Posts Tagged ‘Obama’
Post-race, post-reparations
Naomi Klein has written a damning account of Obama’s complicity in killing off the movement for reparations for slavery. By announcing that the US would not be represented at the UN’s anti-racism conference, ‘Durban II’, ostensibly because it is anti-Israel, he has effectively declared to black people that he will not stand up for them.
As Klein notes in conclusion, the right in the US has already decided that Obama is a ‘reverse racist’ that wants to use public finance to redirect funds directly to minorities and away from whites. Nothing could be further from the truth, but,
No matter how race-neutral Obama tries to be, his actions will be viewed by a large part of the country through the lens of its racial obsessions. So, since even his most modest, Band-Aid measures are going to be greeted as if he is waging a full-on race war, Obama has little to lose by using this brief political window actually to heal a few of the country’s racial wounds.
Read the whole article here
From post-racialism to racial consciousness
An interesting aid for teaching the problems of racelesness, post-racialism and colour-blindness to students. I will be using this in my first lecture for undergraduates who will doubtless be asking whether racism isn’t a thing of the past with the election of Obama. Although this is clearly a bigger issue in the US, the Obama election has had an enormous effect on the consideration of racism in the West more generally. Although we obviously cannout simply adapt US realities to different national contexts, the issue of post-race is as alive and well in Europe as it is in North America, the difference is only that it is not discussed in those terms because race in the post-war era was not considered central to what it means to be European.