Black President Research Articles

The Twenty-First-Century Black Studies Turn to Melancholy

This essay examines the turn to melancholy in African American theory and literary criticism in the early years of the twenty-first century. Recent texts such as Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (2015) and Jermaine Singleton’s Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual (2015) are as generative as earlier treatments of melancholy and race, such as Anne Cheng’s The Melancholy of Race and Stephen Best’s “On Failing to Make the Past Present.” The unresolved, unsettled, inassimilable tension of past and present is the pulse of contemporary, post–Civil Rights movement African American literature. If melancholic hope has steadily been a tradition of black affect, what might make our present moment especially tied to black melancholic hope? The tension, in the first years of the century, between the barrier crushing signaled by the first black president and the crushing police violence that led to the Black Lives Matter movement dramatizes the merging of melancholy and hope in contemporary black affect. The merging of melancholy and hope, in twenty-first-century black studies, is producing crucial new ways of understanding the motion tied to stasis and the cultural work of collective melancholy.

The Lack of Political Activism Among Today’s Black Student-Athlete

The period of 1968-1972 was the only period in American sport history that black athletes were outwardly committed to the struggle for liberation and equality. Throughout American history, the black athlete has been socialized to be politically unconscious, inactive, and docile. During the era in which Dr. Harry Edwards led the revolt of the black athletes, the activism of the athletes matched the injustices that existed in American society. With the rise of the prison industrial complex, racial profiling, the extraordinary racial disparities in the criminal justice system, the disdain of our former black president, ubiquitous black poverty, and the incessant incidents of police brutality, this article examines how the activism of today’s black student-athletes does not match the glaring injustices that exist in American society. The protest by the University of Missouri’s football team in 2015, which resulted in the president of the university resigning, highlighted the power of black student-athletes when their voice is collective, animated, and purposeful. NCAA Division I athletics has become a $10 billion industry and black-student athletes are responsible for generating a significant amount of this revenue. Today, they have the leverage, influence, and power to change many policies that affect their own development and the condition of those in their communities. This paper examines the lack of activism and political consciousness among today’s black-student athletes.

“Birtherism” and Anti-Blackness: The Anti-Islamic Ante-Life of Africanized Slavery

The first black President of the United States, Barack Obama, entered office on a wave of racial optimism. But rather than transcending the United States’ racialized history, Obama's presidency has in a sense “outed” it, exposing this history's anti-Islamic origins. This article establishes a link between anti-blackness and the Islamophobic reaction to his election: late medieval and early modern European Christians could classify newly Africanized peoples as uniquely and ontologically enslaveable only because they previously had imagined Muslims as such.

Introduction: Race, Politics, and the Humanities in an Age of “Posts”—Rethinking the Human/Race

This Special Issue of Humanities comes at a time when the viability of the humanities are challenged on numerous fronts. [...]

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

Key to leadership success is defining personal values and strengths

Soraya Coley, Ph.D., became the first female and black president of California Polytechnic University at Pomona in 2014. Coley, who grew up in a legally segregated North Carolina and attended segregated schools, had a vested interest in higher education from a young age.

Introduction: Interethnicity: From Cultural Appropriation to Horizontal Comradeship

