Post-racial America Research Articles

Vanessa I. Corredera. Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

This review considers Vanessa I Corredera's Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America.

Seeing Race in Post-Racial America: Spectatorship and Visibility of the Racial Experience in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon (2014)

Abstract: This article examines the theatrical representation of race and its political implications in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon (2014), a modern reworking of Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon (1859). It offers a critical analysis of An Octoroon that compels readers to recognize that race, although a product of historical construction, holds significant real-world implications. The discussion of the play begins with its prologue, the importance of which has not been addressed sufficiently by critics. After delving into Jacobs-Jenkins’ diagnosis of colorblind American society through his alter-ego character, BJJ, the essay examines how Boucicault’s original play presents an ambiguous gaze that creates a masking practice often overlapping with colorblind subjects who refuse to address the existing racial inequality and prejudice that Jacobs-Jenkins critiques. Despite The Octoroon ’s sympathetic treatment of the mixed-race heroine’s suffering body, Boucicault’s stage version gradually endorses a white hegemony that defines race as an invisible essence while separating the white audience from the racialized spectacle. The final section revisits An Octoroon and argues that the adaptation’s use of the oppositional gaze and the materiality of a photograph as a reflective visual medium challenges the easy separation between the spectacle of race and the perspectives of white viewers.

Post-Racialism: Reality or Illusion?

Post-racialism has gained considerable attention in the last decade. The historic election of Barack Obama in November of 2008 as the first Black president of the United States initiated conversations about the beginning of a “post-racial” era. Post-racialism mimics colorblindness which was first articulated by racial progressives, and later conservatives co-opted this language. Both claim that race should no longer be considered a factor in awarding rights and resources due to racial progress. By examining the existing literature, I stress that the notion of living in a post-racial America does not respond to reality.

Review: To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America, by Felicia Angeja Viator

Review: <i>To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America</i>, by Felicia Angeja Viator

Black and Blue

This mystory explores alienation in a law enforcement family and anti-racist allyship after the 2012 murder of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. Situated within key circuit of culture moments of identity and representation, I use the popular song “What It Means” by Drive-By Truckers (2016) and my personal experience to address whiteness. Colorblindness and fragility are twin components of whiteness in post-racial America that animate alienation and allyship. Both embodied analyses of pop culture and personal experience describe white identity and white privilege at the interpersonal and intercultural level.

Realities of postracial America in Michael Thomas’ “Man Gone Down”

The actuality and novelty of the proposed article lie in the use of postracial theories in the process of rethinking postmodern subjectivity. The purpose of the article is to analyze Michael Thomas' novel “Man Gone Down” through a hermeneutics of post-identity. Emphasis is made on racial identity in the realities of contemporary American society. The subject of the article is racial identity in the context of today's politics of so-called “racial tolerance”. In Ukrainian literary criticism, Michael Thomas' fiction has drawn little attention, as well as postracial theory. The following methods have been used in the article: close reading, hermeneutic, and cultural. It is concluded that Michael Thomas' novel “Man Gone Down” belongs to the body of those texts that debunk the political construct of postracial America. The novel adds new emphasis to depicting racial relations in the United States, to issues of class stratification, access to education, the common good, and finally to the crisis of the American dream. In addition, a new understanding of the identity of Black Americans has been emphasized, in particular, the departure from the rhetoric of ​​racial advancement or the prominent mission of “a racial man”. One of the main focuses is the narrator's attempt to find his place in the world and at the same time not to imitate the social roles defined by the ideology of the ruling white majority. The form of the inner monologue allows the readers to focus on the narrator’s past, which is constantly reviewed by him. The author describes hidden, and sometimes truly invisible but tangible to the racial Other, discriminatory practices. The desire of the main character to express himself and not meet the expectations that have traditionally been placed on members of his race is the main issue of the novel. Being yourself in the realities of totalitarian discourses is not an easy endeavor.

From Obama's Presidency to Beatty's Booker Prize: On the Notion of the "Racial Sellout"

This essay explores how Black Americans have deployed the notion of the racial sellout since the turn of the twenty-first century. First, it revisits Barack Obama's iconic presidency, examining how Obama and his critics each imagined the trap of "selling out." Next, it turns to Paul Beatty's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sellout, which interrogates the supposedly postracial America that Obama left behind. Through its ironic performance of segregation, Beatty's novel exposes the real sellouts in contemporary America: those public leaders who defend "colorblind" discourse while refusing to recognize the nation's enduring racial inequities.

