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A Note on Race and Politics in the United States

 

 

The impetus for this brief commentary derives from the idea that the politics of race in the United States continues to be a public affairs issue. Given that it is important for political scientists to debate race and politics in the United States, as a multifaceted area of American politics, the Journal of Political Science and Public Affairs provides an open forum for different methodological approaches and diverse perspectives and positions on race and politics. In fact, we are witnessing a time where race, in terms of its metonymic intensifications, is analyzed and discussed through a variety of coded signifiers such as culture and class. Hence, any effort to stage a standoff that race matters or not in the United States would have to recognize the ontology and epistemology of race and its modalities of visual performance, that is, not what race is, but what race does. Race is something that is ascribed to blacks and other nonwhites. Whites, on the other hand, are unraced and unmarked, which positioned whites as members of the dominant group.
 
With the election of a black man, Barack Obama, to the highest position of power, conventional wisdom has it that, in the United States, there is a “declining significant of race”. In fact, in 2006, Joe Klein of Times magazine praised Obama for “transcend[ing] the racial divide so effortlessly” and bringing together, to borrow from John Hope Franklin, “the two worlds of race”. This discursive reconstruction of America’s race relations has forged a broad social consensus, frequently expressed in claims that the United States is now a post racial society. Post racial simply means that whatever racial issues the United States might have once had, because of the election of Obama, a black man, as the President of the United States, these racial issues have disappeared. And since post denotes sequentiality, a movement beyond, in this case, race, and yet black sand other nonwhites continue to be viewed in racial terms, I think that the term post racial is, in itself, enigmatic.
 

 

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