Introduction: Interethnicity:From Cultural Appropriation to Horizontal Comradeship Emily Lutenski For the past decade or so—since the election of the United States' first black president and the rise of the Tea Party to more recent standoffs between "Bernie bros," Black Lives Matter protesters, and the altright—it has been impossible for me, an Americanist who obsessively reads the newspaper, not to think that our nation has reached a fever pitch in a new set of culture wars, ones that hark back to, and in some cases reproduce, older conversations about the utility of identity politics. As a Midwesterner, though, I am unused to being near the center of so many of these conversations: those of us in the middle have been here geographically, to be sure, but have long been considered residents of a relatively inconsequential region, one commonly represented as rather unremarkable and undesirable. It is a place where the diversity of our politics, our demographics, and our intellectual and cultural productions has, as a result, occasionally gone unacknowledged and unnoticed. This is the understated region where I was born, where critique is often made via the affectations of a flaccid "Midwestern nice" and which I have called home—admittedly, sometimes begrudgingly—for most of my adult life and nearly all of my academic career. This is the place—traditionally comprising bellwether and battleground states—which has increasingly become, instead [End Page 7] of a forgettable flyover country, the seat of ideological tugs-of-war. We in the Midwest have seen the curtailing of collective bargaining rights and the institution of right-to-work laws in states that were formerly union strongholds. We have seen our suburbs become flashpoints of rebellion against police violence and hearts of the Black Lives Matter movement. We have seen our votes determine the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Whether on the left or the right, we are, to the surprise of many, central. When we think of universities as sites of ideological debate, we may be tempted to first think of coastal campuses like the University of California at Berkeley, home to the free speech movement, a hotbed of political protest throughout the 1960s, and a thorn in the side of California's then-governor, Ronald Reagan. More recently, UC Berkeley has again become a symbol for free speech controversies—this time, for the radical right, after the cancellation of Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos's campus appearance due to safety concerns and property damage by antifascist protestors. But here in the Midwest, our universities have also always been places for ideological debate—and such debates have received even more attention from those outside our campuses during these reinvigorated culture wars. Indeed, many of the public universities throughout the region served by the Midwest Modern Language Association—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin—have suffered extreme cuts in state support. Sometimes, as at the University of Missouri, this has dovetailed with student activism and the public perception that free speech is being curtailed on campus. Our flagships have become increasingly tuition-dependent—or dependent on complex entanglements with corporations. At the same time, our Midwestern college-aged population has dropped, and many of our public universities have come to rely on the tuition dollars of students from out-of-state and from other nations, some of whom are not given the tools they need to succeed academically on our campuses. Furthermore, our campuses with missions to serve regional and local populations have eliminated positions, instituted hiring freezes, and, in some cases—like Chicago State University—nearly been shuttered. Like graduate students elsewhere in the country, ours continue to face uncertain futures as we have, in many cases, failed to transform our doctoral programs [End Page 8] to accommodate the realities of the academic job market by either decreasing the supply of PhDs or increasing the portability of advanced degrees—particularly in the humanities—to other professional careers. Our staff members, such as those at the University of Michigan, have been laid off and centralized. Our IT departments and dining halls have been outsourced and privatized. With all these forces shaping the lives of...

The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction

392 CLA JOURNAL The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction Michael Hill, Jessica Welburn Paige, and Deborah Whaley Ta-Nehisi Coates commands varied attention. As 2017 ended, he provoked approval from Annette Gordon Reed, a pound from Walton Muyumba, and critique from Cornel West.1 These reactions not only hint at the range of opinions about Coates but also affirm his status as an intellectual celebrity. Determining the meaning of such affirmation requires a long view of black creativity. When James Weldon Johnson wrote about “black and unknown bards” whose routes to artistic expression caused “a wide, wide wonder,” he did not have 21st century writers in mind (769-770). Still, his focus on the circumstances under which black authors could “lift” their “voice and sing” clarify as much about Ta-Nehisi Coates as they do about Lucy Terry, David Walker, and Anna Julia Cooper. Johnson recognized that black art constitutes a reaction against anonymity. If Coates did not experience slavery and Jim Crow like earlier black authors, then he did confront an America that had a hard time seeing where blackness fit into national identity. Prior black writers addressed this problem by exploring tropes like invisibility, misnaming , and marginalization. While Coates’s work dialogues with these themes, his abiding preoccupation is racial reckoning in democracy’s shadows. His probing of this topic acquires greater significance because his most celebrated efforts coincide with the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. In light of 2018, how should the public understand Coates? The editors of this special issue believe that he should be analyzed as a black writer.2 Although that label sounds satisfactory, it begs the question of whether Coates is best labeled a writer of fiction or nonfiction, a deft user of tweets, blogs, and comments or a savant of journalistic essays and memoirs. He defies easy characterization, yet his centrality remains a marker of a shift in the intellectual currents of black society. From a moment when the preacher,the politician,and,more recently,the academic 1 For the pieces where Gordon-Reed, Muyumba, and West offer their perceptions, see respectively “We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates review–On White Supremacy,”“Ta-Nehisi Coates Blazes a Singular Intellectual Path in We Were Eight Years in Power,” and “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle.” These three pieces offer but a sampling of the wide attention that Coates inspired. 2 Our approach in part echoes the sentiment of Jamelle Bouie who observed that We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), Coates’s most recent book, suggested that he should be evaluated “as a writer, nothing more and nothing less.” For a fuller account, see Bouie. CLA JOURNAL 393 The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction prevailed as signature figures in the arena of black public intellectual endeavor, Coates signals an extension and a customization of the ascendancy of the writer. To understand Coates and this development, we must relentlessly pursue context. After the Civil Rights era and the passage of legislation like the Voting Rights Act, the articulation of black cares and concerns increasingly migrated away from the moral milieu of the ministerial class and towards the realpolitik manipulations of mayors, city council members, and state/national legislators. This development did not occur all at once; however, gradually, the vital tasks of speaking on behalf of Black America fell to a class of individuals whose chief obligations dovetailed with governance. From the mayoral cohort that featured people like Carl B. Stokes, Maynard Jackson, and Coleman Young to the presidential candidates like Charlene Mitchell, Shirley Chisolm, and Margaret Wright, the presence of a robust black political class in the 1970s signaled the indisputable, if circumscribed, gains that greater integration delivered. If this group indicated one fairly quick harvest from civil rights activism, then the proliferation and the visibility of black academics suggest a slower, yet equally important emergence. The vital role that academics like Charles Johnson (sociology) and Charles Hamilton Houston (law) played in challenging segregation may have been obscured by the more conspicuous operation of black lawyers. While that situation may have prevailed...

