The Race Problematic, the Narrative of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Election of Barack Obama

Abstract

On November 4, 2008 Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States. He became the first Black person to be nominated for and win the presidency as the standard bearer of one of the two major political parties in the United States. Obama's Democratic Party primary and caucus campaign for the nomination and his general election campaign confronted both overt and subtle attributions to his race and derisions to race as a determining factor in the outcome to the election. However, Obama did not run race-specific campaigns. Other than self-identifying as a Black man, Obama did not call specific attention to his race or race in general. This essay is an attempt to analyze the race problematic as it played out within Obama's quest to become the first Black person to run for and win the presidency as the standard bearer of one of the two major political parties in the United States. My effort is to interrogate the race problematic within the paradigm of Martin Luther King Jr.'s narrative of a beloved community and Barack Obama's odyssey of winning the presidency while not propounding his identity as a Black man.