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HAMILTON’S DERACIALIZATION

Barack Obama’s Racial Politics in Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2018

Richard Johnson
Richard Johnson*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
*
*Corresponding author: Dr. Richard Johnson, Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YW, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Many commentators have described Barack Obama as a ‘deracialized’ politician. In contrast to ‘racialized’ Black candidates, deracialized politicians are said to deemphasize their Black racial identity, downplay the racial legacies of American inequality, and favor race-neutral over racially targeted policies. Puzzlingly, this narrative of Obama’s racial politics sits incongruously with his political curriculum vitae, spent largely in contexts which are difficult to describe as deracialized. This article holds that commentators have misjudged Barack Obama’s racial politics by conflating a contingent electoral strategy with a deeper expression of Obama’s racial philosophical commitments. In explaining these commitments, the article finds the deracialized/racialized framing inadequate. Instead, it favors the typology of racial policy alliances situating Obama within the “race-conscious” policy alliance rather than the “color-blind” alliance. By returning to the site of Obama’s political development, Hyde Park in Chicago, the paper uncovers a tradition of racial politics in which Blacks formed coalitions with progressive Whites but also embraced Black racial identity, acknowledged the enduring legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and supported targeted policies to overturn these racial legacies. The article argues that Obama was an inheritor of this tradition.

Keywords

Black NationalismDeracializationRacial Policy AlliancesBarack ObamaRacial CoalitionsRacializationRacial Identity
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , Fall 2017 , pp. 621 - 638
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2018 

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