Carceral Lives Matter

Carceral Lives Matter Jeannine Marie DeLombard (bio) Jen Manion. Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $45.00. Austin Reed. The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict. Ed. Caleb Smith. New York: Random House, 2016. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper). Ava DuVernay’s 2016 Netflix documentary 13th, on the U.S. criminal justice system in the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment, is only the most recent example of the intensifying critical scrutiny of race and penality in both mainstream news sources and alternative media. In 2010, civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The 2012 New York Times bestseller recounts how the Reagan-era War on Drugs has gradually been institutionalized into “a new system of racialized social control.”1 The New Jim Crow may well have inspired black millennials to break ranks with their elders, as evidenced by protests holding 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton answerable for the devastating impact on communities of color of President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. (Both Clintons have issued apologies.) These protests attracted national attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, founded in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin. As the news of Zimmerman’s acquittal spread in the summer of 2013, U.S. movie theaters were screening Fruitvale Station (2013). The Sundance- and Cannes Award-winning film opens and closes with smartphone footage of the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant—also unarmed, also African American—by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer. Over the next three years, the tragic scene would be restaged over and over again in a seemingly endless string of viral videos documenting brutal police attacks on Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and other black and brown citizens. Noting the widespread tendency to focus on male victims of racial profiling, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) [End Page 33] launched the #SayHerName campaign in February 2015 to promote intersectional social justice by exposing violence by officials against women of color. With all of these events unfolding under what sociologist and minister Michael Eric Dyson in a new book calls The Black Presidency (2016), African American cultural criticism has again become mainstream. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me (2015), won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for General Non-Fiction. As the examples of Dyson and the AAPF suggest, those in the academy have not confined their voices to classrooms and peer-reviewed publications; with Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016), Princeton Department of Religion Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., may represent a new cohort of post-Ferguson black public intellectuals. As Liberty’s Prisoners and The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict remind us, however, incarceration as racialized social control has been constitutive of American politics and culture from the very beginning. Aptly, Jen Manion locates her study of early American carceral culture in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Manion’s welcome contribution is an intersectional analysis that considers the interplay of race, condition, class, gender, national origin, and sexuality in the development of the penitentiary system. In the process, however, she covers ground that has already been well trodden by prison historians David Rothman, Billy G. Smith, Thomas Dumm, Michael Meranze, Rebecca McLennan, Leslie Patrick-Stamp, Jack D. Marrietta and G. S. Rowe, as well as literary scholars like Peter Okun, Jodi Schorb, Caleb Smith, and myself. As the familiar images adorning and illustrating the book indicate, Liberty’s Prisoners once again takes us from Walnut Street Gaol (1776) and Walnut Street Prison (1790), to Eastern State Penitentiary (1829) and Philadelphia’s House of Refuge (1828). U.S. prison history is typically structured by the tandem development of Pennsylvania’s “separate system” of solitary confinement at Eastern State and New York’s “congregate” system of silent group incarceration. Appropriately, then, Caleb Smith provides an insider view of the alternate “congregate” worlds...

