0857249118

EDITORS INTRODUCTION
I am honored to present Volume 22 of Political Power and Social Theory

(PPST). This volume is a landmark, in that it is among the rst volumes of
PPST to be dedicated to a single topic. With the 2012 U.S. Presidential
Election in sight, this special volume on the meaning of Barack Obamas
presidency from a critical social science perspective is especially timely. For
the rst part of the volume, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Louise Seamster
have put together a diverse collection of essays on the politics of race in the
age of Obama. For the second part (the Scholarly Controversy section
familiar to PPST readers), Philip S. Gorski offers provocative reections on
Obama and civil religion in the United States, with critical commentary
from Joseph Gerteis, Andrew R. Murphy, and Michael Young and
Christopher Pieper.
Soon enough, readers will be able to assess for themselves the signicance
of these essays and commentaries. Here I would like to thank Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva and Louise Seamster for putting together the special section
and to Philip S. Gorski and the commentators for sharing their thoughts.
Finally, many thanks to Stephanie Hull and the rest of the team at Emerald
for bringing this volume to completion.
xv
RETHINKING OBAMA
POLITICAL POWER AND

SOCIAL THEORY
Series Editor: Julian Go
Recent Volumes:
Volume 1: 1980
Volume 2: 1981
Volume 3: 1982
Volume 4: 1984
Volume 5: 1985
Volume 6: 1987
Volume 7: 1989
Volume 8: 1994
Volume 9: 1995
Volume 10: 1996
Volume 11: 1997
Volume 12: 1998
Volume 13: 1999
Volume 14: 2000
Volume 15: 2002
Volume 16: 2004
Volume 17: 2005
Volume 18: 2006
Volume 19: 2008
Volume 20: 2009
Volume 21: 2010
POLITICAL POWER AND SOCIAL THEORY VOLUME 22
RETHINKING OBAMA
EDITED BY
JULIAN GO
Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
United Kingdom North America Japan

India Malaysia China
SENIOR EDITORIAL BOARD

Ronald Aminzade
University of Minnesota
Eiko Ikegami
New School University Graduate
Faculty
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
Duke University
Howard Kimeldorf
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Michael Burawoy
University of CaliforniaBerkeley
Florencia Mallon
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jill Quadagno
Florida State University
Nitsan Chorev
Brown University
John Coatsworth
Columbia University
Ian Roxborough
State University of New York-Stony
Brook
Diane E. Davis
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Michael Schwartz
State University of New York-Stony
Brook
Susan Eckstein
Boston University
George Steinmetz
University of Michigan
Peter Evans
University of CaliforniaBerkeley
John D. Stephens
University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill
Julian Go
Boston University
Maurice Zeitlin
University of California-Los Angeles
Nora Hamilton
University of Southern
California
Sharon Zukin
City University of
New York
ix
STUDENT EDITORIAL BOARD

Cara Bowman
Zophia Edwards
Kiri Gurd
Adrienne Lemon
Megan OLeary
Itai Vardi
xi
EDITORIAL STATEMENT
Political Power and Social Theory is a peer-reviewed annual journal
committed to advancing the interdisciplinary understanding of the linkages
between political power, social relations, and historical development. The
journal welcomes both empirical and theoretical work and is willing to
consider papers of substantial length. Publication decisions are made by the
editor in consultation with members of the editorial board and anonymous
reviewers. For information on submissions, please see the journal website at
www.bu.edu/sociology/ppst.
xiii
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Matt A. Barreto
Department of Political Science, University

of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
Department of Sociology, Duke University,

Durham, NC, USA
Betsy L. Cooper

Joseph Gerteis
Department of Sociology, University of

Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Benjamin Gonzalez

Philip S. Gorski
Department of Sociology, Yale University,

New Haven, CT, USA
Cedric de Leon
Department of Sociology, Providence

College, Providence, RI, USA
Andrew R. Murphy
Department of Political Science, Rutgers

University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
Tamara K. Nopper

Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Christopher S. Parker

Christopher Pieper
Department of Sociology, Baylor

University, Waco, TX, USA
Dylan Rodrguez
Department of Ethnic Studies, University

of California, Riverside, CA, USA
Louise Seamster
Department of Sociology, Duke University,

Durham, NC, USA
vii
viii
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Christopher Towler

Michael P. Young

Texas, Austin, TX, USA
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INTRODUCTION: EXAMINING,
DEBATING, AND RANTING ABOUT
THE OBAMA PHENOMENON
Louise Seamster and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
ABSTRACT
In this special section of Political Power and Social Theory, we present
the work of scholars from various disciplines documenting and analyzing
the Obama phenomenon. The work in this section, including both
theoretical and empirical analysis, is an early step in the much-needed
academic discussion on Obama and racial politics in the contemporary
United States. We offer this compendium as a call-to-arms to progressives
and leftists, encouraging the revival of radical critique of Obamas discourse
and policies instead of the fulsome praise or confused silence that has so far
greeted Obama from the left.
The election of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States brought
breathless excitement to the progressive community. Many wept with joy on
November 4, 2008, when his election was conrmed. This excitement blunted
progressives critical capacity, making them pudding-like; they suppressed
anything but good, happy, hopey changy1 stories and analyses about
Obama. Throughout the campaign, the few voices who dared ask questions
about his background, politics, policies, connections to Wall Street, and the
Rethinking Obama
Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 22, 315
Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022007
LOUISE SEAMSTER AND EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA
like were practically silenced and were regarded as traitors, racists, people
jealous of Obamas success, pimps needing racism to continue to maintain
their business, etc. For radical scholars and activists, this sudden passion
over electoral politics and outcomes is unusual and disconcerting. The total
investment of energy in the election and now re-election of Obama has
translated to less attention paid to the urgent issues we face, including (but not
limited to) high unemployment (especially for minority folks2); mass
incarceration of people of color (Alexander, 2010); rising deportations3 and
increasingly racist and restrictive immigration laws; failing education (and its
privatization advocated by conservatives as well as by the Obama
Administration4); attacks on unions in Republican-led (e.g., Florida, New
Jersey, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan) as well as Democrat-led states
(e.g., Massachusetts and Obamas stand on teachers unions); a horrid health
care system (the health care reform that passed will do little to control costs,
the Achilles heel of the system; see Oberlander & White, 2009); a concerted
attack on women (e.g., the state initiatives to restrict abortion and family
planning); and continued, misguided American involvement in what are now
four separate wars. Although many of these issues predate Obamas ascent to
the presidency, curiously (for us, expectedly) he has not done much to counter
these troubling trends and, on some issues, one can argue he has done less
than previous presidents.
It is way past time for members of the progressive academic community to
wake up and stop smelling the Obama hope roses. We must, as we have
done historically, analyze the class, gender, race, and imperial nature of the
politics of the administration in charge of the American state, regardless of
the skin color of the occupant of the White House. In fact, as several of the
authors in this issue argue (including the editors), Obamas blackness has
become in many ways the best possible shell5 for the smooth operation of
the American political regime. Accordingly, we have assembled a group of
scholars in this special section of Political Power and Social Theory to
examine, debate, and rant a bit about the Obama phenomenon we believe
that ranting is a much underappreciated form of resistance and a must for
progressive politics. The scholars in this issue have different views on
Obama, the meaning of his election, and his politics, but we included people
who are seriously thinking and engaging on Obama-related matters rather
than just supporting (or critiquing) Obama without much efcacy or
intellectual vigor. We were (and still are) dismayed by how during and after
the campaign, many renowned scholars of color at Princeton, Georgetown,
Harvard, Columbia, Maryland, and other prestigious institutions offered
analysis that was not much better than what we read from liberal writers
Introduction: Examining, Debating, and Ranting about the Obama Phenomenon
in The New York Times or hear from MSNBCs commentators every night
(and, in fact, some are paid commentators for this TV station or seem to
have a direct line to The New York Times). And much of the rst generation
of books on Obama consists largely of nationalist celebrations (We are so
happy and proud of our rst Black president) or books that state the
obvious and easy point that racism is alive and well. Lastly, we would be
remiss if we do not acknowledge the fact that the liberal-labor coalition
(Domhoff, 2010), and their representatives in the media have not done much
better than minority scholars with visibility and the rst generation of books
on Obama.
Therefore, this issue is but a rst salvo on the long road to recovery from
the Obama hope hangover (Bonilla-Silva, 2008). We may not have done all
that needs to be done or said all that needs to be said in this issue, but as
David Simon, producer of The Wire, stated in his farewell letter after the
show ended, Nothing happens unless the shit is stirred! Like Simon, our
goal with this issue is to provoke, challenge, annoy, and, hopefully, force a
debate at a time when there is none.
Before introducing the authors and articles in this issue, however, we
provide a brief account of the Obama political landscape since the election.
This, we believe, is necessary because the Obama craze (Gonzalez, 2008) has
mystied recent history, and what happened yesterday is forgotten today.
AMERICAN RACIAL POLITICS FOR REAL SINCE

OBAMA WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT
Political scientist Michael Dawson has pointed out that Obamas election
represented a moment of middle-class black nationalism (Dawson, 2008).
For far too many blacks (and not just middle-class blacks), Obamas election
was sufcient evidence that we have overcome. Indeed, it is quite plausible
that middle-class blacks will prot from Obamas election: the symbolic
capital of having a black president may help them prove that were not all
alike to wary whites at the expense of most blacks for whom, as Dawson
argues, the American Dream still largely remains an American Nightmare (Dawson, 2008). To assure Obamas success, the unspoken but clear
strategy that Obama and his handlers have used is to avoid any talk about race
and racism, even when racial issues emerge.
For example, after the Obama administration forced Shirley Sherrod6 to
resign following the circulation of a faked video purportedly showing her
racism, President Obama called for a national discussion of race issues

around kitchen tables and water coolers and in schools and church
basements (Montopoli, 2010). Besides the fact that race is already discussed
around kitchen tables, water coolers, and church basements (Myers, 2003)
albeit often in disguised terms (Bonilla-Silva, 2009), calls for discussions,
dialogues, or conversations about race from liberal politicians are actually
ways to deect dealing with race issues at all! (Just announcing the need for
these conversations uses all available breath for serious discussions and helps
all parties return to the normalcy of politely not talking about how race
matters.) This speech was also an attempt to distract from the fact that Shirley
Sherrod was red by Obamas own administration, not by someone standing
at a water cooler in Oklahoma. This could have been the moment for waking
up and realizing Obama is not serious about dealing with racial matters.
However, like with the Gates incident and the ensuing beer summit, Obama
and his people were successful in sealing the racial crack and somehow
convincing everybody that this was all a big misunderstanding forced on the
Administration by a conservative blogger (see our analysis on this incident in
our chapter in this issue).
But Obamas support is not limited to middle-class blacks. The symbolic
importance of his election is evident among poor and working-class blacks
as well. This accounts for the fact that black voter turnout increased almost
5 percent for the 2008 election (Lopez, 2009), nally reaching parity with
white turnout. While less well-off blacks are not likely to benet materially
from Obamas election, they shared the excitement over having the rst
black president and have become consumed by and symbolically invested in
his success. In many ways, they seem willing to give him a pass on almost
anything he does, and they somehow believe that his success is theirs, too.
Presumably, they also expect Obama to enact policies that would improve
conditions for blacks in the United States, but far too many are willing to
rationalize his inactions in this area as the product of the mess President
Bush left for him.7 As Keeyanga-Yamahtta Taylor points out, Obamas
actual track record over the past three years has not been good for poor and
working-class blacks we can look at his 2010 budget, which included cuts
to HUD and heating assistance that will hurt poor blacks more than any
other community, the rising black unemployment, and the disproportionately high rates of foreclosure among poor and working-class blacks who
were targeted by unscrupulous bankers and mortgage specialists in the past 10
years (Rivlin, 2010; Rugh & Massey, 2010; Taylor, 2011). As we send this issue
to press, there are strong indications that Obama, through his emissary, VicePresident Biden, will again compromise with the Republicans on the budget
and agree to Medicare and Medicaid cuts that will likely disproportionally
affect poor folks of color (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2005).
While progressive and liberal whites8 support Obama for reasons other than
blacks (perhaps including the status they earn by being able to claim their
antiracism; Effron, Cameron, & Monin, 2009), their love for Obama seems
unconditional. This love has blinded them too, as they see nothing wrong when
Obama does Bush-like things. Just a few years ago, many of these whites
spearheaded a vigorous anti-war movement and marched and agitated against
the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as Obama has continued these
interventions9 and added Libya and Pakistan to the imperial plate of
entanglements, these same whites stopped showing up at protests (Heaney &
Rojas, 2011) and developed tortuous political arguments to explain away
Obamas expansionist and militarist record (Obama needs to show Americans
and the world that he can lead, be strong, and kill terrorists like Osama Bin
Laden). Where was the (mostly white) left when Obama started bombing
Libya or when he doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan? Where was the
left in questioning the legality and wisdom of Bin Ladens assassination (aside
from Noam Chomsky (2011))? Domestically, where is the lefts response to
Obamas attack on public schools by hiring neoliberal, anti-union cronies like
Arne Duncan and by continuing No Child Left Behind under its new name
Race to the Top? While we applaud the recent pro-union protests in
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, we lament that the left has not pressured
Obama to take a stronger stand in support of working people. Instead of a
reasoned and sustained critique, progressives have behaved like Obama
boosters, only voicing concerns with what would happen if a Republican
president got into the White House. (Have we seen this movie before?)
While the minority masses and a large segment of the white community
(see endnote 5) are still in Obama-doration, a number of voices from the left
have begun to critique Obama and his policies. One of the most eloquent of
these dissenting voices has been the civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who
recently appeared in Democracy Now to talk about his new documentary
and Obamas presidency. Belafonte lamented that
there is no force, no energy, of popular voice, popular rebellion, popular upheaval, no
champion for radical thought at the table of the discourse. And as a consequence,
Barack Obama has nothing to listen to, except his detractors and those who help pave
the way to his own personal comfort with power power contained, power misdirected,
power not fully engaged. (Belafonte, 2011)
Beyond Belafonte, there is more rumbling suggesting that support for Obama
may not be as uncritical this time around. Latino leaders in particular have
expressed ambivalence about 2012. Luis Gutierrez, Democratic Representative from Illinois, has announced that he may not support Obama unless
the Administration comes through with progressive immigration reform
(Rodr guez, 2011). Oscar Chacon, executive director of the National Alliance
for Latin American and Caribbean Communities, said in response to Obamas
recent El Paso speech on immigration that we cannot help but to feel truly
trapped between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the political choices
available to Latino voters (NALACC, 2011) less than a ringing endorsement. Bruce Dixon, managing editor of the Black Agenda Report,
documents how Latino activists and nonprots are frustrated by soaring
deportations, failure to pass the DREAM act, and the Secure Communities
act, a measure that continues the expansion of local and state governments
into the business of hunting and deporting undocumented people
(Dixon, 2011). And ahead of Obamas trip to Puerto Rico this June,
activists are organizing a large protest demanding self-determination (NILP,
2011).
Several black intellectuals and leaders have also voiced concern about
Obama. Most famously, if also problematically, Cornel West has thrown his
hat into the ring, telling Chris Hedges in a critique of Obama that we
become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party,
more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but
thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American
empire (Hedges, 2011). Furthermore, segments of the Hip Hop community,
a community that was vital for Obamas election, have also criticized Obama,
and some artists have done so quite bluntly. During the 2008 campaign
Immortal Technique and Davey D expressed their doubts that Obama could
do much (Forman, 2010). Sean Combs, AKA P. Diddy (formerly Puff
Daddy), said in an interview early in 2011 that although he still supports the
president, he is disappointed with how little Obama has done for blacks.
P. Diddy also said, He (the president) owes us. Id rather have a black
president that was man enough to say that he was doing something for black
people have one term than a president who played the politics game have two
terms.10 Recently Lupe Fiasco tweeted after Osamas assassination, Osama
Dead!?! Afghan Operation done now??? Now kill poverty, wack schools, and
US imperialismy (Fiasco, 2011). And in an interview with CBS News,
Whats Trending, he went further and said that, To me, the biggest
terrorist is Obama in the United States of America. He then added, For me,
Im trying to ght the terrorism thats actually causing the other forms of
terrorism. The root cause of terrorism is the stuff that the U.S. government
allows to happen, the foreign policies that we have in place in different
countries that inspire people to become terrorists. And its easy for us, because
its really just some oil that we can really get on our own.11
Lastly, Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, has said his union is
not going all-out for Obama and for Democrats unless they change their
tune, and is likely to spend its money and troops on local campaigns (Stein,
2011). Blacks, Latinos, and unions are the three pillars of Obamas base
and yet all three groups are, halfhearted efforts aside,12 largely taken for
granted13 as Obama continues to court white voters in swing states (as
Cedric de Leon addresses in his article in this issue). But what would happen if
all these votes could not be counted on to prop up Obamas chances? In that
case, pundits, analysts, and campaign managers might remember that blacks,
Latinos, and poor and working-class people matter, that their needs matter,
and that they will not be satised with a symbolic vote. We could then push
representative liberal democracy to its limits by electing politicians that could
actually represent our interests.
THE CONTRIBUTIONS IN THIS SECTION

