Obama’s Victory and Black Citizenship

Abstract

Obama’s 2008 win has been heralded as the final victory for Black civil rights. Narrowing this achievement to ft a mainstream civil rights narrative seems both to sell it short in terms of cross-racial and global impacts, and to expect too much from it in terms of postraciality. This framing has two significant limitations: a reinscription of the myth of meritocracy, which is often configured as American exceptionalism; and an allegiance to the Black–white binary. I analyze what we learn from this victory about the ways meritocracy, American exceptionalism, and the Black–white binary, enable the biopolitical construction and regulation of citizenship. In order to move beyond the strictures of blood logics, I build on the idea of Obama as “local”—an identity specific to Hawai‘i.