rough period in the late 1960s when you did have rebellions. But if you look at the whole sweep of American history, that's not been the case. And so to that extent, I think America owes African Americans a tremendous debt because any other community that would have gone through what we have gone through and continued to remain subordinated probably would have acted out with far greater anger."

LEIGH SALES: You said in an interview earlier this week that the expectations surrounding Obama are exceedingly high in all corners of society, that the expectations from whites are that we're entering a post-racial America and that from blacks that Obama will be able to solve all their problems. How is Obama going to deal with those expectations?"

RONALD WALTERS: "Well, I think Obama should be the president of the United States. He should run the country. He should do what he's supposed to do with respect to solving some of these big problems with the state of the American economy, foreign policy abroad. And I think that he should enlist African American leaders to help him in that. At the same time, I think what he should do is to try to ameliorate some of the conditions in our communities. He has promised one of the - vicious urban policy programs and in fact a White House office on urban policy. And I would hope that he would use the speech on race that he gave, most of which by the way I agree with, use that speech, because what he said was that we want to get beyond race, but the way to get beyond race is to improve the socio-economic condition of African Americans and other disadvantaged groups so that they can meet each other on grounds of equality."

LEIGH SALES: "Dr Ronald Walters, thanks so much for joining Lateline."

RONALD WALTERS: "That's alright. Thanks for having me."