The New Racial Dialogue: Arriving at Whiteness in the Age of Obama

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2012-01-08 08:46Z by Steven

The New Racial Dialogue: Arriving at Whiteness in the Age of Obama

Journal of African American Studies
Volume 13, Number 2 (June 2009) (“Joy Unspeakable: The First African American President”)
pages 184-186
DOI: 10.1007/s12111-008-9077-y

David H. Roane

My essay issues a challenge for whites to see the blackness of President-Elect Obama as a reflection of the similar complexity lying within themselves. By acknowledging the otherness within their whiteness, white Americans may finally grant themselves their race in a way that compels their much-needed participation in the national dialogue about race.

With the election of the nation’s first black president, there still remains the following question: how docs the “end” of public or institutional racism translate into an end of the negative biases that exist in private? To put it another way, what will the effect of having elected the nation’s first black president really have on the way people design their schools and neighborhoods, construct their families, and conceive their self-identities? What occurs in the ordinary business of people’s day-to-day life only marks true change.

For any national dialogue about race to move forward in a way that is real and significant—i.e. in a way that is personal—it will need new participants. The Age of Obama should be an age when white people can finally talk about their whiteness, not so much as a social identity (they already know how to do this and know how to leverage this quite well), but instead will come to learn what whiteness means as a culture linked to an ethnicity (something they understand much less). With that said, the problem of the 21st century is still the problem of the color line, only this time its frontier has a new set of pioneers.

So, what exactly is whiteness? Can it carry meaning beyond the typical hegemonic associations it has with the oppression of non-white groups? Can we…

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