A Response to Ben Pitcher's “Obama and the Politics of Blackness: Antiracism in the ‘post-black’ Conjuncture”

Abstract

This article reflects on the disparities between dominant public discourses that deny the persistence of systemic gendered racism in the post-civil rights era and socio-economic realities that present evidence of the contrary. In a context where mainstream antiracism has reduced racism to a problem of individual sentiment, voting for Obama may have been understood as an act of proving one's antiracism and a vehicle to relinquish the responsibility to redress past injustices. Such appropriations of radical antiracist praxis, as well as the symbolic weight of Obama's election, presents new challenges and possibilities to the future of antiracist praxis.

Keywords:

• antiracism
• justice
• Obama
• post-civil rights
• post-racial
• racism

Notes

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Life in Hell: Incarceration and the City, 1980–2008,” paper presented at Cornell University's series The Carceral Archipelago: Cities, Communities, and the Prison Regime, November 20, 2009.

See Barbara Gault, Heidi Hartmann, Avis Jones-DeWeever, Misha Werschkul, and Erica Williams, The Women of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast: Multiple Disadvantages and Key Assets for Recovery: Part I. Poverty, Race, Gender and Class (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Women's Policy Research, 2006); Erica Williams, Olga Sorokina, Avis Jones-DeWeever, and Heidi Hartmann, The Women of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast: Multiple Disadvantages and Key Assets for Recovery: Part II. Gender, Race and Class in the Labor Market (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Women's Policy Research, 2006); Avis Jones-DeWeever, Women in the Wake of the Storm: Examining the Post-Katrina Realities of the Women of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Women's Policy Research, 2008).

On how discourses of “color-blindness” work to reproduce systemic gendered racism, see, for example, Eduardo Bonilla Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Claire Jean Kim, “Racial Ordering” in Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Robert G. Lee, “The Model Minority as Gook” in Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); and George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

James Baldwin develops the concept of “willed innocence” in several essays, but most directly in “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the on Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” “White Man's Guilt,” and “Many Thousands Gone,” in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998).

Michelle Harris-Lacewell, “Political Intersectionality: Disrupting Hierarchies and Transforming Movements,” speech given at the UCLA Law School Fourth Annual Critical Race Theory Symposium, March 13, 2010.

See W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968).