Get That S.O.B. Off the Field: A Critical Discourse Analysis of NFL Team Owners’ Responses to President Trump’s Comments About Athlete Protests

In this study, scholarship was extended on the cultural meanings of race and athlete activism by interrogating one key media spectacle surrounding athlete protests: President Trump’s 2017 speech questioning the National Football League (NFL) players’ character, with a focus on NFL owners’ responses. The NFL owners’ statements (n = 32) were subjected to critical discourse analysis. Discourses of post-racial nationalism and functionalism and the subject positions of “good player citizen” and “benevolent facilitator” (re)created meanings of the protests devoid of racial politics, linked to ideologies of color blindness, meritocracy, and diversity. These discourses and subject positions allowed the NFL owners to control protest meanings to maintain White privilege and appeal to their White fan base. These findings expand research on color-blind racism in sport, which perpetuates neoliberal ideals and the myth of a post-racial America, via taken-for-granted language use within discourses.

From a Hashtag to a Movement: Black Women Movement Actors’ Challenges to Leading a Radical Movement in a “Postracial America”

There is limited literature on the connections of local political organizations affiliated with M4BL, led and facilitated by black women movement actors (BWMA). To address this gap in the literature, I conducted five focus groups in Maryland and the District of Colombia in 2016 to identify the challenges facing BWMA (i.e., leaders, organizers, and protestors) in local organizations connected to the Movement for Black Lives. Theoretically grounded in intersectionality and Black radical social movement theories, themes emerging from these focus groups identify a deep racial capital, but challenges a broader vision for movement work rooted in a global analysis. Findings also reveal the challenges presented to BWMA are the following: social media activism as a dominant participation mode, participants’ goals toward colorblind reform policies, and challenges to class-consciousness and coalition-building that signal a racial consciousness among these focus groups and healthy skepticism toward national and global coalitions. This research provides a nuanced discussion of the struggle to build a global working-class movement in local anti-racist organizations which would outline the schism from theory to action. The disconnection between global and local goals is a persistent theme. Implications for future research are discussed.

Indigenous Nations in Postracial America: Rethinking Social Inclusion

This article presents the concept of social inclusion as a means of addressing problems of poverty and social welfare and reviews the place of social inclusion in U.S. policies toward Indigenous peoples within U.S. boundaries. We argue that there are a number of problems with the present policy application of social inclusion to Indigenous peoples in the United States, including external conceptions of needs, individualization, an orientation to distributional as opposed to positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We review some of the ways that Indigenous peoples are challenging the assumptions that underlie inclusionary policy goals. We then consider how a revised concept of social inclusion that comprehends the distinctiveness of Indigenous aspirations for self-determination, nationhood, and collective self-government might benefit not only Native Americans but the United States itself and how it might contribute to a postracial America. Our argument throughout is not with social inclusion as an ideal but with the particular version of it that has characterized late 20th and early 21st century policy toward Native peoples in the United States.

Object-Oriented Diaspora Sensibilities, Disidentification, and Ghostly Performance

Object-Oriented Diaspora Sensibilities, Disidentification, and Ghostly Performance

A Site of Unsettlement

A Site of Unsettlement

Racialized differences in perceptions of and emotional responses to police killings of unarmed African Americans

ABSTRACT Widespread attention to, and mobilization against, police killings of unarmed African Americans shatter any lingering myths of a post-racial America. We argue that the entrenched racial divide in the lived experiences and perceptions of whites and African Americans is mediated by emotions. Continuing research about the perceptions of and emotions attached to political events by people of different races, we draw on an embedded experiment. We contend that stories about police killings will elicit distinct emotions from whites and African Americans. The experiment varies the race of a victim of a police-involved shooting as well as whether the victim was suspected of criminality. We find that the majority of respondents express disappointment without regard to condition and that African Americans are more likely than whites to express anger as an emotional response. We see in-group/out-group psychological tendencies, with whites who read about a white victim (regardless of criminality) more likely to recommend criminal charges for the officer versus those who received a black victim. The findings highlight how identity moderates the connection between emotions and politics while also contributing to our understanding of race relations today.