We begin with two theoretical pieces by Dylan Rodr guez and Tamara
Nopper focusing on the long and deep historical racial context behind
Obamas election and contemporary racial discourse. They are followed by
contributions from Cedric de Leon and from Matt Barreto, Elizabeth
Cooper, Ben Gonzalez, and Chris Parker examining Obamas connection to
New Deal-era Democratic politics and the rise of the Tea Party, respectively.
We conclude with our own contribution.
In his essay, White Reconstruction and Slaverys Present Tense, Dylan
Rodr guez provides a counterpoint to the current multicultural, we
have overcome discourse by arguing that our historical moment and
the Obama national-racial telos cannot be politically severed from the
substructure of racist/antiblack, genocidal and proto-genocidal violence that
is formed in the crucible of racial chattel slavery (p. 14). Rodr guez suggests
Obamas election must be understood as a continuation, rather than a break,
of the violent racial regime beginning in slavery. He highlights and contrasts
the centrality of racial violence in contemporary America (e.g., the prison
complex, the labor market, discrimination, etc.) (Jung, Costa-Vargas, &
Bonilla-Silva, 2011) to the timid, feel-good invocations of racial progress by
Obama and advocates a radical abolitionism that recognizes racial violence in
the present tense so that we can (nally) escape the historical gravity of the
genocidally antiblack peculiar institution (Rodr guez, p. 10).
10
While Rodr guez sees continuity with a white supremacist past in Obamas
election, Tamara Nopper reminds us that the differences also matter in her
essay on Barack Obamas community organizing as new Black politics.
Nopper evaluates the meaning of Obamas past as a community organizer,
arguing that Obama represents the new Black politics, a generation of
politicians of color who have no connection to the Civil Rights movement
and tend to shun issues of race (see also our contribution in this issue). She
argues that many commentators point to Obamas time as a community
organizer to suggest that Obama does have deeper ties to the grassroots and
to progressive politics. However, Nopper contends that Obama uses this
experience in his books and speeches to actually indicate the ineffectiveness of
this model and to advocate his post-racial brand of politics. This move has
allowed him to, on the one hand, express gratitude to old guard Civil Rights
activists and politicians for the job they did while, on the other hand, suggest
the need for a Joshua generation (Obama, 2007) of new leaders to achieve
progress in a different way and style.
Cedric de Leon also debates the continuity-or-change argument in his
contribution titled The More Things Change. De Leon challenges the
argument that Obamas election represented a change in party politics and
suggests his election recapitulates events from the New Deal era. The
Democratic Party introduced New Deal legislation that gave whites
multiple structural advantages, but relied, like the Obama campaign, on
incorporating blacks with offers of minimal civil rights reforms. De Leon
points out that while the literature on whiteness and colorblind racism
explains race in the modern era, this research has heretofore neglected the role
of party politics in shaping racial hegemony. He also urges analysts of
colorblindness to look at the long history (dating back to the 1930s) shaping
the post-racial politics of today. Lastly, he examines the election returns in
Virginia and North Carolina to show that, like in the past, the Democrats of
today proted enormously from an increase in the white suburban vote along
with a greatly increased black turnout. He concludes that whites are still likely
to get much more than non-whites out of this political deal.
While it is important to evaluate the contradictions and tensions inherent
in the present liberal party politics, with their semblance of colorblindness,
Barreto and his coauthors remind us that we should not neglect the
popularity of old-fashioned racism in many circles in the United States. To
this end, Barreto, Cooper, Gonzalez, and Parker explore the role of the Tea
Party in their article, What Motivates the Tea Party? Relying on
Hofstadters (1964) theory of the paranoid style in conservative politics,
they classify the Tea Party as a pseudo-conservative movement motivated
11
by anti-immigrant, anti-black, and anti-gay sentiment. They examine this

claim with content analysis of issues and themes covered on various Tea
Party websites along with a survey of attitudes among Tea Party supporters.
We close this special section with an article by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
(with the assistance of Louise Seamster) titled The Sweet Enchantment of
Color Blindness in Black Face: Explaining the Miracle, Debating the
Politics, and Suggesting a Way for Hope to be For Real in America. In
this contribution he reiterates the claim a claim he has been making since
2008 that the so-called miracle of Obamas election is actually part and
parcel of the post-Civil Rights racial regime that has been in place for
arguably forty years (he calls it the new racism). He also examines the
politics and policies that Obama advocated and has now carried out as
president and, as he predicted during the election cycle, nds they are mostly
center-right. Bonilla-Silva concludes his essay by forcefully articulating the
need for the progressive community to moor their political practices in
social movement rather than in electoral politics, as they have done since the
election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
STEPPING UP TO THE TABLE: WHERE DO WE GO

FROM HERE?
Taken together, the chapters in this section develop the thesis that Obamas
presidency represents continuity with the racial past rather than a meaningful
break epitomized by the empty slogan of change we can believe in. At the
same time, however, the situation today is not exactly the same as in previous
phases of white supremacy and racialized capitalism. Racism or, more
properly, racial domination has transformed itself to survive the end of
de jure in-your-face white supremacy, and it is now much more frequently of
the now you see it, now you dont (Smith, 1996) variety (Bonilla-Silva,
2001). To accurately identify the way this new political regime functions and
develop the politics needed to challenge it, we need to pay close attention to
the differences that have emerged [e.g., the new brand of colorblind minority
politicians coming from both right and left, the post-racial version of colorblind ideology, the rise of a neo-mulatto group (Horton & Sykes, 2004) and its
potential separation from the black community altogether, the meaning of
imperialism in black face, etc.].
The issues raised in these chapters are an early stage in the larger debate
about what the Obama presidency means, how we should interpret the
12
present moment, and the always-pressing political question of what is to be

done. We need to secularize all Obama-related matters and discussions so
that we can analyze his policies and politics critically as we have done with
all other presidents. The argument that any criticism of Obama from the left
helps the racist, hysterical, birther Tea Party Republican right is nonsense
and has helped silence dissenting voices (see our contribution in this issue).
We also reject the argument that such criticism will undermine his reelection
chances, and that, therefore, we must refrain from critique. Obama needs to
be pushed to the left if his Administration is going to deliver more than just
hope. We can turn again to Belafontes recent interview for a wise answer on
this matter. When asked whether criticism of the president might undermine
his chances, Belafonte responded, I think we will not only undermine him,
but undermine the hopes of this nation, if we dont criticize him y Nothing
will happen but good for Barack Obama and the United States of America,
and indeed the world, if everybody stepped to the table and said, This is the
course we must be on (Belafonte, 2011). We second Belafontes call for a
return to lively political engagement. Only if we maintain a critical eye and
become active in movement politics will we at last produce change we can
believe in for real.
NOTES
1. This was an expression used by Sarah Palin in the rst Tea Party national
convention in Nashville, Tennessee in 2010. Although using this phrase may seem
sacrilegious to some, we must admit the effectiveness and wittiness of her pun.
2. As we were nishing this Introduction, the Obama Administration suffered a
blow in their economic expectations as the May 2011 employment data released by
the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that the economy just added 54,000 jobs and
that the unemployment rate was 9.1 percent. The media, however, failed to point out
that the rate was 8 percent for whites, but 16.2 and 11.9 for blacks and Latinos,
respectively. Data from the BLS News Release, The Employment Situation May
2011, released Friday, June 3, 2011. Information accessed from http://www.bls.gov/
on Monday, June 6, 2011.
3. As we point out in our article, Obama is outdoing Bush in this area as
deportations have increased to close to 400,000 per year.
4. See Patrick Martin, Obama education plan boosts privatization, victimizes
teachers, March 31, 2010, at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/rtttm31.shtml.
5. This is a fragment of a quote from V. I. Lenin. The entire quote is, A democratic
republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital
has gained possession of this very best shell y it establishes its power so securely, so
rmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic
13
republic can shake it. See Essential Works of Lenin, edited by Henry M. Christman
(NY: Dover Publications, 1987).
6. This was the black woman working for the Department of Agriculture in
Georgia red who was after a partial video of speech she delivered was leaked by
conservative activist Andrew Breitbart. Reports at the time this incident happened
suggested that Obama was concerned about how Glenn Beck would use the Sherrod
matter to label Obama as a reverse racist. Had Obama, a constitutional lawyer, given
Sherrod her constitutional rights (innocent until proven guilty), he would have
looked like a genius, as the video was proven within twenty-four hours to be a con
job. But this incident, along with many others, indicates the fear Obama and his
people have about anything that may bring him close to race matters.
7. There is no systematic data we are aware of on this matter, but the word in the
streets, hair salons and barber shops, and what we hear from civil rights activists
suggests this is the case. Bonilla-Silva talks almost daily with poor blacks in a variety
of venues (cafeterias, supermarkets, malls, etc.) and almost unanimously they express
support for Obama even though he brings up problematic issues in his policies,
actions, and public pronouncements.
8. This is the 43 percent or so who supported him in 2008 and seem likely to do
so again in 2012.
9. We should not accept, as MSNBC crowingly did, Obamas September 2010
announcement of an Iraq withdrawal, when there is still a reserve force of 50,000
troops and at least as many contractors in the country, in addition to the United
Statess installation of the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad.
10. Excerpted from The Source, a Hip Hop magazine, by The Hufngton Post.
Diddy On Obama: Calls Out President, Asks To Do Better For Black People.
Piece posted on January, 31, 2001, available at http://www.hufngtonpost.com/
2011/01/31/diddy-on-obama-calls-out-president-asks-to-do-better-for-black-people_
n_816473.html.
11. This interview can be found all over the internet. We used the excerpt by Houston
Williams, Lupe Fiasco Calls Obama The Biggest Terrorist, AllHipHop (available
at http://www.allhiphop.com/stories/news/archive/2011/06/08/22784262.aspx).
12. While, as we have said, Obama has avoided the subject of race whenever
possible, his campaign recognizes they need support from blacks in 2012, leading to
some awkward scenes in which Obamas campaign has performed the equivalent of
telling African Americans that he really meant to call, but he was just so busy. In
honor of the 2012 election, the Obama administration has suspended its usual
practice of ignoring African Americans by creating a website and hiring a liaison
to attest to the administrations alleged benets to blacks. (Taylor, 2011). And
despite his somewhat strained relationship with the organization, Obama spoke at a
Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner in September 2010, asking members
to go back to your neighborhoods, to go back to your workplaces, to go to
churches and go to the barbershops and go to the beauty shops, and tell them weve
got more work to do (Williams, 2011).
13. Of course, Republicans arent taking these voters for granted this is why they
are mounting legislation in multiple states to restrict voter rights, through ID
requirements, shortened registration and voting periods, and other cheap tactics that
disproportionately affect young people, the poor, and minorities.
14
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York, NY: The New Press.
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on June 2, 2011.
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2001). White supremacy and racism in the post-civil rights era. Boulder, CO:
Lynne Rienner Publisher.
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2008). The 2008 Elections and the future of anti-racism in 21st century
America or how we got drunk with Obamas hope liquor and failed to see reality.
Lecture delivered at the Association of Humanist Sociologists Meeting, November 7.
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2009). Racism without racists. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleeld
Publishers.
Chomsky, N. (2011, May 6). My reaction to Osama Bin Ladens death. Guernica. Retrieved
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Dawson, M. (2008, February 27). Hes black and were proud. The Root. Retrieved http://
www.theroot.com/views/he-s-black-and-we-re-proud. Accessed on June 2, 2011.
Dixon, B. (2011, May 11). The black president and the brown vote. Black Agenda Report. Retrieved
http://blackagendareport.com/content/black-president-and-brown-vote. Accessed on May
31, 2011.
Domhoff, W. (2010). Who rules America? Challenges to corporate and class dominance.
New York, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Effron, D. A., Cameron, J., & Monin, B. (2009). Endorsing Obama licenses favoring whites.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 590593.
Fiasco, L. (2011, May 2). Quotes from Twitter feed. Retrieved from http://www.atlnight
spots.com/2011/osama-bin-laden-is-dead-nicki-minajlupe-asco-chuck-d-skillz-react.
Forman, M. (2010). Conscious hip-hop, change, and the Obama era. American Studies Journal,
54. Retrieved from http://asjournal.zusas.uni-halle.de/179.html. Accessed on July 14,
2011.
Gonzalez, M. (2008, February 29). Count me out: The Obama craze. Counterpunch. Retrieved
from http://www.counterpunch.org/gonzalez02292008.html. Accessed on June 2, 2011.
Heaney, M. T., & Rojas, F. (2011). The Partisan dynamics of contention: Demobilization of the
antiwar movement in the United States, 20072009. Mobilization: An International
Journal, 16(1), 4154.
Hedges, C. (2011, May 16). The Obama deception: Why Cornel West went ballistic. TruthDig.
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cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516/. Accessed on May 31, 2011.
Hofstadter, R. (1964). The paranoid style in American politics. Harpers Magazine (November),
7786.
Horton, H. D., & Sykes, L. L. (2004). Toward a critical demography of neo-mulattoes:
Structural change and diversity within the black population. In: C. Herring, V. Keith &
H. D. Horton (Eds.), Skin deep: How race and complexion matter in the Color-Blind
era (pp. 159173). Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press.
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Jung, M.-K., Costa-Vargas, J., & Bonilla-Silva, E. (2011). The state of white supremacy: Racism,
governance, and the United States. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kaiser Family Foundation. (2005). A prole of African-American, Latino, and whites with
Medicare: Implications for outreach efforts for the new drug benet. Washington, DC:
The Henry Kaiser Family Foundation.
Lopez, M. H. (2009). Dissecting the 2008 electorate Most diverse in U.S. history. Pew
Research Center. Retrieved from http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1209/racial-ethnic-voterspresidential-election. Accessed on June 4, 2011.
Montopoli, B. (2010, July 29). Obama: Shirley Sherrod deserved better. CBS News. Retrieved
from http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20012072-503544.html. Accessed on
May 31, 2011.
Myers, K. (2003). White fright: Reproducing white supremacy through casual discourse. In:
A. Doane & E. Bonilla-Silva (Eds.), White out: The continuing signicance of racism.
New York, NY: Routledge.
National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities. (2011, May 10).
President Obama, actions speak louder than words. NALACC Press Release.
Retrieved from http://www.nalacc.org/index.php?id107&no_cache1&L1. Accessed
on June 4, 2011.
National Institute for Latino Policy. (2011, June 6). Social and political organizations to present
president Obama on this visit to Puerto Rico with demands. Press Release from the June
14th Coordinating Committee.
Obama, B. (2007, March 4). Speech delivered at Selma voting rights march commemoration.
A.M.E. Church. Retrieved from http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/03/obamas_
selma_speech_text_as_de.html. Accessed on July 14, 2011.
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reform. New England Journal of Medicine, 361, 11311133.
Rivlin, G. (2010). Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. How the working poor became
big business. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.
Rodr guez, B. (2011, April 16). Gutierrez: Support for Obama depends on reform. Associated
Press. Retrieved from http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2011/04/16/gutierrez-support-forobama-depends-on-immigration-reform/. Accessed on June 2, 2011.
Rugh, J. S., & Massey, D. (2010). Racial segregation and the American foreclosure crisis.
American Sociological Review, 75(5), 629651.
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NY: State University of New York Press.
Stein, S. (2011, May 20). Richard Trumka threatens to abandon democrats in 2012
unless they ght harder for labor. Hufngton Post. Retrieved from http://www.
hufngtonpost.com/2011/05/20/richard-trumka-democrats_n_864518.html. Accessed on
June 2, 2011.
Taylor, K.-Y. (2011, May 19). What has Obama done for African Americans? The Socialist
Worker. Retrieved from http://socialistworker.org/2011/05/19/obama-and-the-blackvote. Accessed on May 31, 2011.
Williams, J. (2011, May 10). President Obama, congressional black caucus on solid ground?
Politico.com. Retrieved from http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/54617.html.
THE BLACK PRESIDENTIAL

