{"id":42509,"date":"2015-09-01T17:57:06","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T17:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=42509"},"modified":"2016-08-15T19:57:22","modified_gmt":"2016-08-15T19:57:22","slug":"beyond-the-binary-obamas-hybridity-and-post-racialization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=42509","title":{"rendered":"\u201cBeyond the Binary: Obama\u2019s Hybridity and Post-Racialization.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cBeyond the Binary: Obama\u2019s Hybridity and Post-Racialization.\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Revue de Recherche en Civilisation Am\u00e9ricaine<\/a>
\n<\/a>Number 3 (March 2012): Post-racial America?<\/a><\/p>\n

Kirin Wachter-Grene<\/a><\/strong>, Acting Instructor of Literature
\nNew York University<\/em><\/p>\n

According to many in the American and international press, the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama<\/a> has heralded a possible era of \u201cpostracialism\u201d in the United States. The election, and Obama himself, has given this term social capital worthy of deep consideration. If we understand \u201cpostracialism\u201d to be congealing into a \u201ccolor-blind\u201d ideology that ruptures the historic hegemony of the bichromatic<\/a> (black-white) American binary (as some journalists posit) we have to look at media discourses that position Obama as \u201cpostracialism\u2019s subjective signifier\u201d to understand postracialism\u2019s failure to function as it\u2019s imagined to do so.<\/p>\n

Far from accomplishing a simplistic and idealistic end to discourses of race and practices of racialization in America, postracialism has served to reify public racial obsession, and Obama has been made the locus of attention on which these discourses circulate. Obama is consistently conscripted in racialized projects from those individuals and groups attempting to use him to advance their political cause. Obama is also actively engaging in a discourse of universalized nationalism that uses color-blindness to articulate itself.<\/p>\n

This article will seek to complicate mass media articulations of the postracial, to help broaden it from what appears to be its limited lines of inquiry. Perhaps the salient question to ask is whose \u201cpostracialism\u201d are we referring to, and what might this term signify if we imagine it to mean more than what it clearly is not? Might we read postracialism as an articulation of \u201cpost-black,\u201d if we consider \u201cblack,\u201d in an American context to be historically understood and legitimized as African American? In other words, might \u201cpostracial\u201d have salience as a means to invite a larger cultural conversation of different articulations of blackness in America, one in which immigrant blacks are considered and given voice? This is a particularly relevant question in relation to Obama due to his second-generation immigrant identity, and due to the fact that his \u201cblackness\u201d comes not from African American ancestors, but from his African father.<\/p>\n

This article aims toward a meditation of the potential for immigrant blackness to offer a more inclusive, and more accurate representation of a progressively variegated, \u201cpost-racialized\u201d American culture in need of social legitimacy for its potential to disrupt bichromatic racialization and coterminous universalized nationalism.<\/p>\n

Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n