A Response to Ben Pitcher’s “Obama and the Politics of Blackness: Antiracism in the ‘post-black’ Conjuncture” [Rickey Hill]Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2012-08-28 03:12Z by Steven |
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 12, Issue 4 (2010) (Post-Racial Politics and Its Discontents)
pages pages 347-350
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2010.526058
Rickey Hill, Professor of Social Science
Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, Mississippi
There is no “post-Black conjuncture.” Neither are we, in the United States, living in a post-racial moment. The coming of Barack Hussein Obama as the first Black person to be elected president of the United States has not signaled the end of racial domination as practice or racism as ideology. Racial domination continues to structure the lives of Black people and other nonwhite people in American society. Racism remains the active ideology that rationalizes institutional life and pervades the public and private spheres of interactions and reactions between people of color and the dominant white group. To be sure, Black people and other nonwhite people also suffer because the vast majority of them occupy the lower rungs of the economic ladder. However, while class is a determinant to economic wherewithal and access, race remains the dominant contradiction in the great socioeconomic divide.
Despite racial domination, and because of it. Blackness strives as a concrete cultural, psychological, political, and social force. Contrary to Pitcher’s thinking, “Obama’s claim on Blackness” is not “delimited by his not having been born to the descendants of slaves.” Obama’s claim on Blackness is instead enhanced because…
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