1 Obama’s Racial Politics in Context Neither Black Nationalism nor Deracialization: Barack Obama’s Racial Politics in Context1 Richard Johnson Department of Politics, Philosophy, & Religion, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
[email protected], +44 (0) 1524 592 308 2 Abstract Many commentators have described Barack Obama as a ‘deracialized’ politician. In contrast to ‘racialized’ Black candidates, deracialized politicians are said to deemphasise their Black racial identity, downplay the racial legacies of American inequality, and favour 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 favours 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. Key words: Black nationalism, deracialization, racial policy alliances, Barack Obama, racial coalitions, racialization, racial identity 3 INTRODUCTION Many commentators heralded the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama as the triumph of a post- racial politics pursued by a deracialized African American politician (Ifill, 2009; Clayton, 2010; Caesar et al., 2011; Carter &Dowe, 2015).