ABSTRACT
Kuryla maps a metaphorical American island of the colour blind—in law, public rhetoric and culture—in the process locating the first black president of the United States on it, evaluating the claim that his presidency represents a colourblind or post-racial politics. Barack Obama rejects colour blindness as a fact in the present yet gestures to its ‘better history’ (his modern transposing of Lincoln’s ‘better angels’) while refusing any theoretical resolution of the idea. Obama, in public pronouncements and by sheer fact of his being and his biography, reveals the epistemic irony of the colour-blind idea, its persistence amid the conditions of its impossibility.