NON-SLAVE: GENOCIDE
AND THE PRESENT TENSE
OF RACIAL SLAVERY
Dylan Rodr guez
ABSTRACT
A devastating racial logic remains at play in the moment of a post-civil
rights Black presidency. Barack Obamas ascent has amplied a national
mythology of racial progress in the US multiculturalist age. This
mythology has fundamentally undermined both the credibility and critical
traction of existing scholarly-activist languages of racism, antiracism,
white supremacy, and institutionalized racial dominance. Thus, the
discourse of national-racial vindication that animates Obamas ascendance can and must be radically opposed with creative historical
narrations. These narrations must attempt to explain how and why
systems of racial dominance and state-condoned, state-sanctioned racist
violence remain central to the shaping of our present tense. The chapter
approaches this problematic by examining how the historical social logics
of racial chattel slavery cannot be historically compartmentalized and
temporally isolated into a discrete past, because they are genocidal in
their structuring and are thus central to the constitution of our existing
social and cultural systems. The apparatus of the North American racial
Rethinking Obama
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022008
17
18
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
chattel institution must be theorized in its present tense articulations

because its logics of power, domination, and violence have never really left
us. The essay offers a schematic elaboration of this reconceptualization of
racial genocide focusing on how the slaverys abolition in the latter-19th
century provides the political, cultural, and legal basis for slaverys
reform into the apparatuses of policing, criminalization, widespread
and state-sanctioned antiblack bodily violence, and ultimately massive
imprisonment. This examination allows for an elaboration of how
slaverys genocidal social logics permeate the present tense social
formation, particularly at the site of massive racial criminalization and
imprisonment.
Keywords: Barack Obama; genocide; racism; white supremacy; postcivil rights; slavery
INTRODUCTION: RETELLING THE RACIAL

PRESENT TENSE
A devastating racial logic remains at play in the moment of a post-civil
rights Black presidency. By now we should be able to agree on at least one
political-intellectual premise in our continual assessment of Barack Obamas
signicance as a national executive, global (Black/multiracial) political gure,
and iconic symbol of liberal American optimism: the way in which his ascent
amplies and afrms the national mythology of racial progress1 in the US
multiculturalist age has fundamentally undermined both the common sense
credibility and critical political traction of existing scholarly-activist languages
of racism, antiracism, white supremacy, and institutionalized racial dominance. If the work of building a robust public conversation around the
systemic, historically rooted structures of state and state-sanctioned racism
seemed extraordinarily difcult before 2008, it now seems virtually impossible
in the shadow of the desegregated Oval Ofce.
The central argument of what follows is this: the discourse of nationalracial vindication that animates Obamas ascendance can and must be
radically opposed with creative socio-historical narrations. These narrations
must attempt to explain how and why systems of racial dominance and statecondoned, state-sanctioned racist violence remain central to the shaping of
our present tense. I approach this problematic by examining how the
particular social logics of racial chattel slavery cannot be historically
The Black Presidential Non-Slave
19
compartmentalized and temporally isolated into a discrete past, because

they are genocidal in their structuring and are thus central to the constitution
of our existing social and cultural systems. In part because slavery is often not
explicitly framed, analyzed, and theorized as a unique chapter among the
multiple global stories of racial genocide, I contend that the apparatus of
the North American racial chattel institution must be theorized in its present
tense articulations because its logics of power, domination, and violence have
never really left us.2 While this core argument requires signicantly more
elaboration than I am allowed here, my intent is to offer the initial outlines of a
descriptive, historical, and theoretical framework that claries the political
stakes and contexts of thinking radically, racially, and historically in the
current moment. This essay is organized into ve short sections, which present
some preliminary components of such a framing.
The rst section of this chapter departs from Obamas renowned 2008 A
More Perfect Union speech by revisiting the national-racial turning point
that this patriotic oration glories and mysties: the seemingly magical
racial transformation of a white supremacist and antiblack slave nation
through the (white) moral-political assertion of (Black) emancipation and
(Black male) citizenship. I briey examine how two key elements within the
racial narrative of Barack Obamas presidential candidacy unwittingly
demonstrate the persistent historical present tense of racial slavery, to the
extent that slavery is understood in its totality as a cultural discourse,
material institution, and idiom of power and dominance.3
The second section of this essay departs from this political condition by
urgently arguing for a re-telling of the national-racial story in the aftermath
of November 2008. Here, I take as my point of departure the call issued by
C. L. R. James almost a century ago to view the work of historical narrative
as an urgent, potentially radical political labor in the aftermath and in
anticipation of revolutionary (Black liberationist and anticolonialist)
insurgencies. The third section proceeds toward the construction of such a
narrative by outlining a working conception of slaverys historical present
tense. Anchoring this notion of slavery as a central component of our
current social condition is a re-opened analytic of racial genocide. I situate
this preliminary analysis within a genealogy of radical thought, ranging
from the Civil Rights Congress We Charge Genocide (1951) to Joao Costa
Vargas Never Meant to Survive (2008). This body of work facilitates a
signicantly more comprehensive understanding of how the lived historical
realities of slavery-as-genocide both exceed the empiricist/quantitative
descriptions of genocide common to many social scientic studies (often
characterized by a xation on numerical calculations of premature mortality,
20
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
physiological suffering, and generational loss) and challenge discrete temporal

periodizations of genocide which attempt to delineate the discrete beginning
and endpoints of its historical processes and social effects.4 This genealogy of
radical analysis also suggests that the particular antiblack racial genocide of
North American chattel slavery does not simply end, but is wrapped into a
historical continuity that sustains slaverys structural and institutional
violence into the current social condition.
The essays fourth and fth sections offer a schematic elaboration of this
reconceptualization of racial genocide. I focus in the fourth section on how
the abolition of slavery in the latter-19th century provides the political,
cultural, and legal basis for slaverys reform into the apparatuses of
policing, criminalization, widespread and state-sanctioned antiblack bodily
violence, and ultimately massive imprisonment. This narration examines
how the apparent reformist windfall of slaverys abolition actually rewrites
and exacerbates the fundamental (juridical, physiological, ontological)
violence of the abolished institution, and permanently codes the logics of
antiblack genocide into post-emancipation US statecraft. I proceed in the
fth section by suggesting that the racial story of slaverys present tense is
perhaps best told through a re-narration of the systemic logics of the
contemporary (post-1970s) US prison regime. Departing from an existing
body of scholarship, I argue for an understanding of the US prison regimes
institutional genealogy that centers its historical continuities with slaverys
genocidal social logics. I conclude the essay with a meditation on the Obama
ascendancy as a landmark of the post-1960s era of White Reconstruction,
a notion that de-centers (but does not dispense with) the more commonly
asserted notion of a post-civil rights period.
The racial spectacle that marks the patriotic cessation of the historical
white monopoly on the ofce of the US Presidency represents a certain state
of emergency for existing analytics of race, racism, and white supremacy.
What might it mean to think, theorize, and organize radical politicalintellectual work around the terms of white supremacy and racism at a
time when institutionalized white monopolies have apparently dissipated
(even if only through piecemeal diversity initiatives), and the social legacies
of US racial genocides (slavery, land conquest, colonialism) are commonly
understood as artifacts of a distant, unaccessible, and largely irrelevant past?
What might it mean to consider the current moment as a time when the
changing social logics of a historically genocidal and proto-genocidal racist
nation have enabled a piecemeal repopulation of the ideological and political
apparatuses of national white supremacy with the minds, spirits, and bodies
of its onetime slaves, savages, and racial colonial subjects?
21
ASSESSING THE RACIAL STORY: BLACK

PRESIDENT AS (BLACK) NON-SLAVE
The rise of Barack Obama and the climate of hollow unfulllment that has
followed his administrations unsurprising adherence to the protocols and
logics of the racial/racist state indicate that the aftermath of his ascent is not
best described as a disappointment or political betrayal.5 Rather, it is a
spectacular symptom of a recongured racial political problem: how are we
to make sense of the enduring historical structures (as well as the empirical
evidence) of widespread racial subjection within a state and social formation
that generally articulates itself as multiculturalist in orientation, desegregated in form, and post-racist in institutional spirit? (Keep in mind that
even the racist right-wing reactions to the alleged multiculturalist hegemony
are themselves often grounded in the relatively easily accepted premise that
the United States is no longer a racist or even a racial society; this
assumption matters, if only because it was utterly unfeasible until recently.)
We can address a small but signicant component of this urgent political
dilemma by addressing it as a challenge of both theory and narrative. We do
not have substantial enough frameworks through which to explain
(theorize) and radically engage the structures of racial dominance that have
succeeded the period of American Jim Crow apartheid and persisted or
even proliferated through Obamas presidential ascent. Nor do we have
adequate methods for telling the (racial) story of what has happened since
the 1960s as the social textures and institutionalizations of racist violence/
subordination have seemingly transformed or, at least, dramatically
changed in the post-civil rights period. Given the complexity of these
challenges and the Obama ascendancys centrality to them, it is worth
asking: What national relation to the long historical legacies of racial chattel
slavery is narrated through and by Obama, and toward what ends? How is
Obamas vexed existence as a Black social subject narrated as if it is outside
the long national genealogies of antiblack subjection, and thus resituated
within a multiculturalist revision of the long, durable story of national
white supremacy? How does the racial story of Barack Obama actually
indicate racial slaverys fugitive presence in our midst?
Candidate Obamas March 2008 A More Perfect Union speech, arguably
the dening cultural moment of his presidential campaign, provides an
accessible entry into examining the apparent shifts in the discursive and
rhetorical structures of race and white supremacy in the current moment. As
the signature moment in the campaign in which Obama directly addressed
race as a complex political and historical relation of power, this oration
22
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
brought unprecedented popular legitimacy to a 21st century vision of

multiculturalist, nationalist optimism.
Lifting its title from the opening sentence of the US Constitution,
Obamas address was coined as a political denunciation of (and personal
disassociation from) the widely respected Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright,
whose sermons in the prophetic tradition of Black Liberation Theology were
widely framed by the national media, and eventually by Obama himself,
as demagogic, race-baiting iterations of Black paranoia.6 Crucial to our
discussion is that Obamas speech rested on an ahistorical caricaturing of the
legacies of racial chattel slavery: he narrated the liberal myth of slaverys
demise through the notion of a striving, though inevitably imperfect Christian
nationhood.
The document [the nations founders] produced was eventually signed but ultimately
unnished. It was stained by this nations original sin of slavery, a question that divided
the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow
the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any nal
resolution to future generations. (Obama, 2008) (emphasis added)
Following the logic of this biblical rhetoric, to enslave is tantamount to

