From Capital Ideas, the U. of Chicago B-School mag, we learn that electing Barack Obama president just makes white people more racist (racist being defined as diminished feelings of white guilt and enthusiasm for racial preferences):

Think you’re not racist?

Research uncovers our secret prejudices, and ways to overcome them

By Alice G. Walton

Then the team asked the participants, in a number of different ways, whether race was currently a limiting factor for people in the US. They found that people who were incidentally exposed to counterstereotypical African Americans, such as Obama, former Brown University President Ruth Simmons, or Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, were much more likely to say that race wasn’t a limiting factor. “Those exposed to Black counterstereotypical exemplars were more likely to deny racism and state that Blacks could pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they tried,” the team writes.

Interestingly, it was solely the counterstereotypical nature of the exemplars that was key to the effect—highly successful African Americans in more “stereotypical” professions didn’t provoke it. When participants were shown pictures of singer Diana Ross or basketball player LeBron James, they did not later issue the same denial.