Doubling Down: President Barack Obama’s Doubled Persona after the Zimmerman Verdict

This article analyzes President Barack Obama’s remarks following the acquittal of George Zimmerman on the charge of murdering Trayvon Martin. Speaking directly to, for, or about African Americans would lead some to accuse him of speaking primarily as a black man, while ignoring the idea of race would lead some to accuse him of failing to acknowledge its omnipresence in American life. To manage these constraints, the president employed what we have termed a doubled persona; that is, he enacted two different speaking personae and envisioned a distinct audience persona for each speaking persona: He spoke both as a black president and as a president who is black.

Running on screen while black: Representations of black presidential candidates in U.S. film and television

ABSTRACTThis essay asks what popular representations of fictional black presidential candidates reveal about the social and symbolic conditions that made their presidencies imaginable in the first place. We find that black presidents on screen are only rarely there as the result of democratic elections. Furthermore, when they are, their candidacies are represented in ways that rely heavily on racialized stereotypes of both the black candidate and presumptively white voters. Although these patterns are iterated within popular fictional narratives, we conclude that they could have implications for how actual black candidates are encouraged to perform in campaigns within an allegedly postracial society.

Black Lives Matter and the Struggle for Freedom

In late April 2016, at a town hall-style event in London, President Obama complained about the rising movement against the state-sanctioned murder of black people often referred to as Black Lives Matter. Activists, he admonished, should "stop yelling" and instead push for incremental change through the official "process."… The spectacle of the first black president scolding black activists in the context of a rising rate of police murder (as of this writing, the police have killed 630 individuals, at least 155 of them black, nationwide in 2016) speaks volumes about the state of black politics today.… For those trying to understand the emergence of a new black movement—or, perhaps more accurately, a new phase of a longer, older movement—on the watch of the first black president, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's new book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is an essential starting point.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Explaining White Opposition to Black Political Leadership: The Role of Fear of Racial Favoritism

Despite the election of America's first Black president, most non‐Hispanic Whites continue to oppose Black political leadership. The conventional explanation for White opposition is sheer racial prejudice, yet the available empirical evidence for this theory is inconsistent. I test an alternative theory that Whites perceive Black political leaders as a threat to their group's interests. Using a new survey measure and nationally representative panel data covering the 2008, 2010, and 2012 U.S. elections, I find that a majority of Whites perceive Black elected officials as likely to favor Blacks over Whites. Moreover, fear of racial favoritism predicts support for Barack Obama in both cross‐sectional models and fixed‐effects models of within‐person change, controlling for negative racial stereotypes. I replicate these findings using a separate cross‐sectional survey fielded after the 2014 election that controls for racial resentment. Collectively, these results suggest that perceptions of conflicting group interests—and not just prejudice—drive White opposition to Black political leadership.

