On Post-Racial America in the Age of Obama

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-94
Author(s):  
Amina Gautier
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black President ◽  
Post Civil Rights

Amina Gautier reflects on her childhood tendency to ask when, not if, there would be a black president. Growing up in the post-civil rights era, she was influenced by knowledge of earlier presidential bids by African Americans as well as references to the idea of a black president in popular culture, including television programs of the 1970s and 1980s that often saw adult characters project the ability to run for office onto black youth. However, Gautier cautions against conflating Barack Obama's historic election to president with the beginning of a “post-racial” era. She uses a personal experience of racial insensitivity to observe the distance we have yet to go before we are truly post-anything.

Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion. By Melanye T. Price

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 897-898
Author(s):  
Robert Gooding-Williams
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black President ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This is a timely, engaging, and illuminating study of Black Nationalism. The book's “fundamental project,” Melanye T. Price writes, “is to systematically understand individual Black Nationalism adherence among African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era” (p. 60). Black Nationalism has a long history in African American politics, but with the demise of Jim Crow and the election of our first black president, we may reasonably wonder whether ordinary African American citizens are disposed to endorse it. Price's book is important because it addresses this question head-on, defending the thesis that a renewal of Black Nationalism remains a viable possibility in post-Obama America.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles R. Stith
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
Historical Periods

This chapter presents former ambassador Charles Stith's reflections on the impact of African Americans on U.S. foreign policy during particular historical periods. He identifies four eras of impact that reflect an African American imprint on U.S. foreign policy. Those are the slavery era, the Reconstruction era, the civil rights era, and the post-civil rights era. Each era is noteworthy for its changes in status and power of African Americans and thus has implications relative to the question of impact. Each era also had its distinct foreign policy issues and challenges. Among his observations are that the foreign policy concerns of African Americans were both major and mainstream from era to era, whether the issue was the slave trade or the war against terrorism; that the unique contribution of African Americans to the foreign policy mix is to see America's geopolitical interests through the lens of human rights; and that the breadth of foreign policy interests by African Americans has reflected their position and power within the American body politic.

Understanding White Nationalism in American Politics

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-62
Author(s):  
Robert C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Science ◽  
American Politics ◽  
White Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
The Subject ◽  
White Nationalism ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
The Relationship

This article analyzes the contribution of Ronald Walters to the development of white nationalism as a theory of white subjugation and domination of African Americans in the post–civil rights era. It also discusses why his work has been ignored by political science scholarship on the subject, and the relationship between white nationalism and white racism.

The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 589-602 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudine Gay
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Midterm Elections ◽  
Congressional Representation ◽  
Voting Participation ◽  
Post Civil Rights

The election of African Americans to Congress is a primary achievement of the post– civil rights transition from protest to politics. I evaluate the link between black congressional representation and political engagement, as measured by voting participation. There are two related objectives: Construct a broader model of participation that takes into account a key component of the political environment since the civil rights era, and more fully appreciate the political significance of minority officeholding by considering its nonpolicy consequences. Using precinct data from eight midterm elections, I demonstrate that the election of blacks to Congress negatively affects white political involvement and only rarely increases political engagement among African Americans.

Black President Bush

Neo-Passing ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eden Osucha
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Sketch Comedy ◽  
White Manhood ◽  
Black President ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
President Bush ◽  
War Policy

This chapter examines fictional depictions of African American presidents as a popular trope in U.S. film, television, and literature, as producing a discourse of “black presidentialism” that implicitly embeds a logic of passing that comes into relief in sketch-comedy performances by Richard Pryor and David Chappelle. This chapter argues that Chappelle’s “counterburlesque” as “Black President Bush,” which rearticulates George W. Bush’s Iraq War policy and its justifications rearticulates in terms of black hypermasculinity and street vernacularities, exposes how popular culture’s discourse of black presidentialism, in its post–Civil Rights era instantiations, invokes what the traditional passing narrative understands as the disconnect between its protagonist’s appearance and presumed essence of his or her identity, with acute attention to the role gender plays in racial semblance. In the case of the black president trope, that dualism is recoded as the tension between the abstracted white manhood of the office of the presidency and black masculine racial particularity.

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