{"id":54433,"date":"2017-07-10T01:57:52","date_gmt":"2017-07-10T01:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54433"},"modified":"2017-07-10T01:57:52","modified_gmt":"2017-07-10T01:57:52","slug":"sbu-libraries-black-history-month-lecture-2-13-17-dr-zebulon-miletsky-obama-post-racialism-and-the-new-american-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54433","title":{"rendered":"SBU Libraries Black History Month Lecture 2-13-17 Dr. Zebulon Miletsky: &#8220;Obama, Post-Racialism and the New American Dilemma&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ncvoWv1iWOM\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em><strong>SBU Libraries Black History Month Lecture 2-13-17 Dr. Zebulon Miletsky: &#8220;Obama, Post-Racialism and the New American Dilemma&#8221;<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCTnuE_U7j6EF7oEabikfBWw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Stony Brook Library Media Services<\/a><br \/>\n2017-02-13 (Published 2017-02-15)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"mailto:Zebulon.Miletsky@stonybrook.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Zebulon Vance Miletsky<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies<br \/>\n<em>Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York<\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ncvoWv1iWOM?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The election of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2016\/11\/27\/how-i-grew-with-obama-in-the-white-house.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Barack Obama<\/a> in 2008 as the 44th President of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/United_States\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">United States<\/a>, raised hopes for many that as a country we were entering a post-racial moment, that the twin legacies of oppression and slavery were overcome, not only in the United States, but the world.\u00a0That same period, however, brought crises of authority caused by neo-liberalism, police violence, and mass incarceration that have consistently set back the very racial progress that Obama\u2019s presidency seemed to inaugurate. Far from being post-racial, the Obama years were a period of constant racial crisis, the repercussions of which were felt daily since the killings of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Death_of_Eric_Garner\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Eric Garner in New York<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Michael Brown in Ferguson<\/a> in the summer of 2014.\u00a0It took the election of an African American to the nation\u2019s highest office to uncover a level of racial hatred the likes of which we have not seen since the 1960s, requiring an analysis of the relationship between multiracialism and post-racialism, as well as how whiteness operates in the United States, to fully appreciate what has come to pass. The election of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Donald_Trump\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Donald Trump<\/a> as President has been a clear rejection of the post-racial era ushered in by Obama. Much like our more recent experiment in racial democracy, there are parallels between what happened with the overthrow of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reconstruction_Era\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Reconstruction<\/a>, America\u2019s startling experiment in biracial democracy after the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/American_Civil_War\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Civil War<\/a> and today. The historical roots of the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/whitelash\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">whitelash<\/a>\u201d that fueled Trump\u2019s victory lie in a prior racial backlash to an unprecedented attempt to grant African Americans citizenship during the period of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Reconstruction_Era\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Reconstruction<\/a>. Based on a book chapter-in-progress for a volume on the Black Intellectual Tradition in America, this presentation discusses how the 21st century could potentially mark a new low in American race relations\u2014or a \u201cnew American dilemma\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"mailto:Zebulon.Miletsky@stonybrook.edu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dr. Zebulon Vance Miletsky<\/a> is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and a historian specializing in recent African-American History, Civil Rights and Black Power, Urban History, Mixed Race and Biracial identity, and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hip-hop_in_academia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hip-Hop Studies<\/a>. His research interests include: African-Americans in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Boston\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Boston<\/a>; Northern freedom movements outside of the South; Mixed race history in the U.S. and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">passing<\/a>; and the Afro-Latin diaspora. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, essays and book chapters and is currently working on a manuscript on the civil rights movement in Boston. Ph.D.; African-American Studies with a concentration in History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2008.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Based on a book chapter-in-progress for a volume on the Black Intellectual Tradition in America, this presentation discusses how the 21st century could potentially mark a new low in American race relations\u2014or a \u201cnew American dilemma\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,459,8,26,23674,20,842],"tags":[27242,9830,3709,3708,4091],"class_list":["post-54433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-history","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-social-justice","category-usa","category-videos","tag-stony-brook-library-media-services","tag-stony-brook-university","tag-zebulon-miletsky","tag-zebulon-v-miletsky","tag-zebulon-vance-miletsky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54433","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=54433"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54435,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54433\/revisions\/54435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}