Abstract
This essay examines the rhetoric used to describe President Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign and in the first months of his presidency. Questioning proclamations that the election of America's first black President heralded a new post-racial era, the essay argues that the use of certain, seemingly benign rhetorical appeals by Obama's political opponents represented attempts to attach characteristics to him that re-circulated notions first disseminated in American popular culture through blackface minstrelsy. The essay concludes that Obama's election challenges deeply embedded assumptions about the proper “place” for African-Americans in politics and society. Therefore, Obama's ascendancy to the presidency evolves racial relations into an even more complex and relevant dynamic than before his election.
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