ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts of the key concepts covered in this book. As with other race-related controversies during the Obama administration, there was considerable interest in just how the president would address the situation. Mr. Obama soared into office on the strength of a massive and massively inspired constituency, and that, once in office, his team worked tirelessly and successfully to domesticate this constituency. This is a clear abdication, a repudiation, of the role the administration might have played in helping to mobilize and remain in conversation with the people to whom it should be saying, go make me do it. The book covers less on the president's character than on the wider discursive conditions that enable the approach to governance and to political life that he seems to represent. It is difficult to resist the impulse to moral evaluation, or to avoid receiving the arguments made as anything other than steps toward a moral complaint.
