I would like to address the interesting differences between the posts submitted by Loury, Lowndes, and Sleeper.

If we can endure Sleeper’s dismissive denigration of any view he disagrees with, his way of positioning himself between those he calls “extremes,” and his demonizing of anti-racist politics, we do arrive at an important claim in the final sentence of his post: “For Obama, de-politicizing race is not only a necessity but a big tactical step forward toward racial justice.” As Sleeper has argued for years, liberalism became a racializing (identity) politics that produced division and resentment rather than consensus around issues of class inequality. Social justice thus requires taking race (and identity politics more broadly) out of progressive politics, which can advance only by speaking a language of universality, not difference. Lowndes and Loury offer compelling reasons to reject Sleeper’s narrative of post-new deal and post-sixties history, and so, his assertions about the conditions enabling progressive politics.

Lowndes’ essential claim, contra Sleeper, is that “the deeply lodged problems of racial and economic inequality are inexorably tied together, and must therefore be broached together.” Indeed, Lowndes criticizes the very “de-politicization of race” that Sleeper endorses, for Lowndes sees the “dominance of color-blind ideology” as a way to deny racial inequality and any remedies that address it. Thus “the staggering evidence of racial stratification in America has been met with stubborn indifference, denial or irritation. Black leaders who have raised issues of inequality...have been consistently dismissed as hucksters or paranoids by journalists and pundits alike...” Obama had avoided these caricatures -and gained Sleeper’s approval- precisely because he had avoided race, indeed, divisions of any kind, through a transcendent language of hope and national unity. For Lowndes, this is the idiom of American exceptionalism, a nationalist language that might elect Obama by positioning him as an immigrant and American, not as a black man, but this language precludes addressing structures of racial inequality and division. In contrast, Obama’s Philadelphia speech is “an important advance in the national conversation about race” because it finally avows the centrality of racial domination in American history and its legacy in the present, while folding “the specificity of racial injustice into a larger story of interracial unity.” But Lowndes is unconvinced that Obama is committed to moving (white) people to work-through racial division toward the actuality and not only the poetry of “more perfect union.”

Lowndes invokes Baldwin to depict a national culture founded in disavowal of its racial constitution. Loury echoes Baldwin to depict the necessity of coming-to-terms with the past, which means a history of racial injustice and anger about it. For Loury, therefore, Obama’s Philadelphia speech is a welcome acknowledgment of the specificity of racial injustice, but Loury faults Obama for patronizing a generation of African-Americans -symbolized by Pastor Jeremiah Wright-in the ways he criticizes their anger. For Obama credits the reasons for black anger, but calls it self-defeating and obsolete. Loury thus sees a “narrative-defining” moment in American life, a “fight over the American historical narrative,” not only in the broad way Obama situates race in a larger history, but in the specific way he situates black protest. For if Obama is committed to “putting the past behind us,” Loury worries, this means repudiating “the prophetic voice” in and of the black community, a critical voice in regard to injustice anywhere, and not only in American life.

Obama’s rhetoric and campaign therefore raise two fundamental questions: the national narrative that defines the meaning of “American” membership and history, and correspondingly, the narrative defining the meaning of African-American experiences of injustice, and of African-American idioms of protest. Lowndes emphasizes whether Obama will confront white innocence, and Loury emphasizes Obama’s distancing from racial injustice and idioms of black prophecy, but these are two sides of one problematic, two ways of relating the part and the whole. For Loury and Lowndes, then, Sleeper’s post-racial fantasy repeats ongoing white disavowal of the racial constitution of the American republic, and repudiates the prophetic voice by which African-Americans, and anti-racist whites, have named and confronted it, to move beyond it.

Obama himself seems to personally embody the possibility of moving beyond a history constituted by a black-white binary: In the tradition of “the king’s two bodies,” his bi-racial personal body seems to symbolize the possibility of a post-racial political body. But this symbolic resolution is invested with the wish to escape the actuality of a divided social body. He himself invokes this wish to authorize himself. Inescapably, though, he is repeatedly returned to his history, as the episode with his pastor dramatizes, and as he enacts the electoral necessity of at once relying on but resisting being identified only with black voters. Inescapably, he is compelled to confront the political meaning of being the child of a black man, not only an immigrant. Still, his miscegenated history may give him a special authority to address white anger as well black anger, and to mediate rather than transcend difference. By moving between black and white experiences he could re-negotiate the relationship of part and whole rather than promise a unity beyond division. His miscegenated history also gives him the chance to re-work the meaning of race, and not only nation. For when critics argue if he is “black” enough, they are not really debating pigmentation or genealogy, but whether he speaks to domination and inequality. He could make race less a matter of descent from slaves, then, and more a category or trope denoting positioning in a structure of inequality.

But by confronting the race-d history of American inequality, he does risk being reduced to blackness, which in the discourse of a still-prevalent white supremacy jeopardizes his legitimacy as an American. And every gesture toward the specificity of injustice and the reality of group experience, will be used to wed him to “special interests” or “identity politics,” to deny his claim to represent a larger whole. To the degree he himself depicts the American whole as a transcendent unity, then, he legitimizes the story and assumptions critics will use to discredit him as “un-American.” But he would indeed significantly change our narrative and politics to the degree he avows publically that injustice is part of life because every political whole is constituted partially, that protest is needed to address such exclusion, and that mediating the relation of parts and whole is the necessary and difficult work enacted by political leaders. To do this, though, he would have to rework rather the prophetic voice he seems inclined to associate with “the politics of the past.”