being and becoming fully human: the slave owning white society collectively
bears Adams culpability of original sin, the necessary burden for eventually
inhabiting the Christian humility of humanness before God. This white
supremacist humanness is universalized throughout the speech, but is
especially conspicuous in Obamas re-narration of the Constitutions juridical
normalization of a slave institution that spawned epochal genocidal racist
violence. Stunningly given his substantial pedagogical engagement with the
emerging scholarly eld of critical race theory during his 12 years as a
University of Chicago Law School professor7 Obama obliterates any
historical understanding of the Constitution as a fundamentally antiblack,
anti-indigenous national document. Rather, he mysties this founding
American text which legally formed, validated, and protected the institution
of racial chattel slavery as if it were an immanently abolitionist one.
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our
Constitution a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship
under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union
that could be and should be perfected over time. (Obama, 2008)
Of course, the narrative arc of this liberal mythology is nothing new, and the
story is entirely routine in bypassing the centrality of slavery and land
conquest to the Constitutions formulation of citizenship, property
rights, commerce, domestic militias, and taxation (infamously, Taxes shall
23
be y determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including

those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed,
three fths of all other Persons.). The more relevant issue for our discussion
is: Why was this speech issued as it was, by the person who orated it?
On the one hand, it seems easy to delineate how A More Perfect Union
attempts to erase the indelible: it reduces the social and economic system
that rested on the chattel subjection of Africans to a compartmentalized and
ultimately reconcilable event in the American white racial destiny. This
evisceration of slaverys long historical impact on the nation has been
crucial to the very feasibility of the American national-racial narrative in its
hegemonic forms. On the other hand, according to Obamas narrative, the
protracted and arduous process of slaverys abolition is itself a universal
American history, and should be told as a non-racial story:
And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or
provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as
citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive
generations who were willing to do their part through protests and struggle, on the
streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great
risk to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.
(Obama, 2008)
Slaverys lasting legacies of social, economic, and cultural violence thus

disappear in the redemptive allegory of a righteously antiracist American
body politic. This teleology of racial progress allows for a compartmentalization of genocidal slaverys temporality, spatiality, and sociological effect:
it is a bygone period of American history, rather than a fundamental social
architecture and discursive matrix guiding the formation of American racial
power relations during and beyond the plantation era. While Obama later
catalogues some of the inequalities passed on from an earlier generation
that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow Black/
white achievement gaps in schooling, occupational discrimination, the
wealth and income gap between Black and white, etc. his purpose in
doing so is to contextualize and resoundingly disavow the racial resentment
of Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation.
For the men and women of Reverend Wrights generation, the memories of humiliation
and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those
years y . That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention
from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our
condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it
needs to bring about real change. (Obama, 2008)
24
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
Borrowing an ideological line from the Black neoconservative litany,

Obamas dismissal of Black anger via Jeremiah Wright is guided by a
disciplinary admonishment: Black resentment is a misplaced reaction to a
social condition that is signicantly recreated by a) the Black cultural
pathology of what right-wing Black pundit John McWhorter (2001) calls
Black American self-sabotage (for Obama, our own complicity in our
condition), and b) the particular self-defeating tendencies of Black anger
and bitterness, which obstruct the formation of those unspecied
(multicultural/multiracial) alliances required for progressive social
change. It is here that Obama tentatively invokes the irreparable historical
violence of antiblack racial slavery so that it may be distanced, contained,
and erased.
Against their own political intentions, rhetorical gestures like these
indicate the fugitive presence of slaverys structuring national-racial
violence in the present tense: there is something irrepressible about
slaverys persistent impact on the social imagination of the post-1865
US, and rhetorics of patriotism (across the political spectrum) must
constantly confront this vexing presence. We will examine this problem
more closely in the following section. For now, it should be emphasized
that the vision (and for many, the fear) of a Black president calls forth
the possibility of a national racial salvation that can (nally) escape
the absolute historical gravity of the genocidally antiblack peculiar
institution.
It is in the context of such a national racial redemption that Obama
represents a subtle though historically signicant political breakthrough: he
has turned American patriotic racial humanism into a global (Nobel Prize
winning) charge rather than an oxymoron. The speech enunciated this
ideological position through the metaphor of a salvable racial injury, healed
through an insistent post-racial nationalism:
But I have asserted a rm conviction a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my
faith in the American people that working together we can move beyond some of our
old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of
a more perfect union. (Obama, 2008)
The philosophical precedents of Obamas ludic American racial humanism are worth briey addressing, if only because such a reection can help
establish the grounds for a sustained critical response. Black theorist and
writer Sylvia Wynter powerfully reminds us that the epochal philosophical
project of Western liberal humanism has relied on the mapping of absolute
irrationality onto the Black, colonized, and native positions all over the
25
world. Wynter thus summarizes the racial schema that orders the liberal
humanist intellectual movement:
[I]t is the intellectuals of the bourgeoisie, from Adam Smith and Malthus to Darwin and
Ricardo, that y spearhead the second intellectual revolution of humanism, this time a
bioeconomic or liberal humanism y . So we are now moving from rational/irrational to
evolved/non-evolved, selected/dysselected. And here we come to the crux of the matter.
This code is going to be mapped upon the extra-humanly determined difference of
somatotypes between what DuBois calls the lighter and the darker races, or the colour
line. So this will be enacted as a code, not only as between white and Black in the
apartheid systems of the US and of South Africa, but also in the colonizer/colonized or
the settler/native dichotomous relation all over the world. All over the world. (Wynter &
Scott, 2000, pp. 182183) (emphasis in the original)
If we follow Wynters mapping of Western liberal humanisms irreducible

commitment to the epistemic and social violence of racial binary opposition
and its particular tethering of white civilizational supremacy to genocidal
antiblackness we can better understand why Obamas furtive liberal racial
humanism is so oxymoronic: it presumes the Blacks capacity for inhabiting
rationality and evolved/modern human subjectivity, while ignoring how the
white liberal humanist racial schema preemptively (and permanently) posits
the Black as the non-evolved and dysselected gure of history. Obamas
rhetoric seems to magically resolve this fatal humanist contradiction by
situating the Black presidential gure as the conduit for sanitizing the
historical toxicities of national white supremacy and its singular productions
of systemic antiblack violence. But how does Obama accomplish this magical
feat, if he in fact remains a gure of racial blackness in spite of or perhaps
because of his elite political status? What makes him so successful in
sterilizing the absolute, permanent, and irresolvable (Black) resentment/anger
and (white) national anxiety/guilt that surrounds the stubborn presence of
slaverys logics of social domination?
It is here that we might visit on a second narrative structure that has
guided Obamas political trajectory since the time of his emergence as a
viable presidential candidate. There is an under-theorized, though not
unnoticed, aspect of the Obama ascendency that constitutes a necessary
dimension of his cross-racial attractiveness as a national symbol. His racial
persona is signicantly dened by the fact that he is not a descendant of
slaves. On the contrary, he has famously acknowledged (and his presidential
campaign has strangely valorized) his slave-owning maternal ancestry.8 Said
one Obama spokesperson in 2007, It is a true measure of progress that the
descendant of a slave owner would come to marry a student from Kenya
and produce a son who would grow up to be a candidate for president of the
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DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
United States (Swarns, 2007). Another Obama representative posited that

the candidates Southern slaveholding ancestry was representative of
America (Fornek, 2007). In fact, available evidence suggests that Obama
may be descended from slave traders on the paternal side of his family tree
as well (Hinckley & Soole, 2007; Obama, 2004).9 Furthermore, it has
frequently been Obama himself who has inferred the broader political
relevance of his family trees differential proximities to New World slavery:
Ive gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the worlds poorest
nations. I am married to a Black American who carries within her the blood of slaves
and slaveowners an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have
brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue,
scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no
other country on Earth is my story even possible.
Its a story that hasnt made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that
has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its
parts that out of many, we are truly one. (Obama, 2008)
I address these genealogical matters not to attribute a vulgar essentialist

signicance to ones familial (and social) heritage, but rather to bring
attention to the political meanings of attempts to (self)narrate such a
decisive rupturing of the globally naturalized connection between modern
constructions of racial blackness and the social condition/abject status of
racial chattel slavery (Barrett, 1999, forthcoming). I would suggest that it is
precisely this discourse of disruption Obamas embodiment of a symbolic
severance of blackness from slavery that unintentionally conrms the
binding historical presence of racial slavery as a logic of social power that
permeates the everyday intercourses of the nation, from electoral discourse
and public policy debate to policing strategies and warfare protocols. In
attempting to undo the long historical conation between blackness
and slavery, the Obama ascendancy is also rewriting the script of white
supremacist nation-building, compartmentalizing the genocidal legacies of
slavery and fortifying a liberal mythology of post-civil rights AfricanAmerican progress and political empowerment. It is exactly such a narrative
that facilitates and enhances the structures of institutionalized state-organized
and state-condoned (antiblack) racist subjection in the multicultural age.
What is important here is not the seemingly self-explanatory and simple
fact that Obama is not descended from slaves. Rather, it is the notion of his
exceptional relationship to the historical structure of slavery that must be
addressed: this exceptional Blackness allows Obama to bear the weight of
detoxifying the long legacies of genocidal slavery: Obama represents the
magical gure of the Black American non-slave. Yet we must be careful to
27
admit: while acknowledging the idiosyncrasies of his own family tree,

Obama consistently identies himself with American blackness, afrms an
African American identity, and recognizes that his biracial parentage
(Black African father, white mother) does not grant him amnesty or even
signicant distance from the complex lived realities of Black social existence.
He does all of this, however, within a narrative structure that pronounces a
purposeful, strategic alienation from the Black slaves social existence.
A still-assembling global common sense suggests through the person of
Obama that the essential violences of race are deteriorating if not
altogether disappeared: November 5, 2008, editorial headlines from
Vancouver and Glasgow read, Americans Move a Step Closer to PostRacial Society and The Nation that Stops a Race y Until Now, while in
Sydney, a February 2007 feature article asked, Can this Man Unite
America?10 The US print, radio, television, and Internet media discourse in
this rhetorical and ideological vein is so saturated it should require no further
mention here. Against this discourse, I continue by elaborating another
primary contention: that our historical moment and the Obama nationalracial telos cannot be politically severed from the substructure of racist/
antiblack, genocidal and proto-genocidal violence that is formed in the
crucible of racial chattel slavery, and perpetuated through its logics of social
power as they shape the distended post-emancipation (post-1865) and postcivil rights (post-1965) periods.
THE TIME-LAPSING LOGICS OF (ANTIBLACK)

RACIAL GENOCIDE
The watershed of November 4, 2008, has composed another chapter in a
national-racial story that incessantly postpones confrontation with the
fugitive presence of slavery in our midst. Against this multiculturalist racial/
post-racial optimism, I wish to consider a different set of political and
narrative premises for conceptualizing our historical present tense: most
importantly, that the intertwined social logics of racial chattel slavery, white
supremacy, and multiple racial genocides constitute institutional and
political legacies that cannot be easily contained within time-limited
frameworks. Few have phrased the problem with more clarity than Native
Hawaiian radical intellectual Haunani Kay Trask:
But can we, as Native peoples, resist the planned New World Order by ourselves?
Probably not. The state of the world gives us little hope. Native resistance can be and has
28
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
been crushed. As indigenous nations die out, our peoples reach a point of irreparable
harm. We cannot sustain our numbers, our cultures, our stewardship of the earth. Even
while they plan our demise, First World countries and those aspiring to that status
memorialize our passing. (Trask, 1999, pp. 6162)
Elaborating Trask, we might ask how the institutional, cultural, and

epistemological inheritances of racial genocide perpetually leap into our
midst, and compel a reckoning that is not easily accomplished through
prevailing political languages and activist forms. If we are to respect Trasks
radical disruption of the presumed time of genocide as past tense, we must
understand that hers is both a narrative and theoretical statement: the
story of racial genocide, from this indigenous anti-colonialist perspective,
is a telling of how the worlds structures of genocidal terror and violence
form a stranglehold on a future which does not exist for the Native. To
confront this deracinated future time, literally a reckoning with ones
destiny of non-existence, is to render absurd the multiculturalist, nationalist
pretensions of the Obama telos.
Centering an antiblack genocide temporality, the late Manning Marable
reects in 1983 on a nation-building process in which Blacks have been
brutally oppressed, unquestionably, since 1619. Addressing a post-civil
rights state whose capacities were being redirected and administered toward
a social planning that could inevitably involve the complete obliteration of
the entire Black reserve army of labor and sections of the Black working
class, (Marable, 1983, pp. 251252) he invigorates a radical epistemology
of racial genocide in reference to the contemporary United States:
The genocidal logic of the situation could demand, in the not too distant future, the
rejection of the ghettos right to survival in the new capitalist order. Without gas
chambers or pogroms, the dark ghettos economic and social institutions might be
destroyed, and many of its residents would simply cease to exist. (Marable, 1983, p. 253)
(emphasis in original)
Following Trasks narrative opening and Marables analytical-temporal

focal point, we can begin to appreciate how racial genocides constitute
multiple, continuous histories of the present. These thinkers epistemic
centering of planned demise, obliteration, and ceasing to exist
delineates a state of emergency that cannot be soothed or solved with
piecemeal social reforms, stopgap economic incentives, or populist signications of racial diversity and multicultural nationalism. To absorb the gravity
of these genocide-centered positions is to more fully appreciate why the
aforementioned story of the Black presidential non-slave must be refuted:
29
because if its mythology is allowed to exist, then the present and future times
of genocides are not only naturalized, they also become imperceptible.
My purpose here is to move toward another way of telling the story of our
historical present that keeps intimacy with (rather than rejecting or eeing
from) the profound, politicized despair that accompanies it11 (Ngo, 2005).
I am not interested in a point-by-point refutation of the na ve-to-insidious
allegations of the onset of a postracial/postracist America. Rather, I am
invested in foregrounding and rening the theoretical tools of radical,
historical narrative creativity. How might the retelling of racial genocides
multiple stories facilitate the expansion of radical explanatory frameworks and analytical methods for addressing the contemporary condition,
and displace the racial story of a post-civil rights Black presidency?
I am inspired in this instance by the durable political-intellectual model of
C. L. R. James. As a historian of Black insurrection and revolution, James
understood that the theoretical uency and analytical clarity catalyzed by
such narrative creativity might help generate a scholarly-activist practice of
telling and retelling social stories that inhabit, rather than mystify, this
genocidal present tense. James, whose 1938 study of the Haitian slave
revolution unapologetically anticipates the coming era of anticolonialist
uprising and transformation, asserts the centrality of historical narrative
structure to the scholarly marking/making of (Black) revolutionary
subjects without a way to retell the story of the master, against the
masters power and toward the masters demise, the Black New World
(colonial) slave was perpetually stuck in the language, vernacular, and
imagination of her/his own dehumanization. Following James, the purpose
of such a narrative structure is to form a critical apprehension of the specic
conditions and political necessities dening a historical moment, while
attempting [t]o portray the limits of those necessities and the realisation,
complete or partial, of all possibilities (James, 1989, p. x).
In my view, Jamess encouragement opens the historical imagination
toward a radical narrative creativity that might allow us to tell and retell the
present tense stories of institutionalized dehumanization (Gordon, 1996,
pp. 305306) and systemic racist subjection. What might it mean to narrate
the historical present against the presidential gure of the Black non-slave,
and to radically, unapologetically refute the idea of an America vindicated of
the worst of its racial past? If the very idea of America is to be narratively
steeped in a permanent indictment of the racial damage on which it is based
an implication that is not only ethically necessary, but which may be productive of creative and radical political possibilities then a useful narrative
starting point is one that views the necessities of [our political-intellectual]
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DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
environment (James, 1989, p. x) as being centrally dened by the permanent

