Introduction Racializing Obama

Abstract

The historical significance of the election of illinois Senator Barack Obama as president of the United States was recognized literally by the entire world. For a nation that had, only a half century earlier, refused to enforce the voting rights and constitutional liberties of people of African descent to elevate a black American to its chief executive was a stunning reversal of history. On the night of his electoral victory, spontaneous crowds of joyful celebrants rushed into streets, parks, and public establishments in thousands of venues across the country. In Harlem, over ten thousand people surrounded the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building, cheering and crying in disbelief. To many, the impressive margin of Obama’s popular-vote victory suggested the possibility that the United States had entered at long last an age of postracial politics, in which leadership and major public policy debates would not be distorted by factors of race and ethnicity....