Study Shows White People Believe One Successful Black Person Means Racism Is Over

And when white liberals somehow got Barack Obama elected POTUS, the "Black Power" movement effectively came to an end:

As the votes were tallied for the 2008 presidential election, conservative pundit William Bennett weighed in on the election's significance. “I’ll tell you one thing it means, as a former secretary of education,” Bennett said on CNN. “You don’t take any excuses anymore from anybody who says, ‘The deck is stacked.'”

Bennett, who is white, suggested that if Barack Obama could become president, so could any black man. Implicit in the argument was that systemic racial discrimination was no longer keeping black men and women from success. 

Bennett is far from alone in arguing that a single black American's success is proof that impenetrable racial barriers no longer exist. In fact, it's a common view, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

The study authors, Clayton R. Critcher, assistant professor at University of California Berkeley, and Jane L. Risen, associate professor at the University of Chicago, found that exposure to a single African-American in a high-performing position -- any position outside stereotypical jobs in which blacks “traditionally” excel -- is enough to make whites more likely to deny the existence of systemic racism. 

“People shifted the blame from vestiges of racism in America to problems in black communities,” Critcher told The Huffington Post over the phone.

To test this finding, Critcher and Risen recruited several hundred college students and adults to participate in eight experiments. In each study, participants were asked to identify images of marginally famous individuals.

In most cases, all participants were shown the same images, depicting moderately famous white men and women. However in certain cases, one group was presented with an image of a successful African-American, like Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, while others saw an image of a white person of equivalent success, like Lockheed Martin Executive Chairman Robert Stevens. 

Then, participants were asked their opinion of the role of race in modern America, including whether they felt that race could influence workplace success. 

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