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The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
The Persistence of the Color Line Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency Author:Randall Kennedy Timely?as the 2012 presidential election nears?and controversial for its bracing iconoclasm, here is the first book by a major African American public intellectual on racial politics and the Obama presidency. — Renowned for his cool reason vis-à-vis the pitfalls and clichés of racial discourse, Randall Kennedy?former clerk to Supreme Court Justic... more »e Thurgood Marshall, Harvard professor of law, and author of the New York Times best seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word?gives us shrewd and keen essays on the complex relationship between the first black president and his African American constituency.
Kennedy tackles hot-button issues: the nature of racial opposition to Obama, whether Obama has any special responsibility to African Americans, the increasing irrelevance of traditional racial politics and the consequences thereof, electoral politics and cultural chauvinism, black patriotism and its antithesis (essentialism and rebellion), the differences between Obama?s presentation of himself to blacks and whites and the challenges posed by the dream of a postracial society, and the far-from-simple symbolism of Obama as a leader of the Joshua generation in a country that has elected only three black senators and two black governors.
Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers a gimlet-eyed view of Obama?s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America.« less