The Obama Coalition

While the tensions between white hope and black despair were a dynamic that characterized politics in the Long Sixties, their structure is recursive. That is, the (positive and negative racial) feelings that undergird racial liberalism did not stop emerging and receding after law and order campaigns destroyed civil rights and Black Power organizing in the mid-70s. Nowhere is this clearer than in the entrance and disappearance of the so-called “Obama coalition” in 2008 to elect Barack Obama as the first biracial/black president in U.S. history. In considering how hope continues to be inextricably linked to rage, contempt, and despair, this brief conclusion considers hope as an ironic discourse of liberalism, particularly as it is racialized. The birth of Afro- pessimism as a coterminous discourse with what we now call the “post-racial” Obama coalition is important because it demonstrates how black feelings in the Long Sixties continue to shape national political discourse, demonstrating how affective politics are iterative as well as how they change over time.

Revolutionary Suicide

Chapter 6 examines how the absence of hope and the collapse into black pessimism were driven by the exposure of white liberalism’s collaborations with anti-black political rhetoric through the language of “law and order,” through the expansion of the FBI’s harassment and surveillance of Black Power activists, and through the expansion of mass incarceration. Using Huey Newton’s writings, this chapter charts how revolutionary suicide operates both as a Black Power meme as a well as a repository of feelings about black Being in a colonial state where blacks have been denied both thinking and feeling as avenues of expression. With specific focus on the rhetorical form of the eulogy, this chapter describes how Newton’s revolutionary suicide is an attempt to reconcile assassination and repression with possibilities for black agency through what Corrigan calls “necromimesis,” but it demonstrates how little room there was for black activists to politically maneuver by 1971 as the nation consolidated racial feelings around law and order politics and new conservatism.

Postwar Feelings

This chapter discusses the Kennedy administration’s emotional repertoire since it set the tone for youth dissent for the decade. Corrigan examines the co-constitutive nature of hope and despair in the postwar period to understand how these competing political feelings expressed generational and racialized disputes about the nature of the polis, the uses and abuses of power, the role of political institutions in guaranteeing social and political equality, and the role of dissent as an emotional sphere of public discourse. Using John Kennedy’s speeches, Arthur Schlesinger’s writings on Kennedy, and Norman Mailer’s responses, Corrigan suggests that much of the black struggle in the United States has been aimed at producing new political feelings that worked both in tandem and against those being cultivated by the white establishment during the Kennedy years.