Beyond post-racial narratives: Barack Obama and the (re)shaping of racial memory in US schools and society

Abstract

Drawing from the work of cultural memory and racial formation theory (Omi and Winant 1994) we explore the ascension of Barack Obama as an illustration of how ‘race’ is understood and remembered. This article focuses on the public media discourse of the 2012 Obama re-election to illustrate how the narrative morphed racially from 2008 to 2012. Our findings suggest that the public discourse about ascension and re-election of Barack Obama drew from racial and post-racial narratives to describe his re-election. We contend that attention given to the public construction of Barack Obama in the present is vitally important to how the narrative arc of ‘race’ in the US will be understood in schools and society.

Keywords:

• Obama
• race
• post-racial
• curriculum
• narrative

Notes

1. Throughout this article, we will refer to textbooks, curriculum materials, and other formalized historical narratives using Apple’s (2000) notion of ‘official knowledge.’ For Apple, official knowledge moves beyond the material definitions of curriculum to also consider questions of whose knowledge is considered legitimate, who decides, and how these questions are negotiated in classroom and policymaking spaces.