Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities in Teaching About Race and Anti-Racism in the Twenty-First Century

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The election of Barack Obama is touted by many as a symbol of the United States’ movement towards a “post-racial” society. Yet, in the year after his election, there were elevated numbers of racially motivated hate crimes, with over 9,000 incidences (AP 2008; FBI 2008). At the same time, there has been a broad, collective movement in opposition to progressive reform and civil rights for people of color and immigrants (Gonzales 2009; Bunch 2010). Nevertheless, political pundits, newspaper columnists, and politicians have written at length about Obama’s election as signifying a “post-racial” America – a vision of the United States as a society in which race no longer acts as a barrier to certain populations marginalized in the nation’s past (NPR 2009; Steele 2008). Scholars have also adopted this term in considering the implications of post-racial ideology on race theory (Nayak 2006) and the possibility of post-racial states (Goldberg 2002).