The “alien spirit” of relativity

The Supreme Court case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin has once again exposed the unresolved problem of race in America. Particularly telling were the comments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia. Roberts asked, “What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?” And Scalia said, “Most of the black scientists in this country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas.” In case that was not sufficiently inflammatory, he continued unfazed: “They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re … being pushed ahead in … classes that are too … fast for them.”What Roberts has overlooked is that many of the most brilliant physicists, particularly the theorists, have been outsiders, at least in thought. Their “minority” perspective played a critical role in their success. In physics research, being an outsider can be an advantage when seeking answers to unsolved problems. Of course, being an ethnic or racial minority does not automatically make one a minority thinker. But it does come with unique experiences that could yield remarkable success in research.The value of outsider thinking is quite clear when one considers how physics advances. For the most part, undergraduate physics education focuses on a codified set of solved problems. Research, on the other hand, exposes students to the unknown. The skills to excel at the latter have little to do with those required for whizzing through the former. Physics departments are replete with examples of problem-set whizzes who floundered in research. The ability to come up with new ideas that inform unsolved problems is a key factor in determining success in research.The building blocks of modern physics as we know it—quantum mechanics, field theory, and general relativity, for example—all arose from individuals who stepped outside the established line of reasoning. That spirit is exemplified by Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow in their immensely influential 1974 grand unification paper, which contains the disclaimer, “Our hypotheses may be wrong and our speculations idle, but the uniqueness and simplicity of our scheme are reasons enough that it be taken seriously.” Such a frank admission of the risk involved in doing physics is rare.A key element that determines a person’s ability to make such leaps is the comfort level with being different—even iconoclastic. Minorities are by definition outside the majority culture. Hence, taking risks that would set us further apart from our peers does not feel unnatural. That is, it is easiest to go against the grain when you are not part of the grain!The outsider status can be used as a great motivating factor to beat the system. Consider, for example, the 1965 physics Nobel laureate and boyhood genius Julian Schwinger. The jacket of Schwinger’s 1970 book Particles, Sources, and Fields (Addison-Wesley) begins with the quip, “If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em.” Clearly his outsider status was heartfelt. The 1905 physics Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, well-known as an anti-Semite, denounced relativity as being derived from an “alien spirit” and dubbed the whole of Albert Einstein’s work as part of a “Jewish fraud.” Undoubtedly what Lenard recognized, in a through-the-looking-glass way, is that Einstein’s minority or outsider status may have been the very thing that enabled him to construct the most brilliant and important theory in physics to date. The “alien spirit” that catalyzed Einstein’s derivation of relativity may be the very same outside-the-box mindset that illuminates the thinking of at least some minority theoretical physicists today.So to answer Roberts’s question, central to advancing physics is the ability to be an outsider. For minority physicists, a tendency toward outsider thinking is not fabricated. It is part of who we are, and it is the very thing that is unique to our experience.It’s now 2016, and we have a black president, yet those uninformed comments come from people who are supposed to be the top legal minds in the country. At the very center of what should be a prudent, deliberate consideration of delicate legal matters that affect millions of lives, we find instead insensitive stereotypes that can only detract from the ultimate goal of justice.© 2016 American Institute of Physics.

Book Review: Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, by Ian Hanley López

Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Ian Hanley Lopez. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 273 pp. $24.95 hbk. $9.99 ebk.In the post-civil rights era, racism remains a permanent feature within social institutions in the United States-including mass media and educational, political, and criminal justice systems. Many communication scholars of race analyze discourses of racism to reveal the roots of racist thinking and practices ingrained in U.S. history and culture. In examining racist thinking and practices, communication scholars not only have brought attention to overt acts of racism, but they also have highlighted covert acts of racism that are pervasive in contemporary society. Ian Haney Lopez's book is important for scholars examining how mundane and everyday language masks operations of power and promotes social inequalities. Lopez, the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, provides a comprehensive and compelling account of how U.S. politicians used coded racial appeals to persuade white lowand middle-income voters to support policies that threaten their own economic interests in favor of upper-class elites. The strength of this book lies in Lopez's detailed exploration of racialized communication tactics that politicians used to curb social services, trample unions, defund public schools, give corporations regulatory control over financial markets, and oppose health care reform since the 1960s, starting in the era of George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, and continuing in age of the Tea Party and the first black president, Barack Obama.Lopez holds nothing back in pointing out the manner in which racial codes have been skillfully deployed in U.S. politics. In this thoroughly researched, but highly partisan account, Lopez writes about how conservative politicians in the Republican Party embraced racial pandering and race-baiting arguments to gain support from white voters, and ultimately win elections. So how has the GOP managed to use coded racial appeals in political campaigns despite taking stances on policies that largely disregard the impact of race, gender, sexuality, and class on historically oppressed groups? The answer, according to Lopez, is seen in their use of racial entreaties couched in what he calls Dog Whistle Politics.Lopez uses this phrase to explain how race remains central to U.S. electoral politics. He argues that racial entreaties work like a dog whistle-a metaphor signifying how modern racism is frequently inaudible and denied, but triggers strong responses from those who are attuned it. Like a canine reacting to the piercing blast of a whistle, voters react to the subtext of political messages (e.g., welfare cheats, gangbangers, terrorists, or food stamp president), which hints to sharp, penetrating racial stereotypes of people of color. This kind of dog whistling is not motivated by pure malice. …

