At This Defining Moment: Barack Obama's Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race

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At This Defining Moment: Barack Obama's Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race

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In this provocative new work, Enid Logan analyzes the politics of race in the 2008 presidential election. Despite widespread claims that Obama’s win proved the U.S. to be officially “colorblind,” Logan argues, race in fact played a central role in the 2008 campaign. Obama won not in spite of race, but, in part, because he was seen to offer an appealing, carefully mediated version of blackness that was readily consumed by a majority of the electorate. As a “post-racial” black candidate—i.e. through his magical blackness- Obama could reconcile Americans of all colors and creeds, grant whites absolution for the racial sins of the past, and redeem the nation itself, by demonstrating the U.S. to be again a shining beacon of democracy and progress.

The book is based primarily on an analysis of over 1,500 articles, editorials, blog postings and other forms of public commentary collected over a three year period. Logan writes that the central narrative of the election crafted by the press was the story of America’s definitive triumph over racism. With Obama’s victory, we were told, the U.S. had finally gotten the “albatross of race” off its back, and the “myth” of racism as a barrier to achievement could be finally put to rest.

In critique, Logan points to the irony of the fact that in an electoral season where race supposedly did not matter, the public sphere was thoroughly saturated with “race talk.” Further, to disrupt the notion that the election of a single “exceptional” black man as president proves that racism is dead in America, Logan brings to bear a mass of sociological evidence, demonstrating the profound, and, in some cases, widening indices of racial inequality in the 21st century.

Logan also critically examines the “new politics of race” that Obama’s ascent was widely proclaimed to herald. Crucially, she argues, the “upbeat,” “non-confrontational,” model of blackness that the senator was believed to represent provided a powerful rebuke to more problematic versions of black politics understood to be embodied by leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright.

Logan claims that Obama’s deployment of the new politics of race was and continues to be crucial to his ability to garner white support. When he has been seen as evidencing too much race consciousness, he has been met with popular indignation, and denounced as a false prophet of post-racialism. Thus, while Obama’s “next generation” black politics elevated him to the presidency, it has also served as a kind of straightjacket; limiting the degree to which he is able to address issues of race, or to enact policies that might be seen to disproportionately benefit African Americans.

In other key chapters of the book, Logan examines the conflicts over race and gender that erupted during the Democratic primary, the racial “triangulation” of Asian-American and Latino voters, the racially-coded populist discourse forwarded by the McCain/Palin campaign, and the reactionary politics of the “birther” and Tea Party movements.

Ultimately, Logan argues, what we saw in 2007-2008 was neither that race no longer matters in American politics, nor that the U.S. is irredeemably racist. Rather we learned that a certain kind of black candidate, relying upon a specific deployment of blackness, could in fact make it to the presidency. While Barack Obama helped to create a space for new conceptions of national identity and a new kind of racial politics, she concludes, is imperative that scholars, activists and others continue to push that space open much further.

Visit Professor Logan's webpage at http://enidlogan.blogspot.com/
Book available here: http://www.amazon.com/This-Defining-Moment-Presidential-Candidacy/dp/0814752985/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318821349&sr=1-1

More information can be found online at http://enidlogan.blogspot.com/

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