Darrell Newton

"They Want Their Country Back, but I Want My Leader Black: Obama and the Illusion of Post-Blackness"

Within this presentation, I will be discussing the emergence of post-blackness as a form of cultural capital within Obama’s America. Just as in the 1960s, in which perceptions of Blackness amplified pride, empowered community groups and social movements, there is a current notion that the popular election of the nation’s first African American president signals the possible end of black political and cultural efficacy, and the triumph of pluralism.

“Post-black” cultural critics have hailed Obama's election as a new definition of Blackness, one in which the iconography of this notion can be re-shaped beyond the “limits of ghetto,” and the “dogmatic code of the ‘hood and [of] street militancy” (Touré). Further, there is a belief that while a struggle for racial equality has lessened to a polite disagreement, Blackness currently reflects those locked into a lower income class struggle, a struggle led by grass roots organizers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton; icons framed as passé within this new, multicultural nation.

As Fiske reminds us, class differences and race are inseparable. As the Black “underclass” earns less than whites and other ethnic groups, their very name identifies them asunder, rather than part of, the white social order. The recoding of racial difference into “comparative maturity,” notes that this Black underclass holds less economic and social maturity than the racial majority, reinscribing whiteness as superior, and mature.

While this racial Darwinism constructs whiteness as the evolutionary goal to which others may develop, present economic uncertainties have disrupted white middle class Americana. As the previous administration remains mostly unnamed within this fracas, “static confiners of whiteness” are now sliding uncontrollably into the economic abyss; bringing them closer to the underclass than ever before as Main Street views Wall Street bailouts, hears discourses of bloated government and witnesses a Black man in expensive suits continue to hail the coming changes in America.

It is painfully obvious in town hall meetings, as effigies of the President, clad in B-boy athletic wear, knit caps, and faux-gold chains are burned, the issues of race, and class disruption are clearly in flux. This is particularly evident in news stories, blogs You Tube postings, and elsewhere. Those who could not avoid the presence of Obama and his convergent saturation of media presence now shift racist attitudes into classist concerns, as demands increase to get their country back.

I argue that those elements within pop culture that define Blackness through the lens of binarism and economic class, do not seemingly acknowledge the continued naming of Obama as Black, iconic and problematic. The struggle to define Blackness as diverse, multiclassist and fluid is all-encompassing and, for better or worse, still alive. These ideological choices may then merge with resistant readings of continued Black ideological presence, intrinsic desire and the aesthetic.