The Reconstitution of American Identity: Configuring a Postracial American Identity in Toni Morrison's &lt;em&gt;A Mercy&lt;/em&gt;

68 CLA JOURNAL The Reconstitution of American Identity: Configuring a Postracial American Identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy1 Kwangsoon Kim In his commentary on African American historical novels, Keith Byerman asserts that “the very choice of history as subject is determined by authors’ experiences of the recent and the present”(2).If America is moving into a postracial era with all-time high black achievement economically and politically, as Byerman puts it, “it could be considered pointless and even counterproductive to insist on a race-oriented history” (4). However, contemporary African American historical novels, Byerman argues, “are motivated in part by precisely a recognition of both current prosperity and deprivation” (4), and black novelists are responding to a particular contemporary issue in their return to history. When Toni Morrison returned to the seventeenth century colonial American setting in her ninth novel, A Mercy, the immediate responses associated the author’s “experiences of the recent and the present” (Byerman 2) with “the currency of twenty-first century ‘post-racial’ political platforms due to President Obama’s successful campaign” (Kadel 28). Moreover, the publisher encouraged this association between Morrison’s novel and the era of a Black president by intentionally adjusting the book’s publication schedule and releasing it on November 11, 2008, one week after Barack Obama’s election. In addition, while the media began to describe Obama’s era as being postracial, Toni Morrison used the word “pre-racial” to describe seventeenth-century colonial America in her interview with National Public Radio (“Toni Morrison on Human Bondage”). Paying particular attention to the semantic relationship between the media’s perception of “post-racial(-ity)” and Morrison’s use of the term “pre-racial,” most reviewers and critics have characterized Morrison’s novel as a novel that celebrated the new “post-racial” American era—an era that was about to begin with the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. Boris Kachka viewed Morrison’s A Mercy as a novel that employed a “redemptive tone” that was “felt even more keenly [during] an election year with a full deck of race cards” (“Toni Morrison’s History Lesson”), and Bob Thompson commented that Morrison’snovel“servesasathought-provokingbookendtotheeraweareentering” (“Interesting Times”). Tim Adams used a more celebratory tone in the review he wrote before the presidential election day:“That this book will be published in the week before her nation may choose a President who for the first time could eclipse that [racial] divide, who could make ‘them’‘us,’ lends it a fundamental resonance” (“Return of the Visionary”). These critics, as Lauren Elise Kadel puts it, imply that CLA JOURNAL 69 Configuring a Postracial American Identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy “heralding a ‘post-racial’ twenty-first century political milieu nostalgically points to Morrison’s imagined ‘pre-racial’ landscape” (29). In other words, they assume that Morrison returned to history for this novel because of her recent experience as an ardent supporter of Barack Obama and that she set her novel in pre-racial America in order to preemptively imagine this upcoming “post-racial” America under the newly elected African American president. All of this begs the following question: Did Morrison’s A Mercy truly intend to correspond to and celebrate the political climate that propelled and surrounded the advent of a black president in the White House? Did Morrison believe that the election of President Barack Obama would propel twenty-first century America into a new postracial era? Will contemporary postracial America be similar to the “pre-racist”America“before it [that it, racism] all got institutionalized”(Morrison, “President-Elect”)? In reality, Morrison was wary of critical responses that bound up her novel in the political discourse surrounding the election of America’s first black president. Morrison jokingly touched upon this link between A Mercy and Obama’s election: “I really like President-Elect Obama, but I wish he’d stay out of my book reviews and things” (“America Before Slavery” 23). When asked if “we’re in a quote ‘post-racial’ time before the election of Senator Obama,” Morrison unequivocally answered that she did not expect the Obama era to be definitely postracial: “I’m not...

