A Double Edged Sword

The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in 2008 was a watershed moment in what Michael Omi and Howard Winant have described as the American “racial project.” ¹ Obama’s electoral victory was pounced upon by cultural critics, political commentators, and ordinary citizens as evidence that the United States had progressed to a new plane of “post-racial” democracy, where the racial slights of the past had been largely supplanted by the image of a black man in the White House. ² Conservative commentators such as John McWhorter contended that whilst racism still existed, it no longer restricted the life chances and experiences of the vast majority of African Americans, and that the “problem of the color line” espoused by W.E.B. Du Bois was less relevant for a multiracial twenty-first-century constituency. ³