In new political culture, race doesn't overshadow relations

WASHINGTON - Singer Lindsay Lohan recently used the term "colored" to describe the president-elect, whom she supports.

A couple of weeks ago, John Updike, who writes from the white male perspective, penned a review of the latest novel by Toni Morrison, who writes from the black female perspective. It wasn't the usual backscratch that occurs when one eminence reviews another. Updike called the book "a typical Toni Morrison collection of 'unmastered women.' "

Meanwhile, the latest art-house movie hit to be measured for possible Oscars - Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married" - features a huge cast, with roughly an equal number of blacks and whites, but only the whites really get a chance to develop as characters.

A few years ago - and maybe as recently as last year - each of these events would have spawned painful accusations and defenses, as each situation was examined through America's racial prism. Offhand comments by celebrities, literary putdowns, and movies with characters of multiple races - all were decoded for possible biases in a culture struggling to acclimate itself to its own diversity. (And all allegations of bias were themselves vetted for excessive political correctness.)

This season, however, none has stirred more than a ripple of controversy in a country that was getting ready to choose a black president. And while America's racial struggle won't end with Barack Obama's presidency, the election of a black president is clearly changing the way America assesses racial matters. The early evidence suggests there is far less suspicion, less sense of injury, and less of a need to create so-called teachable moments on all sides of the racial divide.

In pre-Obama America, for instance, one would have expected Lohan to be roundly excoriated for using the term for black people that was once attached to second-tier water fountains and restrooms in the segregated South; and her defenders would have cried foul, pointing out that the word she used is awfully close to the properly descriptive term "people of color."

But last week, when the Huffington Post website put up a video of Lohan making the remark, almost all the online comments were of the so-what quality. "Who cares what Lindsay Lohan said whether it was colored or good or whatever. . . . People misspeak every day," read one.

Not so long ago, Updike's integrity as the New Yorker's longtime book critic probably wouldn't have insulated him from the suggestion that he was barricading the doors of America's literary academy against someone who writes in a very different voice.

In the late '80s, for instance, many black women writers expressed outrage when Morrison's "Beloved" failed to win the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, suggesting she was the victim of racially biased judging. In the ensuing decades, however, she went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature, more than closing the fame gap with Updike and other white male novelists.

And this year, when the Los Angeles Times sought Morrison's reaction to Updike's "not particularly kind" review of her new novel "A Mercy," she didn't even mention their different backgrounds. "I like reviews written by writers and he's a writer," she said. "I thought he recognized some of the merits of my book and he may have been misreading others, but that's just a regular reading response."

As for "Rachel Getting Married," the movie has been getting mostly raves, and few, if any, critics have bothered to assess the story on racial grounds. They're reviewing it based on what it says about family dysfunction, grief, coping with trauma, drug addiction - problems that don't exactly play out along racial lines.

Until recently, it would have been hard to imagine a drama with equal numbers of black and white characters being about anything but race. And if its makers claimed otherwise, almost no one would have accepted the idea. In drama, as in life, any encounter between white people and black people almost had to be viewed, on some level, as a comment about race.

If the recent presidential campaign does nothing but implant the idea that people of different colors can interact without being shadowed by racial history, the contest will have lived up to its "historic" label.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond. He can be reached at canellos@globe.com