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The persistence of the color line : racial politics and the Obama presidency / Randall Kennedy.

by Kennedy, Randall, 1954-

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New York : Pantheon, 2011.

African Americans -- Politics and government.

Presidents -- United States -- Election -- 2008.

Racism -- Political aspects -- United States -- History.

Race awareness -- United States -- History.

United States -- Race relations -- Political aspects -- History.

United States -- Politics and government.

United States -- Social conditions.

9780307377890 (hardback)

030737789X (hardback)

322 p. ; 22 cm.

The Obama inaugural -- Obama courts black America -- Obama and white America : "why can't they all be like him?" -- The race card in the campaign of 2008 -- Reverend Wright and my father : reflections on blacks and patriotism -- The racial policies of the Sotomayor confirmation -- Addressing race "the Obama way" -- Obama and the future of American race relations.

"Timely--as the 2012 presidential election nears--and controversial for its bracing iconoclasm, The Persistence of the Color Line is the first book by a major African-American public intellectual on racial politics and the Obama presidency. Renowned for his cool reason vis--vis the pitfalls and clichš of racial discourse, Randall Kennedy--former clerk to late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Harvard professor of law, and author of the New York Times bestseller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Kennedy--gives us shrewd and keen essays on the complex relationship between "the first black president" and his African-American constituency. The Persistence of the Colorline tackles hot-button issues: the nature of racial opposition to Obama; whether Obama has any special responsibility to African-Americans; the increasing irrelevance of traditional racial politics and the consequences thereof; electoral politics and cultural chauvinism; black patriotism and its antithesis (essentialism and rebellion); differences between Obama's presentation of himself to blacks and whites and the challenges posed by the dream of a post-racial society; the far from simple symbolism of Obama as leader of the Joshua generation in a country that has elected only three black senators and two black governors. As the National Law Journal puts it: "Randall Kennedy is doing the smartest work in the area of race." Here, in The Persistence of the Color Line, Kennedy--eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right--offers a gimlet eyed view of Obama's triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America"--

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