ABSTRACT
This chapter presents prospects of post-raciality in Barrack Obama's United States of America. It explores what post-racialism means and what racial history has to be in order for appeals to post-racialism to make sense. The chapter also explores whether the United States has in fact become post-racial in any of the relevant senses of the term, and why people who doubt that they are post-racial might still be drawn to the idea. The key to a racial formation reading of prophetic post-racialism is recognizing that the act of articulating the post-racial prophecy does the work of an explicitly racial, that is, non-post-racial, politics. By pairing the focus on prophetic vision with a kind of pragmatic experimentalism, the post-racialist can liberate projections of the post-racial future from present limitations, and insist that the future is still in the making. The chapter explains Obama's own relationship to the idea of post-racialism.
