I think it is worth reflecting more on the significance of Obama’s Philadelphia speech. Unlike Skrentny, I think his dramatic departure from conventional political rhetoric about race matters quite a bit. In any case I don’t know what Obama would do – or would be able to do – as president for African Americans. In general, presidents don’t control the terrain on which they act. Absent pressure from below, Obama’s range of options on the matter of racial equality would likely be constrained.

Nevertheless, the fact that the speech has been so enthusiastically received across a broad spectrum (including a number of prominent conservatives) may indicate that there may be something new afoot. There has been no real groundswell of antiracist action of late, that’s for sure. But maybe there is finally some exhaustion in the long-held strategy of racial demonization that brought the GOP to power (and the DLC along with it) in recent decades. Many leading Republicans, including Bush, former RNC head Ken Mehlman, Michael Gershon, and others now try hard to distance themselves from the taint of racism. This fact, while significant, should not immediately provide solace, however. As Victoria Hattam and I have written elsewhere, Republicans who want to reconfigure their relationship with civil rights will do so for purposes most on the left would not support. The most prominent example here is probably Condoleezza Rice using her childhood in Jim Crow “Bombingham” to justify the war in Iraq.

But in the absence of active racial demonization as a political strategy, there may be new space for activists to advance struggles around issues of racial inequality. If this is true, we may finally be able to shake off the liberal backlash narrative of those – like Sleeper, Todd Gitlin, and others – who continually cry that emphasis on racial inequality is divisive and will inevitably send whites rushing back into the arms of the Republican party. That argument was always misplaced, blaming as it did the black freedom movement for conservative dominance in American politics.

George Shulman rightly points out that it is not an either/or question of transcending race or clinging to it exclusively, but of linking the part to the whole. Here I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is right to say that we will have to find ways of arguing that racial equality benefits everyone. That’s not just a rhetorical move, I think. As CLR James pointed out long ago, every struggle for black freedom in America has advanced the cause of freedom and equality for all other groups as well. I have enough audacity of hope to believe that significant numbers of Americans - as they have in moments past - could be won over once again to the cause of full equality.