and time-lapsing marks of white supremacist and racist social logics,
particularly and especially those formed by the antiblack genocide of racial
chattel slavery and its complex historical aftermath. Plainly, this is to tell a
non-ctional theoretical story through the language of a historical tale, one
that invites a form of political and cultural discourse that exceeds the
constraints of academic disciplines and becomes, in a sense, an antidisciplinary and potentially popular vernacular of social truth.12
REVISITING GENOCIDE
I place emphasis on the genocidal structuring of the New World racial
enslavement regime not because its primary objective was the wholesale
physical elimination of a population, but rather because it was central to a
civilizational project that undertook the absolute displacement or eradication
of different indigenous ways of life, from Africa to the Americas. There is an
unbreakable historical, institutional, and conceptual linkage between the
ideological invention of racial blackness as the physiological marker of the
slave and the zero point of the emergent modern racial order, and the political
economies of this racial marking within changing modes of economic
production (Patterson, 1982; Robinson, 1983; Wynter, 2003). Here, it is
crucial to understand that the epistemes and social matrices of racial
blackness are continuously and primarily structured by the racial chattel
relation, rather than the labor, migrant, colonial, or citizen relation: thus, the
social relations constituted by this coercive and historically pervasive
tethering of blackness to chattel status form the conditions within which the
structural foundations of the modern civilized order (from civil society to the
nation-state) have emerged and ourished.13 In other words, it is the forceful,
historically consistent, militarized and institutionalized conation of Black
social existence with the social status of property and the peculiar subjection
of Black bodies to regimes of physiological vulnerability and disintegration
such as the slave plantation, lynching, apartheid, and racial criminalization
that constitutes the primary historical logics of antiblack genocide. Different
historical formations of antiblack racist violence ow from this primary
relation, which constantly reiterates and improvises on the biopolitical
dimensions of slavery.14 Black political subjectivities, freedom struggles, and
liberation discourses have formed their own, organic sets of concerns,
sensibilities, agendas, and analytics within this antiblack genocide continuum.15 The remainder of this discussion attempts to resonate with this
31
critical genealogy of antiblack genocide by outlining a historical analytic

through which it can be traced in the present tense.
It is widely acknowledged by legal and historical scholars, as well as
indigenous liberation and human rights activists, that the United Nations
ofcial denition of genocide (as coded in the 1948 Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) is deeply awed as both
a juridical framework and historical conceptualization. While I have more
thoroughly discussed the need for a critical disposition toward the UNs
intentional narrowing of the scholarly and legal understanding of genocide
elsewhere, (Rodr guez, 2009) it is worth emphasizing that the earliest draft
formulations of the UN Genocide Convention offered a substantially broader
understanding of this historical concept, which included genocidal practices
that extended beyond the narrow realm of wholesale population decimation or
liquidation. Native American scholar Ward Churchill provides a summation
of versions of the pre-approval draft in the 1997 text A Little Matter of
Genocide, describing a signicantly more robust and layered denition of
genocide than that eventually legislated by the UN. Central to this proposed
UN denition of genocide, Churchill writes, was the juridical position that,
y acts or policies aimed at preventing the preservation or development of racial,
national, linguistic, religious or political groups should be considered genocidal, along
with a range of preparatory acts, including all forms of propaganda tending by their
systematic and hateful character to provoke genocide, or tending to make it appear as a
necessary, legitimate, or excusable act. (Churchill, 1997, p. 410)
The early drafts of the Genocide Convention paid rigorous attention to

genocidal state practices that extended beyond mass killing, and included
complex denitions of cultural genocide, political repression, and a range of
culpable acts that implicated a spectrum of state and state-sanctioned
institutional and ideological/discursive mobilizations.
Legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, one of the central members of the
Genocide Conventions original drafting committee, is widely acknowledged
as the originator of the term, as he develops an extensive denition of
genocide in Chapter IX of his 1944 opus Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
Importantly, Lemkins text employs Nazi Germany as a case study to build a
multilayered understanding of genocide that provides a strong legal basis for
criminal prosecution of offending states and material redress for genocides
victims/survivors across different historical and political circumstances
(Lemkin, 1944, 1947). While there are endemic limitations that emerge from
Lemkins paradigmatic centering of the Nazi case, his text holds signicant
value within its own parameters: perhaps most importantly, his insistence on a
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DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
strong juridical structure of international accountability for genocide as a

composite of practices, usually though not exclusively carried out by
members of the offending state, became a central and characterizing feature of
the draft proposal he and others submitted for the UNs nal approval.
On receiving Lemkins text, however, several former European colonial
states in concert with the emerging Cold War superpowers coalesced to
undermine the draft Convention of its denitional scope and legal
enforceability. UN representatives from the United States and Soviet Union
successfully expelled Lemkin and others from the Genocide Conventions
revision and approval process and, in dialogue with representatives serving on
UNs Legal Committee and Ad Hoc Committee on Genocide, eviscerated
some of the central juridical provisions delineated in the draft. (Chalk &
Jonassohn, 1990, pp. 812) The UNs maneuvering also resulted in the
elimination of protocols for a permanent international tribunal instead
allowing accused governments to develop autonomous measures to internally
assess accusations of genocidal conduct and erased the entire second article
of the draft, which dened the far-reaching concept of cultural genocide. As
two prominent genocide scholars have succinctly written, although it
marked a milestone in international law, the UN denition is of little use to
scholars (Chalk & Jonassohn, 1990, p. 10).
Thus, despite such important attempts at appropriating and rearticulating
the terms of the UN Genocide Convention as William Patterson and the
Civil Rights Congresss (1951) We Charge Genocide petition to the UN
(which seized on the language of the Genocide Convention to formally
accuse the US government of committing genocide against its domestic
Black population), and Jean-Paul Sartre and Arlette El Ka m-Sartres 1968
marshalling of evidence of US military genocide in Vietnam (Sartre & El
Ka m-Sartre, 1968), the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide is a momentous failure as legislation on its own
terms, and fails as a remotely sufcient denition of genocide in its most
historicized forms. It is precisely as a result of this failure that the work of
Patterson and the Civil Rights Congress is being revisited at the current
moment by a growing community of radical intellectuals, including
anthropologist and Africana studies scholar Joao Costa Vargas (2008) and
Native American (Cherokee) feminist scholar Andrea Smith (2005), among
others. These thinkers enable a critical revisiting of We Charge Genocide as a
document for the historical present, a vital intellectual maneuver in light of
the UNs ideological hegemony in the terrain of genocide discourse.
The remainder of this essay will proceed from an analytical and conceptual
framing of genocide that is broadly informed by the texts of thinkers like
33
Trask, Marable, Lemkin, Patterson, Vargas, Smith, and Churchill. Following

the trajectory of these intellectuals, I am conceptualizing racial genocide as a
logic of social formation and nation/civilization building that produces
multiple, dynamically related systems of physiological, civil, and social death.
Genocide, as I understand it here, is a socially productive process that is as
centrally occupied with the creation of oppressive and repressive conditions of
existence as it is with mobilizing antisocial, militarized processes that lead
to intensied or protracted systems of physical human extermination. I am
also suggesting that by tracing the institutional and political continuities of
racial chattel slavery as a historically productive genocidal apparatus, it is
possible to more seriously examine how the most normalized and therefore
terrifyingly acceptable systems of white supremacist state and statesanctioned antiblack violence may be seen to emerge organically from the
genealogies of racial chattel slavery and thus shape the present tense historical
condition in which each of us differently and perpetually lives.
SLAVERYS ABOLITION AND THE CARCERAL

LOGIC OF GENOCIDE
A racial chattel logic permeates the contemporary US social formation, most
stridently in the mutually constituting production of its policing, criminalization, and imprisonment apparatuses. It has proved to be especially difcult to
generate a critical language around this relation, despite and because of
progressive attempts to tentatively narrate such historical linkages. While
legal scholar Michelle Alexander has most recently proposed a historical
analogy that views the emergence of post-1970s mass imprisonment as the
New Jim Crow, she ultimately asserts that the condition is in fact not
substantively comparable to Jim Crow, and that while the parallels between
the two systems of control are striking, it is more important to understand
that there are important differences (Alexander, 2010, p. 195).
What I wish to critically engage here is not Alexanders cataloguing of the
institutional, cultural, and political differences between the racist regimes of
formal segregation and post-segregation mass imprisonment. I strongly
agree that a rigorous illustration of such empirical and political distinctions
is central to any serious analysis of the post-1960s period. Rather, I question
Alexanders methodological (and political) choice to pigeonhole the Jim
Crow-mass incarceration juxtaposition within a supercial posture of
analogy, rather than enrich it through a robust conception of institutional
34
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
genealogy and historical continuity, and infuse its conceptual power with an
epistemic centering of the long present tense of antiblack state violence
(if not antiblack genocide). (In fact, there are a number of disappointingly
incomplete gestures to precisely these methodological possibilities evidenced
throughout her text.)
To invoke Jim Crow as part of a narrative framing of the current period
of unprecedented antiblack and racist criminalization, in my view, invites an
amplication of the prison regimes fundamental connectedness to allegedly
bygone eras of the US racist state and racist (white) civil society, rather than
a mitigation or analytical disavowal of that connectedness. Of course, in one
strict sense Alexander is correct in asserting that if one were to draft a list
of the differences between slavery and Jim Crow, the list might well be
longer than the list of similarities. The same goes for Jim Crow and mass
incarceration. Alexanders call for a rigorous inventory of the specicities of
different racial systems of control (Alexander, 2010, p. 195) (from slavery
to Jim Crow to mass incarceration) is not to be dismissed, as it disciplines
against rhetorical and analytical sloppiness on the part of activists and
scholars alike. At the same time, I critically question the conspicuous racial
telos of Alexanders narrative, particularly as conveyed in her overarching
assertion that the conditions of the racial present are marked by an absence
of overt racial hostility among elected ofcials and other politicians, law
enforcement ofcials, and within the public discourse more generally
(Alexander, 2010, p. 197). It is in this vein that Alexander undermines the
potential force of her accumulated descriptions of mass incarceration,
especially as she resorts to a familiar refrain of the post-civil rights (and post2008) litany:
But even granting that some African Americans may fear the police today as much as
their grandparents feared the Klan y and that the penal system may be as brutal in many
respects as Jim Crow (or slavery), the absence of racial hostility in the public discourse
and the steep decline in vigilante racial violence is no small matter. It is also signicant
that the whites only signs are gone and that children of all colors can drink from the
same water fountains, swim in the same pools, and play on the same playgrounds. Black
children today can even dream of being president of the United States.
Those who claim that mass incarceration is just like Jim Crow make a serious
mistake. Things have changed. (Alexander, 2010, p. 197)
While afrming Alexanders insistence on a critical analysis that does not

resort to slipshod analogies and which appreciates the shifts in the
institutional and discursive textures of the post-Jim Crow racial condition,
I wish to challenge her conceptualization of racial hostility in this
instance. (I will momentarily leave aside the question of Alexanders gross
35
mis-estimation of the post-1960s reawakening of organized white supremacist movements and ideologies, evidenced in shorthand by the tripling of Ku
Klux Klan membership during the decade of the 1970s.) (Marable, 2007,
p. 171) That is, I would posit that the tracking of overt racial phobias is
only one, profoundly delimited method for constructing an analytical
schema that attempts to locate the centrality of race, racist (state) violence,
and histories of racial genocide to present social formations. Departing from
Alexanders premature surrendering of what could well have been a fruitful
historical analytic (thus allowing her comparison of mass imprisonment to
American apartheid to rot on the vine of provocation), I further question
whether it is, in fact, the Jim Crow power relation that should be centered in
examining the genealogy of the contemporary US imprisonment regime.
How might we take seriously the possibility that the paradigmatic power
relations formed by the antiblack racial genocide of chattel slavery a
paradigmatic power that consistently constitutes the changing discourses
and institutionalized structurings of racisms more generally forms a the
central dimension of the contemporary US criminalization and carceral
apparatuses?
Legally, the prisoner/convict/inmate is understood as the bodily
property of the state, eviscerated of civil existence and designated as
available for involuntary servitude. Scholars such as Angela Y. Davis
(1998), Colin Dayan (2001), Marcus Rediker (2007), Alex Lichtenstein
(1995), Sally Hadden (2001), Dennis Childs (2009), Sarah Haley (2009),
David Oshinsky (1996), Douglas A. Blackmon (2008), Matthew J. Mancini
(1996), Lo c Wacquant (1999), and others have differently traced the links
between racial plantation slavery and the emergence of the modern
American penal system, elaborating how the construction of a carceral
apparatus during the late-19th and early-20th centuries fundamentally
replicated and arguably exacerbated the social and racial logics of the
supposedly abolished slave plantation. Here, however, I am most concerned
with the racist, antiblack, and white supremacist logics of slaverys abolition,
and how the relations of racial dominance underlying the terms of abolition
construct the permanent conditions of possibility for the emergence of the
post-emancipation criminalization/imprisonment regimes that have distended slavery into our present tense.
The institutional, juridical, and cultural linkages between the white
supremacist premises of abolition and the unfolding of the US prison
regime over the course of the following century reects a political legitimation
and reinvigoration of slaverys logic of antiblack racist genocide, as it has been
reformed to t the changing mandates of the post-slavery and post-civil
36
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
rights American nation-building project. Guiding such a re-narration of the

last sesquicentennial is a rereading and retelling of the text and animus of
the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, commonly valorized as the
decree that freed the enslaved African:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place
subject to their jurisdiction. [emphasis added]
The 13th Amendment performs its fundamental violence by recodifying

