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.