The Reconstitution of American Identity: Configuring a Postracial American Identity in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

68 CLA JOURNAL The Reconstitution of American Identity: Configuring a Postracial American Identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy1 Kwangsoon Kim In his commentary on African American historical novels, Keith Byerman asserts that “the very choice of history as subject is determined by authors’ experiences of the recent and the present”(2).If America is moving into a postracial era with all-time high black achievement economically and politically, as Byerman puts it, “it could be considered pointless and even counterproductive to insist on a race-oriented history” (4). However, contemporary African American historical novels, Byerman argues, “are motivated in part by precisely a recognition of both current prosperity and deprivation” (4), and black novelists are responding to a particular contemporary issue in their return to history. When Toni Morrison returned to the seventeenth century colonial American setting in her ninth novel, A Mercy, the immediate responses associated the author’s “experiences of the recent and the present” (Byerman 2) with “the currency of twenty-first century ‘post-racial’ political platforms due to President Obama’s successful campaign” (Kadel 28). Moreover, the publisher encouraged this association between Morrison’s novel and the era of a Black president by intentionally adjusting the book’s publication schedule and releasing it on November 11, 2008, one week after Barack Obama’s election. In addition, while the media began to describe Obama’s era as being postracial, Toni Morrison used the word “pre-racial” to describe seventeenth-century colonial America in her interview with National Public Radio (“Toni Morrison on Human Bondage”). Paying particular attention to the semantic relationship between the media’s perception of “post-racial(-ity)” and Morrison’s use of the term “pre-racial,” most reviewers and critics have characterized Morrison’s novel as a novel that celebrated the new “post-racial” American era—an era that was about to begin with the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. Boris Kachka viewed Morrison’s A Mercy as a novel that employed a “redemptive tone” that was “felt even more keenly [during] an election year with a full deck of race cards” (“Toni Morrison’s History Lesson”), and Bob Thompson commented that Morrison’snovel“servesasathought-provokingbookendtotheeraweareentering” (“Interesting Times”). Tim Adams used a more celebratory tone in the review he wrote before the presidential election day:“That this book will be published in the week before her nation may choose a President who for the first time could eclipse that [racial] divide, who could make ‘them’‘us,’ lends it a fundamental resonance” (“Return of the Visionary”). These critics, as Lauren Elise Kadel puts it, imply that CLA JOURNAL 69 Configuring a Postracial American Identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy “heralding a ‘post-racial’ twenty-first century political milieu nostalgically points to Morrison’s imagined ‘pre-racial’ landscape” (29). In other words, they assume that Morrison returned to history for this novel because of her recent experience as an ardent supporter of Barack Obama and that she set her novel in pre-racial America in order to preemptively imagine this upcoming “post-racial” America under the newly elected African American president. All of this begs the following question: Did Morrison’s A Mercy truly intend to correspond to and celebrate the political climate that propelled and surrounded the advent of a black president in the White House? Did Morrison believe that the election of President Barack Obama would propel twenty-first century America into a new postracial era? Will contemporary postracial America be similar to the “pre-racist”America“before it [that it, racism] all got institutionalized”(Morrison, “President-Elect”)? In reality, Morrison was wary of critical responses that bound up her novel in the political discourse surrounding the election of America’s first black president. Morrison jokingly touched upon this link between A Mercy and Obama’s election: “I really like President-Elect Obama, but I wish he’d stay out of my book reviews and things” (“America Before Slavery” 23). When asked if “we’re in a quote ‘post-racial’ time before the election of Senator Obama,” Morrison unequivocally answered that she did not expect the Obama era to be definitely postracial: “I’m not...