the terms of bodily capture and subjection: criminalization is now the
leverage point through which the duly convicted are made available for
enslavement. The slave relation itself is not abolished.
Accompanying this abolitionist recodication of slavery in the latter-19th
century was a widespread, sustained, intensive white supremacist refusal to
concede white civil societys historical legal entitlement of access to largely
unregulated racist terror. Plantation slaverys abolition catalyzed and
emboldened new and existing regimes of white racist violence over the
course of the following decades, from the rapid expansion of the Ku Klux
Klan and state-condoned proliferation of lynching to a renaissance of
antiblack visual cultures and the institutional articulation of Jim Crow
apartheid. In fact, this expansion of white supremacist violence in the postemancipation period evidences the generalized uncontainability of antiblack
genocide as a primary cultural and institutional modality of American
nation-building. Put differently: the historical context of white social and
political reaction to the 13th Amendment suggests that the cultural animus
of antiblack genocide was elaborated and extrapolated, not abolished or
effectively curbed, by the end of plantation slavery and the national
pronouncement of Black emancipation.
By way of illustration, archival texts like the December 1865 Congressional
report submitted by Freedmans Bureau Chaplain and Sub-Commander
Thomas Smith facilitate a re-narration of the post-emancipation moment as a
focal point for a renewal of the kind of white supremacist violence that
characterized the slave order. Dispatched to Shongalo, Mississippi to
investigate an alleged outrage committed by the [white] citizens on freedmen
at that place, (US Congress, 1865, p. 31) Smith exhaustively describes an
incident representative of this racial climate. A small section of his account
reads,
On the evening of November 25 the colored people were having a party; rst they had a
quilting, then a dancing party; about ten or eleven oclock, while y the people were
enjoying themselves very pleasantly, a company of white men, supposed to number
37
about twenty, came up suddenly, set re to all the buildings, then, surrounding them,
began, and for some time continued, to discharge re-arms, also refusing to let the
people come out at the doors y . The white men drove the colored people away, and
went round picking up the bundles and other articles of property, throwing them all into
the re y. It was said that one man, a stranger in the place y hearing of the party, had
gone to it, and when about to make his escape y several shots were red at him; he fell,
and his body was lifted up and thrown into the re; was burned so, that when the inquest
was held the jury was unable to distinguish either the race or sex, and called in a surgeon
to decide those points. (US Congress, 1865, p. 32)
Such white mob violence genocidal in its logic, localized and intimate in
its scale was catalyzed by the crisis of racial-national meaning wrought by
the 13th and 14th amendments. This reopens a crucial part of the national
racial story that must be retold: having lost its formal racial monopoly on
the social-cultural structures of both citizenship and freedom, the white
American world was cast into deep racial crisis. The long historical
construction of US national subjectivity as essentially, if not purely white
and essentially, genocidally, and always antiblack was formally displaced by
the terms of abolition and emancipation, and the creation of Black
(Negro) citizenship. Yet, if we are to take seriously the fact that Smiths
report on the Shongalo outrage is representative of seemingly countless
similar narrations (within and beyond the Freedmans Bureau archive) of
the high-intensity, repetitive, and persistent white supremacist populist
violence that marked the Reconstruction period, then we are also forced to
take a far more complex inventory of how the genocidal social logic of racial
chattel slavery structurally supersedes (and therefore outlives) the institutional form of the slave plantation, and permeates the juridical and cultural
forms of Black emancipation and the slave institutions formal abolition. In
this way, antiblack genocide is coded into Black emancipation, and
constitutes the nominal freeing of the enslaved African.
Performances of proto-genocidal antiblack violence have consistently
made the white world intelligible to itself in the long aftermath of plantation
slavery. Black physiological subjection to violent white will re-wires civil
societys circuits of cohesion and, as illustrated in the Shongalo case, restores
white national self-recognition amidst the trappings of Black freedom and a
contingent Black civil recognition. Against the liberal narrative of national
moral fortitude invoked by Obama and his person, this re-telling of the
national abolitionist tale centers on the re-codication and reforming of
the white supremacist violence essential to the nation-building project, and
brings forward the archival and institutional (living) artifacts of what
Saidiya Hartman (1997), Jared Sexton (2010) (Sexton & Martinot, 2003),
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DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
Frank Wilderson (2010), and others address as the political ontology of

antiblackness.
Recalling the larger contextualization of this discussion, it should be
emphasized that the immediate effects of the 13th Amendments terms of reenslavement in accelerating the criminalization and policing of Black and
other non-white populations of the southern states during the late-19th and
early-20th centuries are well-noted in an existing body of scholarship
(Hadden, 2001; Hernandez, 2010). This work allows us to apprehend the
social technologies of racial proling at their earliest and best, as they
produced the prototypes of Jim Crow state violence and re-assembled Black
slave labor via Black prison plantation labor. This is a useful, vital body of
work that further demysties the liberal racial narratives including that
articulated in Obamas A More Perfect Union responsible for constructing the abolition/emancipation moment as one of national racial
decency and moral awakening.
What remains rather distressing, however, is that recent antiracist critical
scholarly discourses and activisms have not generally revisited, much less
rigorously theorized and narrated, the present conditions through which this
white supremacist logic of post-abolition, post-emancipation social (re-)
organization has constituted multiple institutionalizations of racial dominance (e.g., prisons, policing, domestic counterinsurgency) in historical
continuity with the structuring terms of genocidal racial slavery. To put it
another way, the post-1960s, post-civil rights moment does not constitute
an escape from or signicant neutralization of what Vargas has analytically
centered as the hemispheric-global structuring of antiblack genocide, but is
instead a complex period of this genocidal logics rearticulation, momentary/localized dissipation, reinstitutionalization, and remilitarization.
PRISON REGIME AS (PROTO-)GENOCIDE

To crystallize what I hope to be the potentially useful implications of this
provocation toward a retelling of the slavery-abolition story: if we follow the
narrative and theoretical trajectories initiated here, it should take little stretch
of the historical imagination, nor a radical distension of analytical framing, to
suggest that the singular institutionalization of racist and peculiarly antiblack
social/state violence in our living era the US imprisonment regime and its
conjoined policing and criminalization apparatuses elaborates the social
logics of genocidal racial slavery within the American nation-building project,
especially in the age of Obama. The formation and astronomical growth of the
39
prison industrial complex has become a commonly identied institutional

marker of massively scaled racist state mobilization, and the fundamental
violence of this apparatus is in the prisons translation of the 13th
Amendments racist animus.
By reforming slavery and anti-slave violence, and directly transcribing
both into criminal justice rituals, proceedings, and punishments, the 13th
Amendment permanently inscribes slavery on post-emancipation US statecraft. The state remains a slave state to the extent that it erects an array of
institutional apparatuses that are specically conceived to reproduce or
enhance the states capacity to create (i.e., criminalize and convict) prison
chattel and politically legitimate the processes of enslavement/imprisonment
therein. The crucial starting point for our narrative purposes is that the
emergence of the criminalization and carceral apparatus over the last forty
years has not, and in the foreseeable future will not build its institutional
protocols around the imprisonment of an economically productive or protmaking prison labor force (Gilmore, 1999).16 So, if not for use as labor under
the 13th Amendments juridical mandate of involuntary servitude, what is
the animating structural-historical logic behind the formation of an
imprisonment regime unprecedented in human history in scale and complexity, and which locks up well over a million Black people, signicantly
advancing numbers of nonwhite Latinos/as, and in which the white
population is vastly underrepresented in terms of both numbers imprisoned
and likelihood to be prosecuted (and thus incarcerated) for similar alleged
criminal offenses?17
In excess of its political economic, geographic, and juridical registers, the
contemporary US prison regime must be centrally understood as constituting an epoch-dening statecraft of race: a historically specic conceptualization, planning, and institutional mobilization of state institutional capacities
and state-inuenced cultural structures to reproduce and/or reassemble the
social relations of power, dominance, and violence that constitute the
ontology (epistemic and conceptual framings) of racial meaning itself (da
Silva, 2007; Goldberg, 1993). In this case, the racial ontology of the postslavery and post-civil rights prison is anchored in the crisis of social meaning
wrought on white civil society by the 13th Amendments apparent juridical
elimination of the Black chattel slave being. Across historical periods, the
social inhabitation of the white civil subject its self-recognition,
institutionally afrmed (racial) sovereignty, and everyday social intercourse
with other racial beings is made legible through its positioning as the
administrative authority and consenting audience for the nation- and
civilization-building processes of multiple racial genocides.
40
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
It is the bare fact of the white subjects access and entitlement to the
generalized position of administering and consenting to racial genocide that
matters most centrally here. Importantly, this white civil subject thrives on the
assumption that s/he is not, and will never be the target of racial genocide.18
(Williams, 2010) Those things obtained and secured through genocidal
processes land, political and military hegemony/dominance, expropriated
labor are in this sense secondary to the raw relation of violence that the white
subject inhabits in relation to the racial objects (including people, ecologies,
cultural forms, sacred materials, and other modalities of life and being)
subjected to the irreparable violations of genocidal processes. It is this raw
relation, in which white social existence materially and narratively consolidates
itself within the normalized systemic logics of racial genocides, that forms the
condition of possibility for the US social formation, from abolition onward.
To push the argument further: the distended systems of racial genocides
are not the massively deadly means toward some other (rational) historical
ends, but are ends within themselves. Here we can decisively depart from the
hegemonic juridical framings of genocide as dictated by the United
Nations, and examine instead the logics of genocide that dynamically
structure the different historical-social forms that have emerged from the
classically identiable genocidal systems of racial colonial conquest,
indigenous physical and cultural extermination, and racial chattel slavery.
To recall Trask and Marable, the historical logics of genocide permeate
institutional assemblages that variously operationalize the historical forces
of planned obsolescence, social neutralization, and ceasing to exist.
Centering a conception of racial genocide as a dynamic set of sociohistorical logics (rather than as contained, isolatable historical episodes)
allows the slavery-to-prison continuity to be more clearly marked: the
continuity is not one that hinges on the creation of late-20th and early-21st
century slave labor, but rather on a re-institutionalization of anti-slave
social violence. Within this historical schema, the post-1970s prison regime
institutionalizes the raw relation of violence essential to white social being
while mediating it so it appears as non-genocidal, non-violent, peacekeeping,
and justice-forming. This is where we can also narrate the contemporary racial
criminalization, policing, and incarcerating apparatuses as being historically
tethered to the genocidal logics of the post-abolition, post-emancipation, and
post-civil rights slave state. While it is necessary to continuously clarify and
debate whether and how this statecraft of racial imprisonment is veriably
genocidal, there seems to be little reason to question that it is, at least, protogenocidal displaying both the capacity and inclination for genocidal
outcomes in its systemic logic and historical trajectory.
41
This contextualization leads toward a somewhat different analytical

framing of the deadly symbiosis that sociologist Lo c Wacquant has
outlined in his account of antiblack carceral-spatial systems. While it would
be small-minded to suggest that the emergence of the late-20th century
prison regime is an historical inevitability, we should at least understand
that the structural bottom line of Black imprisonment over the last four
decades wherein the quantitative fact of a Black prison/jail majority has
become taken-for-granted as a social fact is a contemporary institutional
manifestation of a genocidal racial substructure that has been reformed, and
not fundamentally displaced, by the juridical and cultural implications of
slaverys abolition.
I have argued elsewhere for a conception of the US prison not as a selfcontained institution or isolated place, but rather as a material prototype of
organized punishment and (social, civil, and biological) death (Rodr guez,
2006). To understand the US prison as a regime is to focus conceptually,
theoretically, and politically on the prison as a pliable module or mobilized
vessel through which technologies of racial dominance institutionalize their
specic, localized practices of legitimated (state) violence. Emerging as the
organic institutional continuity of racial slaverys genocidal violence, the US
prison regime represents a form of human domination that extends beyond and
outside the formal institutional and geographic domains of the prison (the
jail, etc.). In this sense, the prison is the institutional signication of a larger
regime of proto-genocidal violence that is politically legitimized by the state,
generally valorized by the cultural common sense, and dynamically mobilized
and institutionally consolidated across different historical moments: it is a
form of social power that is indispensable to the contemporary (and postemancipation) social order and its changing structures of racial dominance, in a
manner that elaborates the social logics of genocidal racial slavery.
The binding presence of slavery within post-emancipation US state
formation is precisely why the liberal multiculturalist narration of the
Obama ascendancy nds itself compelled to posit an ofcial rupture from
the spectral and material presence of enslaved racial blackness. It is this
symbolic rupturing the presentation of a president who consummates the
liberal dreams of Black citizenship, Black freedom, Black non-resentment,
and Black patriotic subjectivity that constructs the Black non-slave
presidency as the esh-and-blood severance of the US racial/racist state
from its entanglement in the continuities of antiblack genocide. Against this
multiculturalist narrative, our attention should be principally xated on the
bottom-line Blackness of the prisons genocidal logic, not the fungible
Blackness of the presidency.
42
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
CONCLUSION: FROM POST-CIVIL RIGHTS

