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JUST DO IT

Notes on Politics and Race at the Dawn of the Obama Presidency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2009

Howard Winant
Howard Winant*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara
*
Professor Howard Winant, Department of Sociology, Ellison Hall 2834, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9430. E-mail: hwinant@soc.ucsb.edu
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Abstract

President-elect Barack Obama will take office after a campaign that was pathbreaking on many levels. The argument here, necessarily somewhat speculative, is that Obama's management of his racial identity and of racial politics is roughly predictive of his soon-to-begin management of executive power in the United States. Obama is characterized as a “practical idealist,” a true pragmatist in the deeply grounded, philosophical (as opposed to vulgar) sense of that term. Attention is directed to the way Obama has handled or may be likely to handle the racial politics of the election itself, the ongoing realities of structural racism in the United States and the problem of exercising executive power in an endemically racial state, the role of race in national politics, and the role of race in global politics. The uniqueness of this new administration—headed by a preternaturally skilled and intellectually prepared Black politician—is not chiefly located in the symbolism of Obama's Blackness, important as that is. Rather it is Obama's formation as a Black intellectual and politician that may be expected to guide his thought and action in the White House.

Keywords

PragmatismPolitical AgencyCoalitionRealignmentTransracial PoliticsCross-Class Politics
Type
STATE OF THE DISCOURSE
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Spring 2009 , pp. 49 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2009

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