Black Lives Matter: From Enslavement to Engagement

4 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 83, NO. 1 83 No.1 FOREWORD BLACK LIVES MATTER: FROM ENSLAVEMENT TO ENGAGEMENT By: Alicia L. Moore and La Vonne I. Neal Anunknownspeakeronceprovidedthefollowingcommentary about the policing of Black bodies in America: “If your Black skin is seen as a weapon, you are always believed to be armed, thus a threat to the lives of others.”Never could a statement be more pronounced than at this very moment in time. This is not toimplythatthebodiesofBlack peopleareexperiencinganew phenomenon, but that the implicit blows dealt by a widening window of social media have exacerbated the tense feelings of those who view it—and for some, it triggers the wounds of past discrimination and even past physical encounters. It is clear that the notion of a post-racial America is, in reality, a delusion. With Black bodies making up a disproportionate amount of America’s prison system, and an unrelenting feeling of otherness felt by students of color in the very educational institutions that should provide hope, knowledge, and safety, the culture and climate of engagement in society seem bleak. In other words, the fictitious narrative of postracialism collapses under the slightest level of scrutiny and illuminates a foundation of bigotry that was laid centuries ago. Subsequently, America’s Black children are experiencing the repercussions of a system that was not designed for their survival—neither in academics nor in life. Without active engagement, their hopes and dreams remain largely constrained by the expectations of an “American Dream” that was never meant for their success. The following questions should be asked: With over three hundred years of enslavement and state-sanctioned segregation, how do we move away from the inequities of the past? When African American history is often only discussed in schools within the context of slavery and only during Black History Month, how is the historical narrative of the vibrant culture, art, and significant contributions of African Americans to this country reaching children who so desperately need to hear it? What is to become of Whites who are never taught to see the humanity of those who are of color and whose lives matter as much as theirs do? How is the engagement with institutions that have racial inequalities built into the very hallways that should be pathways to the very type of freedom fought for by those who were enslaved? How are new chains that are meant to shackle the minds of young Black and Brown students broken? It is possible to resist further enslavement and to continue to create Black spaces of success within predominantly White institutions. In this edition of the Black History Bulletin (BHB), Harrison, Moore, Rogers, Booker, Smith, and Rono, in their article “The Sanctity of Black Spaces,” discuss the process of creating a Black student union at Round Rock (TX) High School and what having such a space means to the students who are involved. Similarly, in “Heroes Amongst Us,” RiceBoothe discusses the ways in which Black educators of the past have fought against racist institutions, both by directly attempting to dismantle them and by working for change from within, in order to allow their students a chance at success that they otherwise would not likely have been able to achieve. In “Combatting Enslaved Minds, Forging a New Narrative” by Ward and Blakes and “Pursuing Freedom: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline” by Robinson and McCall, the authors lay a foundation for moving from the heinous legacy of enslavement to uplift, advocacy, and freedom. Thisissueisacelebrationofactivistsandactivism.Theauthors have promoted a shared vision of community engagement in the work of those who, in the words of then presidential candidate Barack Obama, “continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring, and more prosperous America.”1 It is a celebration of Black Lives that Matter. Notes: 1. Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union” (speech, the Constitution Center, March 18, 2008), National Constitution Center, https://constitutioncenter.org/amoreperfectunion/. LA VONNE I. NEAL, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita and Retired Associate Vice President, Administration and Finance, Northern Illinois University; Email: lneal1@niu.edu ALICIA L. MOORE, Ph.D., is Department Chair and holds...

The Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America, by WALTER EARL FLUKER

The Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America, by WALTER EARL FLUKER

Get Out and the legacy of sundown suburbs in post-racial America

ABSTRACTIn the thriller Get Out (2017), director Jordan Peele depicts the reality of people of color in wealthy, white-dominated spaces in ‘post-racial’ America after the election of Obama. In a post-racial society, colorblindness is represented in cinema by increasing the number of black films, directors, writers, etc. This essay argues that the logic of colorblind ideology masks the centrality of racism in neoliberalism. Get Out challenges neoliberal racism in its current form of colorblindness through the narrative and casting, but also uses memory to restore African-American history to undermine other neoliberal strategies that obscure the colonial roots and the lingering impact of structural racism, such as individualism, equality, and progressivism. Get Out confronts the collective illusion of the elimination of racism as a social-spatial practice in post-racial America, exemplified by the real horror of Trayvon Martin being killed in the modern equivalent of a sundown town.

White identity politics: linked fate and political participation

ABSTRACT Hopes that Barack Obama’s election in 2008 would usher in a post-racial America were dashed by the rise of the Tea Party and the 2016 presidential contest. Despite renewed attention to White political behavior following the campaign of Donald Trump and rise of the “Alt-Right,” the identity-to-politics link for Whites remains underexplored in the field of political science. Analysis of data from the 2012 American National Election Study and the 2016 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-election Survey indicates that Whites, depite their privileged majority status, feel their fate is tied to members of their racial group at levels comparable to Black, Latinx, and Asian Americans. Furthermore, we find that a sense of racial linked fate was associated with significantly higher rates of participation in multiple electoral activities, including turning out to vote, registering to vote, contributing money to a candidate, volunteering for a political campaign, and participating in protest among Whites in both elections with notable partisan differences.

Walter Earl Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Pp. 304. $30.00 (cloth).

Walter Earl Fluker, <i>The Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America</i>. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Pp. 304. $30.00 (cloth).