“Not a prophecy, but description”: rethinking multiculturalism in the “post-racial” moment

Back in 2006, when Barack Obama was still just a freshman senator, I was pitching my book editor on a followup to Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: hip-hop, I told her, had followed a number of historical cultural uprisings, but perhaps the least understood of them-and perhaps the most important to understanding the moment we were living through-was the multiculturalism movement. I admitted to her that I had become obsessed with it and how it had moved from a radical avant-garde to a state and corporate “ideology from above.”