(… maybe he’d be making 30 percent more and have a higher net worth.)

The recent foot-in-mouth comments from Geraldine Ferraro have led to a number of people speculating about how things would be different if Obama were white. And it struck me that these types of questions reveal how many people (especially white people) think about race.

Because you can’t make Obama white without changing who he is as a person.

Journalists and media pundits have been speculating the “what ifs” as if race is nothing more than skin deep. As if Obama is a black man solely because of the color of his skin, and if you replace that brown skin with a pasty white one, he’d be the same person.

But I think the reality is that for people of color, our sense of who we are is strongly tied to our race and ethnicity. There is no way for us to “transcend” our race or “go beyond” our race. We don’t see our race as a negative that needs transcending. We see racism as a negative. That’s completely different. The popular meaning attached to “transcending” race seems to be to never mention race at all. In other words, we must forget our color.

And then what? Do we become white? Despite what Mr. Levitt seems to think, we can’t ever choose to be white.

Do white people ever have to “transcend” their race? No, because it is not seen as a negative. Remember, the bad things about race are tied to our skin color. They aren’t tied to racism itself, because that would seem to be an indictment of our white society.

If Obama were a white man, he wouldn’t have to tiptoe around saying “racist” to Geraldine Ferraro, who apparently enjoys the taste of her own feet. Because even some white people are thinking that what she said was pretty darn racist. Maybe they’re transcending their race. Because for white people, transcending their race would mean that they did mention race and racism. Because then they would go beyond the confines of whiteness.