{"id":16693,"date":"2011-10-04T04:48:07","date_gmt":"2011-10-04T04:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=16693"},"modified":"2015-01-13T16:33:55","modified_gmt":"2015-01-13T16:33:55","slug":"obama-and-the-politics-of-blackness-antiracism-in-the-%e2%80%9cpost-black%e2%80%9d-conjuncture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=16693","title":{"rendered":"Obama and the Politics of blackness: Antiracism in the \u201cpost-black\u201d Conjuncture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama and the Politics of blackness: Antiracism in the \u201cpost-black\u201d Conjuncture<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics Culture and Society<\/a>
\nVolume 12, Issue 4<\/a> (2010)
\npages 313-322
\nDOI: 10.1080\/10999949.2010.526046<\/a><\/p>\n

Ben Pitcher<\/a><\/strong>, Lecturer in Sociology
\nUniversity of Westminster, London<\/em><\/p>\n

This article sets out think about some of the challenges to U.S. antiracism heralded by Barack Obama’s<\/a> presidency. It begins by examining the relationship Obama negotiates with notions of blackness in his autobiographical writings, and it considers how this exemplifies what has been described as a \u201cpost-black\u201d politics. It proceeds to discuss the insufficiency of critiques of \u201cpost-black\u201d as having sold out a black political tradition, but it notes that these critiques reveal something of the changing significance of blackness as a form of antiracist practice. Considering how Obama represents a move in black politics from the margins to the mainstream, I argue that the President’s symbolic centrality undermines a conception of critical oppositionality hitherto implicit to the antiracist imaginary. Exploring how this challenges longstanding ideas about who \u201cowns\u201d or controls the antiracist struggle, I suggest that antiracism will need to move beyond accusations of betrayal if it is to account for and understand the profound ways in which Obama has transformed the entire field of U.S. race discourse.<\/p>\n

To think about what Barack Obama\u2019s presidency means for U.S. racial politics invariably involves considering his relationship to a politics of blackness. For some, Obama\u2019s mixed-race transnational heritage means that he is grounded in \u2018\u2018the multicultural and global reality of today\u2019s world.\u2019\u2019 For others, Obama\u2019s claim on blackness is delimited by his not having been born to the descendents of slaves. The complex and subtle criteria of identity claims made of Obama reveal something of the complexity of race in twenty-first-century America and exemplify Gary Younge\u2019s<\/a> observation that however marginal race might be to Obama\u2019s message, it is nevertheless central to his meaning.<\/p>\n

While of course Obama\u2019s autobiographical writings cannot exhaust or provide a definitive answer to this meaning, it is notable that they reveal a distantiated relationship to the politics of blackness. The first paragraph to the 2004 preface of Dreams from My Father<\/a><\/em> describes its author\u2019s intention to communicate \u2018\u2018the fluid state of identity\u2019\u2019 that characterizes the politics of race in contemporary America. Obama\u2019s passage into a performative black male adolescence is archly self-conscious, the result of a \u2018\u2018decision\u2019\u2019 rather than a question of necessity. Though he rightly acknowledges the inescapably determining power of race, Obama retains an ironic distance that resists an understanding of this determination as absolute. Even the final section of Dreams<\/em>, which stages a trip to Kenya as a key biographical moment in Obama\u2019s self-understanding, is undercut by an epilogue on cultural hybridity that refuses as a romantic illusion the search for an African authenticity…<\/p>\n

…So what does Obama\u2019s skillful negotiation of the politics of blackness mean for antiracism? Does Obama\u2019s status as \u2018\u2018a black man who doesn\u2019t conform to the normal scripts for African-American identity\u2019\u2019 jeopardize his progressive potential, or is it a precondition of his success? Does Obama\u2019s victory signal \u2018\u2018the end of black politics,\u2019\u2019 or its radical reinvention?…<\/p>\n

…For one thing, the immediate symbolic potency of the black president simply invalidates claims predicated on the explicit and straightforward marginalization of black people in America. Obama stands for the move of blackness from the margins to the mainstream. Obama was by no means the first black person to obtain access to a position of power, but his presidency represents a qualitatively new dimension; most important, it records a moment in U.S. racial politics when a critical mass of whites were prepared to cast their vote for a black person…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Obama and the Politics of blackness: Antiracism in the \u201cpost-black\u201d Conjuncture Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics Culture and Society Volume 12, Issue 4 (2010) pages 313-322 DOI: 10.1080\/10999949.2010.526046 Ben Pitcher, Lecturer in Sociology University of Westminster, London This article sets out think about some of the challenges to U.S. antiracism heralded by Barack […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,394,20],"tags":[7716,2751,1995],"class_list":["post-16693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-ben-pitcher","tag-souls","tag-souls-a-critical-journal-of-black-politics-culture-and-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}