Politics, Opinion and Reality in Black and White: Conceptualizing Postracialism at the Beginning of the 21st Century
With the election of the first black president, commentators and pundits said that Americans could now believe that African Americans had achieved racial equality, or at least that they would achieve it in their lifetimes. As Barack Obama used a universalist message and adopted a racially transcende...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/rrca, |
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| 1. Verfasser: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
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Revue de recherche en civilisation américaine
2012
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| Schlagworte: | |
| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | With the election of the first black president, commentators and pundits said that Americans could now believe that African Americans had achieved racial equality, or at least that they would achieve it in their lifetimes. As Barack Obama used a universalist message and adopted a racially transcendent strategy which might seem at odds with his self-definition as an African American, he came to be defined as a postracial candidate, in a postracial America. The promise of an electoral victory indeed called for a strategy that would avoid race-specific issues, while at the same time reassured voters that their interests would be best served. This article argues that postracialism can thus be understood and used as an effective electoral strategy aiming at downplaying the individual and collective roles race and racism play in structuring group hierarchy and interaction, so that black or other nonwhite candidates can appeal to white voters. Using recent public opinion data, this paper will then attempt to understand how the contemporary political environment transforms the use of race as a political and/or social construction and whether it matches the evolution of black public opinion as it relates to understandings of race and racism. |
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