
Purchase
The Persistence Of The Color Line
Randall Kennedy
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
Random House
August 2011
On Sale: August 16, 2011
336 pages ISBN: 030737789X EAN: 9780307377890 Kindle: B004J4WL46 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Political
Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and
controversial, here is the first book by a major
African-American public intellectual on racial politics and
the Obama presidency. Renowned for his cool
reason vis-à-vis the pitfalls and clichés of racial
discourse, Randall Kennedy—Harvard professor of law and
author of the New York Times best seller Nigger:
The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word—gives us a keen
and shrewd analysis of the complex relationship between the
first black president and his African-American
constituency. Kennedy tackles such hot-button
issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama, whether
Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans,
electoral politics and cultural chauvinism, black
patriotism, the differences in Obama’s presentation of
himself to blacks and to whites, the challenges posed by the
dream of a postracial society, and the far-from-simple
symbolism of Obama as a leader of the Joshua generation in a
country that has elected only three black senators and two
black governors in its entire
history. Eschewing the critical excesses of
both the left and the right, Kennedy offers a gimlet-eyed
view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and
weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race
in America.
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