The presidential election of 2008 was widely held to be a watershed moment in the long, grim history of American race relations, a unifying event built on a crumbling foundation of polarizing anger.
Randall Kennedy, highly regarded Harvard law professor and author of the controversially titled 2002 book Nigger, asks us to reconsider this "post-racial America" euphoria. In his new analysis of the politics and racial implications of Obama's election, he painstakingly illustrates that we have not moved as far as we think. Although he admits that he, too, was caught up in the moment (even attending his first inauguration), his book takes a more sober look at the Obama presidency and the election process.
If politics really matter, and Kennedy clearly believes they do (he all but ignores the 50% of the eligible voters who haven't voted over the last 50 years), then his new book is a telling look at how racial considerations played out in the 2008 election and how they might affect elections to come in the post-Obama years.
He concludes that we not only have not attained a "post-racial" America, but we don't even agree on what that is. Obama's presidency is important, but his "principal contribution to American race relations will derive not from any policies he initiates or decisions he makes but from the symbolic power of his example as a black man who became president." –-Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.