TO WHITE RECONSTRUCTION
The Obama ascendancy is the signature moment of the post-1960s White
Reconstruction, a period that has been characterized by the reformist
elaboration of historically racist systems of social power to accommodate
the political imperatives of American apartheids downfall and the
emergence of hegemonic (liberal-to-conservative) multiculturalisms. By
focusing on how such reforms have neither eliminated nor fundamentally
alleviated the social emergencies consistently produced by the historical
logics of racial genocide, the notion of White Reconstruction departs from
Marables notion of the 1990s as the twilight of the Second Reconstruction (Marable, 2007, p. 216)19 and points toward another way of framing
and narrating the period that has been more commonly referenced as the
post-civil rights era.
Rather than taking its primary point of historical departure to be the
cresting of the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy of delimited (though no
less signicant) political-cultural achievements, White Reconstruction
focuses on how this era is dened by an acute and sometimes aggressive
reinvention and reorganization of the structural-institutional formations of
racial dominance. Dened schematically, the recent half-century has
encompassed a generalized reconstruction of classically white supremacist
apparatuses of state-sanctioned and culturally legitimated racial violence.
This general reconstruction has (1) strategically and unevenly dislodged
various formal and de facto institutional white monopolies and diversied
their personnel at various levels of access, from the entry-level to the
administrative and executive levels (e.g., the sometimes aggressive diversity
recruitment campaigns of research universities, urban police, and the
military); while simultaneously (2) revamping, complicating, and enhancing
the social relations of dominance, hierarchy, and violence mobilized by such
institutions relations that broadly reect the long historical, substructural
role of race in the production of the US national formation and
socioeconomic order. In this sense, the notion of White Reconstruction
brings central attention to how the historical logics of racial genocide may
not only survive the apparent disruption of classical white monopolies on the
administrative and institutional apparatuses that have long mobilized these
violent social logics, but may indeed ourish through these reformist
measures, as such logics are re-adapted into the protocols and discourses of
these newly diversied racist and white supremacist apparatuses (e.g., the
43
apparatuses of the research university, police, and military have expanded

their capacities to produce local and global relations of racial dominance, at
the same time that they have constituted some of the central sites for
diversity recruitment and struggles over equal access). It is, at the very least,
a remarkable and dreadful moment in the historical time of White
Reconstruction that a Black president has won ofce in an electoral
landslide while well over a million Black people are incarcerated with the
overwhelming consent of white/multiculturalist civil society.
I have tried to develop a few critical directions to engage the challenges of
this moment. Departing from the Obama presidencys reproduction and
acceleration of the durable liberal myth of American racial progress, I began
this essay by outlining how the Obama narrative (of which Obama is both
an active agent and objectied racial medium) eviscerates the historical
continuities of slavery in contemporary relations of social dominance and
institutionalized racial subjection. Moving from the Obama ascendancys
national racial story, I have attempted to stress the importance of examining
how a specic racial discourse has produced the gure of Barack Obama as
the Black presidential non-slave, which in turn composes a symbolic
severing of racial blackness from racial chattel slavery.
Suggesting that the work of confronting and refuting this narrative
requires a combination of imaginative, creative, and theoretical labor, this
essay outlines one approach to this formidable challenge by focusing
attention on the normalized relations of racial dominance that have
proliferated in the post-1960s period. I have argued that the intertwined
social logics of racial chattel slavery, white supremacy, and multiple racial
genocides compose social legacies that cannot be contained within discretely
periodized frameworks. In other words, these legacies do not strictly exist in
the past tense. My attempt at constructing a narrative outline of the
present tense of racial genocide has, by necessity, been offered here in the
form of a conceptual and theoretical schematic, which I hope might serve as a
preliminary tool for critical appropriation by the reader. This schematic
centrally relies on an analytical and conceptual framing of genocide that
signicantly departs from the hegemonic denition of the UN Genocide
Convention: following the example of several radical scholars, I have offered
a working conception of racial genocide as a logic of social formation
and nation/civilization building that produces multiple, dynamically related
systems of physiological, civil, and social death, which in their totality
constitute entire historical periods and the particular social formations that
animate them.
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
44
Such an understanding of racial genocide facilitates a focusing on the

historical continuities of racial chattel slavery as a socially productive
genocidal apparatus. Centering an analysis of the 13th Amendment (and
slaverys abolition more generally) as a juridical-cultural recodication of
the terms of antiblack genocide, I have addressed the emergence of racial
criminalization as the leverage point through which the racial power relation
of slavery is reconstituted, and through which slavery effects on present
tense institutionalizations of racial dominance more generally. Taking the
formation of the post-1970s US prison regime as the primary model of such
an institutionalization of slaverys present tense, I have outlined a notion of
the prison as a period-dening statecraft of race: it is the apparatus through
which state capacities are mobilized to reproduce the social relations of
power, dominance, and violence that construct the discursive and
institutional foundations of the US national form as a fundamentally racial
and racist social form.
The gure of Obama, in these terms, is animated by slaverys historical
present his embodiment of racial blackness renders him an ever-available
medium through which the reformation of racist, white supremacist, and
antiblack genocidal social logics are explained and narrated in the aftermath
of emancipation, civil rights, and multiculturalism. Thus, it is not necessarily
the racist antiblack (and anti-Islamic) reaction against the Obama presidency
that forms the central point of articulation for the present tense of racial
slavery: rather, it is the structure of enlightened racial liberalism and
progressive racial nationalism the liberal racial populism that creates and
articulates the Obama ascendancy that constructs the most compelling and
dangerous elaborations of this genocidal social logic. It is the racist and
proto-genocidal violence re-narrated, condoned, and/or valorized by this
discourse of racial liberalism and progressivism that requires our closest
political attention in these historical moments. Who is left for dead outside the
eeting social truth of a multiculturalist Obama constituency? What does
the liberal-progressive common sense of racial progress make of the
massive and mind-numbingly normalized racial violences that have
constituted White Reconstruction at the dusk of classical white supremacy?
NOTES
1. Schematically: conquestosettler colonizationoslaveryoCivil WaroemancipationoJim CrowoCivil RightsoObama presidency.
2. While its analytical terms and theoretical concerns are differently structured,
this discussion is enabled by a body of work that most recently includes Jared
45
Sextons essay People-Of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery

(2010). Echoing the focal point of a later section of this essay, Sexton writes,
it is not inappropriate to say that the continuing application of slave law facilitated the
reconguration of its operation with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US
Constitution, rather than its abolition (in the conventional reading) or even its
circumscription. (p. 37)
3. There is perhaps no more signicant text in this conceptualization of the

totality of racial slaverys constituting relation to modern cultural formations,
institutional architectures, and regimes of power than Orlando Pattersons Slavery
and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982).
4. While my characterization of the vast body of genocide studies literature is far
from universally applicable, these tendencies toward an epistemic centering of
quantitative calculation and discrete historical periodization surface repeatedly. Just
a few recent examples include Baum (2008), Midlarsky (2005), and select essays from
Hinton (ed.) (2002).
5. The discourse of betrayal abounds across various publics, but is especially acute
among liberal-progressive outlets. Some widely read print and online examples of
this discourse include Palermo (2008), Lindorff (2009), Hodge (2010), Fiss (2009),
Dixon (2009), and Marchand (2009).
6. Obama quickly heeded calls to renounce his friend and mentor, most famously
in his A More Perfect Union speech of March 18, 2008. See also Banks (2008) and
The Washington Post (editorial) (2008).
7. The New York Times published copies of Obamas course materials in a 2008
article. The course syllabus for Current Issues in Racism and the Law, taught
by Obama in the Spring 1994 term, clearly indicates his substantial familiarity
with some of the major works in the then-emerging eld of critical race theory.
See Kantor (2008).
8. Numerous articles in major newspapers summarized the work of genealogist
and Library of Congress employee William Addams Reitwiesner, who researched
Obamas maternal ancestry in detail. See, for example, Kennedy (2007), Hinckley
and Soole (2007), Swarns (2007), and Fornek (2007).
9. The Chicago Sun-Times (Hinckley & Soole, 2007) and Obamas own Dreams
from My Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance (2004) trace his paternal ancestry
to Owiny, a leader of the Luo tribe during the 17th century. The Luo, as with
numerous other tribes, frequently sold prisoners of war to European slave traders,
though likely with little or no sense of the atrocities of the transatlantic trade and
New World chattel slavery. While much of Obamas paternal/African genealogy is
unknown, it is entirely possible that he like many in the African diaspora has
ancestors who were active in the West African circuits of the European slave
economy.
10. An almost absurd political na vete characterizes much of the global medias
opinion-building response to Obamas election. By way of example, see Bramham
(2008), Cunningham (2007), and Hartcher (2008).
11. Here I am echoing Viet Mike Ngos initiation of a critical politics of despair in
his prison interview You Have to Be Intimate with Your Despair: A Conversation
with Viet Mike Ngo (San Quentin State Prison, E21895) (2005).
46
DYLAN RODRIGUEZ
12. Here I am referencing Frantz Fanons elucidation of the changing,

endangered, and violently secured conditions of insurgent truth-making under the
conditions of racial colonialism. Fanon writes,
The question of truth must also be taken into consideration. For the people, only fellow
nationals are ever owed the truth. No absolute truth, no discourse on the transparency of
the soul can erode this positiony . Truth is what hastens the dislocation of the colonial
regime, what fosters the emergence of the nation. Truth is what protects the natives
and undoes the foreigners. In the colonial context there is no truthful behavior. And
good is quite simply what hurts them most. (Fanon, 2004, p. 14)
13. This clarication is central to the pedagogical imperatives of Black Studies as

a coherent and critical political-intellectual project, and sits in permanent tension
with the multiculturalist and comparative tendencies of certain pedagogical
approaches within both American Studies and Ethnic Studies. The centering of
the racial chattel relation as distinct from other forms of social relation thus marks a
fundamental difference of both historical experience and political analysis that
cannot be subsumed within other modalities of theorization. I am guided in this
instance by texts as far-reaching as Frantz Fanons Black Skin, White Masks (2008)
and Lerone Bennett, Jr.s Before the Mayower: A History of Black America (1993).
14. While this use of Foucaults notion of biopolitics merits an extended
discussion that I cannot provide here, it is worth clarifying that I am referencing
his delineation of the biopolitical in relation to the genealogy of race as a matrix
for social warfare. See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the
College de France, 1975-1976 (2003).
15. For this insight I am indebted to Joao Costa Vargas, whose forthcoming
project Genealogies of Black Revolt in the Diaspora departs from precisely such a
situating of Black radicalism and political thought within a theorized relation to
antiblack genocide.
16. I have argued elsewhere, echoing a number of activists and radical scholars,
that the US prison in its contemporary form has emerged as a system of human
displacement and coercive social dis- and re-organization rather than as a site for
creating a new slave labor force. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has addressed a key facet
of this logic of displacement by arguing that, the expansion of prison constitutes a
geographical solution to socio-economic problems, politically organized by the state
which is itself in the process of radical restructuring (Gilmore, 1999, p. 174).
17. The US government document Prisoners in 2008 provides a representative
afrmation of my characterization. According to this data, the imprisonment rate of
non-Hispanic Blacks was over 600% greater than that of whites, while
Hispanics were almost 300% more likely to be imprisoned than whites (Sabol,
West, & Cooper, 2010).
18. Here I am inspired by Randall Williams (2010) theoretical meditation in
Expiation for the Dispossessed: Truth Commissions, Testimonios, and Tyrannicide, the penultimate chapter of his book The Divided World: Human Rights and Its
Violence.
19. I am gesturing toward a historical framing here that resituates Marables
periodization of a Second Reconstruction and its marking of a period of liberal
47
racial policy/institutional reforms succeeded by a national trend toward an

increasingly uncertain and unequal racial future (Marable, 2007, p. 216).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is grateful to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and the anonymous outside
readers for their patient and generous responses to an earlier draft of this
chapter.
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BARACK OBAMAS COMMUNITY

ORGANIZING AS NEW BLACK
POLITICS
Tamara K. Nopper
ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how discourse about Barack Obamas community
organizing background underscores his new Black politics. Whereas new
Black politics is associated with a minimization of race, centrist
and neoliberal policies, and an unwillingness to speak truth to power,
Obama has been characterized as different due to his community
organizing experience. As I show, Obamas community organizing background is invoked by him and others in ways that amplify an opposition to
Black racial solidarity associated with the tradition of old Black politics.
The rst section examines how Obamas community organizing is depicted
as a quest for racial acceptance from old guard Black activists but translates
into a story of his political maturation. The second section considers how
Obamas relationship with his (now) former pastor Reverend Jeremiah
Wright is symbolized as a struggle between old and new Black politics and
thus serves as a commentary on the presumed ineffectiveness of racial
solidarity for addressing the plight of working-class Blacks.
Keywords: Barack Obama; new Black politics; community organizing;
racial solidarity; Black power
Rethinking Obama
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022009
51
52
TAMARA K. NOPPER
Despite being described as a new Black politician, characterized as minimizing race, espousing centrist and neoliberal policies, and an unwillingness
to speak truth to power (Ford, 2009; James, 2010; Marable, 2008, 2009),
Barack Obama is considered by some as a different from other new black
politicians because of his community organizing background (Marable,
2008). This article departs from this consideration. As I show, references to
Obamas community organizing, in discourse by and about him, underscores his new Black politics, particularly in regards to a rejection of race as
a basis of group solidarity and political mobilization for African Americans.
Obamas story of community organizing is also depicted as a journey of
political maturation and developing moral authority on racial and economic
matters in contrast to the purported ineffectiveness, parochialism, corruption, nationalism, and radicalism pejoratively associated with old guard
Black politics. To this end I rst detail how Obamas community organizing
is represented as a quest for racial acceptance and eventual negotiation with
old guard Black politics. I then examine how Obamas relationship with his
(now) former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright symbolizes a struggle
between old and new Black politics so as to comment on the purported
ineffectiveness of racial solidarity for addressing the plight of working-class
Blacks whom Obama organizes.
THE NEW BLACK POLITICS

The election of hundreds of race-neutral, pragmatic black ofcials in the
post-Civil Rights era (Marable, 2009, p. 5) has led scholars to distinguish
between the old and new Black politics (Ford, 2009; James, 2010;
Marable, 2008, 2009; Walters, 2007). Compared to their civil rights and Black
power predecessors, new Black politicians are characterized by Manning
Marable (2008) as post-racial black politicians, who espouse a politics
that minimises matters of race. They do not like to talk about race and
subsume it under the rubric of poverty and class. So they are generally left of
centre, or liberal, on social and economic policy. A related difference, as
explained by Ronald Walters (2007), is that the old Black politicians had
been familiar to Blacks before these elections, serving them in various ways as
heads of highly visible organizations in the eld of civil rights. But by arising
from within the Black community, they also arose at the periphery of the
American electorate, a fact that dened the nature of the campaigning and
the style, agenda, and audience addressed (pp. 1516). Specically, those
with roots in the Black political community tended to promote a policy
Barack Obamas Community Organizing as New Black Politics
53
focus that was a vehicle for the assertion of Black interests (Walters, 2007,
p. 16). Conversely Obamas policy aims, although liberal to progressive, are
more universalistic and lack concentrated attention to the Third World or
issues that are associated strongly with underrepresented American groups
(Walters, 2007, p. 16).
Of course, as Richard Thompson Ford (2009) notes, Obama was not
alone in his new, less confrontational style of politics. He was part of a
cohort of new Black politicians who have won ofce not by appealing to
narrow racial solidarities but instead by drawing broad support from voters
of all races, and in some unlikely locations (p. 39). In his provocatively
titled article Barack is the new Black (2009), Ford explores the different
style of politics as a source of generational conict between the old guard
and the new guard of Black leadership. As he suggests, the conict may
emerge from both substantive policy differences as emphasized by Walters
as well as the old guards jealousy and resentment toward the younger
generations relatively rapid ascendancy to political ofce. Taking as a point
of departure Jesse Jackson Sr.s infamous overheard sound bite about
wanting to castrate Obama, Ford (2009) questions, What was it about
Obamas speech that pushed Jacksons buttons? Why did Jackson think that
Obama was talking down to his audience? (p. 38). According to Ford, It
wasnt the substance of Obamas comments, which echoed themes that
Obama and Jackson himself had sounded many times in the past (p. 38).
Rather, Jacksons bitter aside reected a much deeper and more longstanding animosity because Obama had consciously and conspicuously
avoided the style and much of the substance of the Black politicians of
Jacksons generation (p. 38). Unlike Jackson, who is described by Ford as
a brash, belligerent, speak-truth-to-power race man in the Black Power
tradition, Obama wasnt angry or belligerent he was poised, condent,
and unappable (p. 38).
Ford continues:
The older generation of Black activists and this included many who had in fact held
public ofce tried to pressure other people to take action on their behalf. They lectured
White liberals and railed against conservatives. The basic model was oppositional and
the tools used mau-mauing, dramatic confrontation, public embarrassment, the guilt
trip were the tools of the weak. By contrast Obama didnt raise the roof about social
injustice, hoping that those in control would take some notice he had every expectation
that he would be in control. Obama and the Black politicians of his new generation
didnt speak truth to powerthey were power. And they used the language and tools
of the powerful: moderation and compromise, backed up by the proverbial big stick.
(p. 38; emphasis in original)
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TAMARA K. NOPPER
Joy James (2010) concurs with Ford that new Black politicians, or as she
calls them, the new Black candidate, are less likely to speak truth to
power than their predecessors. However, unlike Ford, James does not
conclude that the new Black candidate represents power. Nor does James
emphasize the purported jealousy of the old guard towards the new,
intimated by Ford and some new Black politicians as well as relatively
younger African American professionals who identify with them as one of
the major sources of conict between the two generations (Bai, 2008).
Rather James considers the new Black candidates status in a multiracial
democracy in which Blackness remains xed as negation (of civil society, of
prosperity, of law and order, and of patriotism), and thus, is to be
avoided or disciplined, or in the case of the candidates persona,
transcended (p. 27). In other words, she considers the disciplinary function
of the new Black candidate:
A product of ivy-league universities, no matter how humble his origins, the new black
candidate reects new social stratications in which class privilege and racial etiquette, in
the form of an uncompromised civility towards the mainstream, trump demands for
speaking truth to power. Now, both black conservatives and pragmatic black liberals
shoulder the burden of chastising those without institutional power: progressive radicals,
the alienated, too-black ideologues or culturalists demanding anti-racist accountability
from the mainstream majority and its chosen political class. (p. 27)
Although acknowledging many of the aforementioned tendencies of the

