Barack Obama: Coalitions of a Purple Mandate

James, Stanlie M.

doi:10.1080/10999940902734895

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Colorblind advocacy endangers and hinders possible progress in multicultural education. "Race continues to play a most potent role in American culture although we have yet to move beyond the quintessential black/white dichotomy in a manner that accurately and clearly begins to delineate the many shades of race" (James, 2009). Hence, claims to a post race nation due to the presence of a black president are unsustainable.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's post racial discourse got to do with it? Obama and implications for multiculturalism in college classrooms

Springer¹

2014

JoSoTL

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With the election and re-election of Barack Obama as the first Black President of the United States came the vexing yet perhaps expected conclusion that issues of race and ethnicity were no longer grave concerns. Somehow Obama’s presence suggests the transcendence of race. While a nod to the political progress made in terms of social race relations may be in order, Obama’s election does not translate into a “color-blind,” “post race” American nation. This essay explores how current and ongoing conversations about a post race nation shape student perceptions of race and how they directly affect the teaching instruction of professors, like myself, who are invested in multicultural and inclusive pedagogy. As an instructor invested in inclusive learning, my former struggle of getting students to understand the importance of acknowledging the validity of cultural differences has resurfaced as students who buy into the rhetoric of a “post race” nation no longer think it necessary to examine closely racially charged inequities. Rather than adhere to the problematic ideology of Obama as the embodiment of a “post race” nation, I propose an exploration of his identity and politics as those that encourage fluidity and cultural plurality without denying rightful acknowledgement of race as a viable political reality.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What's post racial discourse got to do with it? Obama and implications for multiculturalism in college classrooms

Springer¹

2014

JoSoTL

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Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and African American Literature

Stein¹

2011

ejas

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Shortly after Barack Obama had been elected the first African American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review in 1990, Times Books approached him with the request for an autobiography that would tell the story of his success as a black professional and academic. Obama took time off from his work as a lawyer and wrote Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, published in 1995. The reviews, as he notes in the introduction to the second edition, "were mildly favorable," but "sales were underwhelming" (vii). Today, this is a different story. Reprinted in 2004 and boosted by Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Dreams from My Father quickly climbed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and sold millions of copies. It was followed two years later by The Audacity of Hope (2006), in which Obama formulated his thoughts on what he called "reclaiming the American dream" and which launched his successful presidential campaign. 2 Speaking in Chicago only hours after having been elected the 44th president of the United States, Obama reflected on the significance of this event and, in doing so, evoked a black woman named Ann Nixon Cooper. This 106-year-old woman, Obama noted, had seen America change from a segregated nation in the early decades of the twentieth century to a nation willing to elect a black American as its president in the twenty-first. Recalling Cooper's lifespan, Obama re-cast his campaign slogan "Yes we can" as "that American creed" and walked his audience through the touchstones of twentieth-century history: the women's suffrage movement, the Great Depression, the New Deal, Pearl Harbor, World War II. He further connected his personal story with one of America's most emotional moments and figures in recent history: the struggles of the civil rights

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Barack Obama: Coalitions of a Purple Mandate

Cited by 2 publications

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What's post racial discourse got to do with it? Obama and implications for multiculturalism in college classrooms

What's post racial discourse got to do with it? Obama and implications for multiculturalism in college classrooms

Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and African American Literature

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