‘Your President Is Not Black!’: Jamaican Reflections On Identity, Race, Class, and (Global) Politics

AbstractPresident Barack Obama enjoys mass‐appeal in Jamaica as an Afro‐descendant leader of a world superpower. Yet, Jamaicans' fondness for Obama as a Black president is partially intersected by local understandings of race and privilege. This paper helps to inform how Jamaican and U.S. American social hierarchies are divergent and how research consultants in Kingston, Jamaica can simultaneously deploy knowledge of American and Jamaican racial systems. It also addresses the outcomes of inbuilt racism in Jamaica to include disproportionate negative effects of SAPs for Jamaica's Black urban poor, the lack of transparent governance, and the maintenance of a rigid social hierarchy. This comparison of two racial systems within the Black Atlantic contributes to understandings of how Afro‐descendants around the world interpret the historic presidency of Barack Obama within the context of U.S. American racism.

The Decolonial Mandela

This article provides a fresh decolonial reading of Nelson Mandela’s political life and legacy as an embodiment of critical decolonial ethics of liberation that is opposed to imperial/colonial/apartheid paradigm of war and its logics of racial profiling, classification, and hierarchization of human beings. The paradigm of war is underpinned by the paradigm of difference and working in combination, they enabled the denial of the humanity of black people, their enslavement, conquest, colonization, dispossession, exploitation, and notions of impossibility of copresence of human races. Mandela emerges at the center of this imperial/colonial/apartheid milieu vehemently opposed to the paradigm of war, logic of racism, and coloniality. After enduring 27 years of incarceration at the notorious Robben Island, Mandela avoided bitterness and preached the gospel of racial harmony, reconciliation, and democracy. His leadership during the transition from apartheid to democracy inaugurated a paradigm shift from Nuremberg paradigm of justice to a new paradigm of political justice privileging political reform and social transformation. As the first black president of South Africa, Mandela practically and symbolically made important overtures to the erstwhile white racists aimed at hailing them back to a new, inclusive, nonracial, democratic, and pluriversal society known as the rainbow nation.

Mediated political masculinities: the commander-in-chief vs. the new man

ABSTRACTThe media play a very influential role in our perceptions of our political leaders, irrespective of where in the world they appear. Since the latter part of the twentieth century, our leaders’ personalities came to play an increasing role in their appeal, in particularly their gendered performances. As Barack Obama's presidency draws to the end of its second term, this paper will examine the representation of his persona in the context of the election in 2008 when he became the first Black US president. Much has been written of him being the first Black president of the USA, however, if we explore his campaign through a gendered lens, we can see that he is equally revolutionary. This contrasts with the gendered construction of male political leaders in other parts of the world, particularly that of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Building on work carried out in relation to the mediatisation and personalisation of politics in the last 50 years, this article shows how gendered performances can be seen to mirror changes in society.

Anim becomes RCN's first black president.

The RCN has appointed its first black president. Cecilia Anim, who is deputy to Andrea Spyropoulos, will replace her on January 1.

Object fear: The national dissociation of race and racism in the era of Obama

This paper furthers the use of psychoanalysis as a lens for reading the contemporary political and social world and explores the ongoing reproduction of the racial unconscious in the United States. In applying a psychoanalytic lens to interpersonal violence and legal and political discourse during Obama’s presidency, we attempt to explore how internal fear of blackness prevents America and psychoanalysis from accessing non-destructive relational psychological spaces. We argue that the violent responses to racial blackness and power are not second-hand effects of racial and economic disparity, but rather intimate parts of our psychodynamics that involve an intersubjective process we term “object fear.” We discuss relational theories that help us negotiate object fear as a location for often ignored racialized group and dyadic psychodynamics, looking at specific examples of object fear, interpersonal violence and the limits of relational psychoanalysis to address these types of object relations. We end by turning to a series of recent Supreme Court decisions to look at the ways in which object fear has been triggered at this historical moment in relation to the presence of a black president and the threat to the maintenance of white supremacy in the United States.