Some people, like Roderick J. Harrison, left, worry that people will consider the struggle for equality for blacks to be over.

By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON - Senator Barack Obama has received overwhelming support from black voters, many of whom believe he will help bridge America’s racial divide. But even as they cheer him on, some black scholars, bloggers and others who closely follow the race worry that Mr. Obama’s historic achievements might make it harder to rally support for policies intended to combat racial discrimination, racial inequities and urban poverty.
They fear that growing numbers of white voters and policy makers will decide that eradicating racial discrimination and ensuring equal opportunity have largely been done.
“I worry that there is a segment of the population that might be harder to reach, average citizens who will say: ‘Come on. We might have a black president, so we must be over it,’ ” said Roderick J. Harrison, 59, a sociologist at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
, and a consultant for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies here.
“That is the danger, that we declare victory,” said Mr. Harrison, who fears that poor blacks will increasingly be blamed for their troubles. “Historic as this moment is, it does not signify a major victory in the ongoing, daily battle.”
Such concerns have been discussed in black intellectual circles for months, on talk radio and blogs, in dinner conversations, academic meetings and flurries of e-mail messages .
It can be an awkward discussion for Obama supporters who argue that the success of the candidate - the man who might become America’s first black president - might make it somewhat more difficult to advance an ambitious public policy agenda that helps blacks. Some of Mr. Obama’s black supporters say that Mr. Obama himself, by rarely focusing on racial discrimination and urban poverty while campaigning, has often fueled the notion that the nation has transcended race.
Other supporters dismiss the idea that Mr. Obama’s success might undermine support for race-based policies. They say black voters should focus on helping him win the presidency, because his emphasis on solutions to problems like failing schools, unemployment and inadequate health insurance would benefit blacks.
In July, the debate bubbled up when The Root, a Web journal of black politics and culture, published a provocative essay titled “President Obama: Monumental Success or Secret Setback?”
“If Obama becomes the president, every remaining, powerfully felt black grievance and every still deeply etched injustice will be cast out of the realm of polite discourse,” wrote Lawrence Bobo, a black sociologist at Harvard University, who supports Mr. Obama and was outlining in the essay the concerns of some friends and colleagues. “White folks will just stop listening.”
Others, like Abigail Thernstrom, the vice chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, say the creation of minority voting districts should be reconsidered, too, given Mr. Obama’s success at wooing white voters in states like Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming.
Ms. Thernstrom, who is white, said black and white academics who worried about the impact of Mr. Obama’s achievement were engaging in “habits of pessimism.”
“People feel that there’s something callous, something racially indifferent in saying, ‘Wait a minute; we’ve come a long way,’ ” said Ms. Thernstrom, a longtime critic of affirmative action who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group.
“But whether he wins or loses, for a black man to become a standard-bearer for one of the two major parties, it does say something,” she said. “It says that the road we started down in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act has come to an end. We don’t need to talk about disfranchisement in the same way anymore.”