Racial Politics After Obama

In the waning months of the unprecedented Obama administration, the public sphere is marked less by a celebration of historic social and political inclusion than by anxiety over the present and future of the American racial order. Whatever else the Age of Obama has wrought in the long term for America’s future, at present it has occasioned an intense racialization of U.S. politics and an eruption of agonistic identity politics across partisan divides. These challenges will be among the most vital of the post–Obama era, for both black politics and the resurgent American left.