WASHINGTON — With Senate leaders threatening to block Roland Burris from being sworn in today as Barack Obama's replacement, many of his supporters see a familiar story of race and injustice.
An all-white club, they say, is trying to prevent a black man from gaining admission, as well as the power that comes with a Senate seat. Summoning a harsh metaphor from the nation's racial battles, Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) even called the Senate "the last bastion of plantation politics."
But the Burris episode has unexpectedly become the first example of how racial politics have changed with the election of Barack Obama to the White House.
Many black leaders, including Obama, have declined to back Burris, even if that leaves the Senate with no African American members. Some view his appointment by Illinois' embattled governor as an odd playing of the race card. Others are renouncing the style of politics that highlights racial grievances and inequality, saying it can no longer work now that the nation has elected its first black president.
"It is another statement on how black politics is now -- that the old regime, the old outlook, the old perspective has been displaced," said the Rev. Eugene Rivers, a black pastor from Boston and senior advisor to the Church of God in Christ, the biggest Pentecostal denomination in the country. "You can't use 50-year-old ideas in a new political era."
Even the Rev. Al Sharpton, known for his confrontational style of politics, is distancing himself from the Burris matter -- conferring privately Monday with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid but refusing to join critics in denouncing the Democratic leadership in racial terms.
"You've not heard a lot of the usual names in the civil rights movement say anything, and that's not an accident," Sharpton said in an interview.
The swirl of racial politics around Burris has been particularly complicated because of the unusual route he is taking to Washington.
Burris was appointed by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich to fill the Senate seat vacated by Obama. Senate Democratic leaders, however, say they do not want to honor any Blagojevich appointment, because he has been accused by federal prosecutors of trying to sell the Senate seat for personal gain. State lawmakers in Illinois are moving to impeach the governor, in part so that a successor could pick the new senator.
