ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to differentiate between race and ethnicity, and distinguish between different forms of racism. It describes demographic shifts in American society along racial/ethnic lines. The chapter explains race at the level of identities, ideologies, and institutions. The election of President Barack Obama led to immediate claims in the media that the United States is a postracial society, a society that has moved beyond race, because Obama could not have won the presidency without a significant number of white votes. Lynching imagery was pervasive on the Internet during President Obama's candidacy and eventual presidency. In 2007, a noose was hung on the office door of an African American professor who taught courses on race and diversity at Columbia University. Conversations about race, which were the goal of the Clinton initiative, first require that we engage in a process of self-reflexivity, examining our conscious and unconscious beliefs about race.