younger generation of Black elected ofcials, Marable (2008) nevertheless
considers Obama different from other new Black politicians due to his
community organizing background and familiarity with leftist politics:
What makes Obama different is that he has also been a community organizer. He has
read left literature, including my works, and he understands what socialism is. A lot of
the people working with him are, indeed, socialists with backgrounds in the Communist
Party or as independent Marxists. There are a lot of people like that in Chicago who
have worked with him for years. But to differentiate, this new generation of elected black
ofcials are unlike the older group who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s whose
constituencies were entirely black.
Although Marable (2008) cautions, Obama is not a Marxist or a socialist

he is a progressive liberal with a kind of centre-left strategy, he still sees
Obamas progressive potential but argues it is imperative that those on the
left y press him to carry out his own agenda. Or, as he puts it, someone
needs to be A Philip Randolph, the Black socialist leader, to Obamas FDR.
In the following two sections I explore how Obamas community
organizing gures in discourse by and about him. I show how Obamas
community organizing background is invoked in ways that underscore his
55
new Black politics and his opposition to Black racial solidarity in the
tradition of his Black political predecessors. The rst section examines how
Obamas community organizing is depicted as a quest for racial acceptance
from the old guard but translates into a story of his political maturation.
The second section explores how Obamas relationship with his (now)
former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright is symbolized as a struggle
between old and new Black politics that serves as a commentary on the
presumed ineffectiveness of racial solidarity for addressing the plight of
working-class Blacks on whose behalf Obama organizes.
COMMUNITY ORGANIZING AS POLITICAL

MATURATION
In his 1995 (2004) memoir, Dreams from my father: A story of race and
inheritance, Obama describes his intention to pursue community organizing
after graduating from Columbia University. The seventh chapter of the
book begins, In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer
(p. 133). At the time, Obama didnt know anyone making a living that
way and was unable to explain to his college peers what it was that a
community organizer did (p. 133):
I couldnt answer them directly. Instead, Id pronounce on the need for change. Change
in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds.
Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country,
manic and self-absorbed. Change wont come from the top, I would say. Change will
come from a mobilized grass roots.
Thats what Ill do, Ill organize Black folks. At the grass roots. For change. (p. 133)
According to Obama, he was partially inspired to take a more humble

path than that generally associated with Ivy League graduates by a series
of images, romantic images, of a past I had never known (p. 134). These
images were of the civil rights movement (p. 134). Obama analogizes his
quest to become a community organizer with his search for a place in the
lineage of Black politics among those he would later call the Moses
generation, or African Americans with political histories rooted in the Civil
Rights Movement (Sweet, 2007):
Such images became a form of prayer for me, bolstering my spirits, channeling my
emotions in a way that words never could. They told me y that I wasnt alone in my
particular struggles, and that communities had never been a given in this country, at
least not for blacks. Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens.
56
TAMARA K. NOPPER
They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men and in the civil rights movement
those dreams had been large. In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs, I saw the
African-American community becoming more than just the place where youd been born
or the house where youd been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrice,
membership had been earned. And because membership was earned because this
community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger
American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redene itself
I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.
That was my idea of organizing. It was a promise of redemption. (pp. 134135;
emphasis added)
In his article The Joshua generation: Race and the campaign of Barack
Obama (2008), David Remnick, borrowing from Obamas self-identication as part of the generation of African Americans tasked with completing
the unnished journey of the Moses generation (Sweet, 2007), remarks:
Sometimes, as one reads Dreams from My Father, its hard to know
where the real angst ends and the self-dramatizing of the backward glance
begins, but there is little doubt that Obama was at sea, particularly where
race was concerned (p. 2). Following this line of thought, Remnick quotes
David Levering Lewis:
The historian David Levering Lewis, who has written biographies of King and Du Bois,
told me that after reading Obamas books he had the sense of a young man almost alone
in the world, trying to nd a place. The orphanage of his life compels him to scope out
possibilities and escape hatches, he said y Lewis told me that he read the memoir as if
Obama were a densely layered character in a coming-of-age novel. To say he is
constructing himself sounds pejorative, but he is open to the world in a way that most
Americans have not had the opportunity to be, Lewis said. That is something that
outsiders have to do. (p. 2)
This narrative about Obamas community organizing treats his commitment to service as an exploration into the meaning and basis of Black identity
in a post-Civil Rights era. Levering Lewis, in his comments to Remnick about
Obamas memoir, concludes, But, as he evolves, the African-American
pathway is the pathway to service, to success, and to a more complete selfdenition (quoted in Remnick, 2008, p. 2). Or, as Remnick (2008) sums up:
He sought admission somehow into that distant world of seriousness and
commitment a connection to the Moses generation. He craved authentic
experience, a sense of service and belonging, and a racial identity (p. 2).
Related, Obamas pursuit of community organizing is depicted as a desire
to be recognized and accepted by those intimated as authentically Black due
to their participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Service to community is
thus depicted as Obamas rite of passage into Blackness. Yet his baptism into
the Black political community is stymied by the unresponsiveness of the old
57
guard. Consider for instance, how Obama describes in Dreams from my father
(2004) his efforts to connect with progressive Civil Rights organizations
while nishing up at Columbia University: And so, in the months leading up
to graduation, I wrote to every Civil Rights organization I could think of, to
any Black elected ofcial in the country with a progressive agenda, to
neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups (2004, p. 135). Obama
reportedly never received a response from the organizations to which he
wrote. This lack of response from civil rights organizations is also emphasized
in David Mobergs article in The Nation (2007a) titled Obamas community
roots.
In 1985, freshly graduated from Columbia University and working for a New York
business consultant, Barack Obama decided to become a community organizer. Though
he liked the idea, he didnt understand what the job involved, and his inquiries turned up few
opportunities. Then he got a call from Jerry Kellman, an organizer working on Chicagos
far South Side for a community group based in the churches of the region, an expanse of
white, black and Latino blue-collar neighborhoods that were reeling from the steel-mill
closings. Kellman was looking for an organizer for the new Developing Communities
Project (DCP), which would focus on black city neighborhoods. (emphasis added)
As Kellman would later tell Byron York of The National Review (2008),
Barack had been very inspired by the civil-rights movement y I felt that he
wanted to work in the civil-rights movement, but he was ten years too late,
and this was the closest he could nd to it at the time (p. 1). Kellman, a white
organizer working for a group that had been established by several Chicago
Catholic churches, specically sought an African American to organize area
neighborhoods that were almost 100 percent Black. After receiving an
application from Obama in response to an ad he had placed in trade
publications, Kellman rst thought Obama may be Japanese due to his last
name and being from Hawaii. York (2008) reports, It was only when
Kellman talked to Obama on the phone, and Obama expressed interest in
something African-American culturally, that a relieved Kellman offered
Obama the job (p. 1). Thus, it was Kellman, a white man, who gives Obama a
chance to professionally commit to organizing the Black working-class.
Before heading to Chicago to work for Kellman, Obama, decided to nd
more conventional work for a year to both pay off student loans and save for
the future (p. 135). The future for which he saved would eventually involve
becoming a community organizer: I would need the money later, I told
myself. Organizers didnt make any money; their poverty was proof of their
integrity (p. 135). More conventional work was employment at what
Obama describes as a consulting house to multinational corporations in
New York (p. 135). While employed at the consulting house, a young Obama
58
TAMARA K. NOPPER
is still committed to community organizing and thus considers himself akin to

a spy behind enemy lines (p. 135). At the multinational corporation he
encounters working-class African Americans who work in less glamorous
positions at the rm. These African Americans will gure in his narrative as
providing a counter to the old guard Black politics in which young Obama
is purportedly eager to participate; as working-class Blacks they discourage
Obama from pursuing community organizing. The Black administrative
assistants who treated Obama like a son and with whom he shares over
lunch his wonderful organizing plans, smile but nevertheless look secretly
disappointed at the Columbia graduates career goals. However, it is Ike,
the gruff Black security guard in the lobby, who is willing to come right out
and tell me Id be making a mistake (p. 135). Ike asks Obama why he would
go into community organizing when he has other options:
Forget about this organizing business and do something thats gonna make you some
money. Not greedy, you understand. But enough. Im telling you this cause I can see
potential in you y got a nephew about your age making some real money there. Thats
what we need, see. Not more folks running around here, all rhymes and jive. You cant
help folks that aint gonna make it nohow, and they wont appreciate you trying. Folks
that wanna make it, they gonna nd a way to do it on they own. (p. 136)
Although he does not pay Ike much attention at the time, because he
sounded too much like my grandparents, Obama nevertheless writes about
the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me (p. 136). After
being promoted to a nancial writer Obama wavers between imagining
himself as a a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal and
who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my
lack of resolve (p. 136). Eventually, Obama resigned from his corporate
position and began looking in earnest for an organizing job (p. 138).
His earnest pursuit eventually landed him an interview with a prominent civil
rights organization in the city (p. 138), in which the director emphasized the
changing nature of civil rights, one that departed from the redemptive
nature that Obama dreamt about (p. 135):
I like it, the director said after looking over my resume. Particularly the corporate
experience. Thats the real business of a civil rights organization these days. Protest and
pickets wont cut it anymore. To get the job done, weve got to forge links between
business, government, and the inner city. He clasped his broad hands together, then
showed me a glossy annual report opened to a page that listed the organizations board
of directors. There was one black minister and ten white corporate executives. You
see? the director said. Public-private partnerships. The key to the future. And thats
where young people like yourself come in. Educated. Self-assured. Comfortable in
boardrooms. (p. 139)
59
Obama was offered the job on the spot but declined his generous
offer, deciding I needed a job closer to the streets (p. 139). He goes to work
as a full-time organizer at City College in Harlem for the New York Public
Interest Research Group (NYpirg). Obama describes his time at NYpirg in
Dreams from my father accordingly: I spent three months working for a
Ralph Nader offshoot up in Harlem, trying to convince the minority
students at City College about the importance of recycling (p. 139).
Some of Obamas contemporaries from New York recall his work
differently. In a 2007 article titled Obamas account of New York years
often differs from what others say, New York Times writer Janny Scott
reports that his years in New York City y in the early 1980s surfaces only
eetingly in his memoir. In the book, he casts himself as a solitary wanderer
in the metropolis, the outsider searching for a way (p. 1). Obamas
representation of his duties at NYpirg surprised some former colleagues.
They said that more bread-and-butter issues like mass transit, higher
education, tuition and nancial aid were more likely the emphasis at City
College (Scott, 2007, p. 2). And as Scott (2007) relays, Eileen Hershenov,
who oversaw Mr. Obamas work for NYpirg, remembers the recent
college graduate being adept at organizing: You needed somebody and
here was where Barack was a star who could make the case to students
across the political spectrum (p. 2). Related, Obamas description of his time
working at a consulting house to multinational corporations (135) is also
recalled by others differently: Far from a bastion of corporate conformity,
they said, it was informal and staffed by young people making modest wages.
Employees called it high school with ashtrays (Scott, 2007, p. 1). Dan
Armstrong, who was a colleague of Obama at Business International
Corporation in New York in 1984 offered an opinion on why Obamas
account of his New York years differs from some of his colleagues: All of
Baracks embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of
the Christs temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer
gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment
bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks
(quoted in Scott, 2007, p. 1).
Such recollections from Obamas colleagues, while perhaps inaccurate,
nevertheless suggest a larger purpose to Obamas telling, albeit how limited
in its detail, of his New York years. Obama of course is not alone in
crafting a narrative of himself as a candidate and politician indeed, his
future vice president Joe Biden was caught during his 1987 presidential
campaign plagiarizing quotes and storyline from British Labor party
leader Neil Kinnock (Shafer, 2008). Nevertheless, I want to consider how
60
TAMARA K. NOPPER
Obamas depiction of his community organizing experience serves to signal

him as a new Black politician. Although a story in which a person opts for
the moral road less traveled by dedicating ones life to political ofce is not
specic to African American candidates, the casting of Obamas foray into
community organizing can also be interpreted as a commentary on Black
politics in which a young Obama is initially eager to participate but as
Kellman put it, was ten years too late (quoted in York, 2008, p. 1). By
downplaying his community organizing work in New York and overemphasizing his anxiety working for corporate America (as well as declining
the offer from the prominent New York civil rights organization that, similar
to Obama today, privileges private-public partnerships) (Gates, 2009),
Obama depicts himself specically as a Black man on a quest to seek, as he
puts it, redemption vis-a`-vis acceptance and inspiration from the Moses
generation. Depicting himself as a Black man interested in serving the Black
community, Obama also tells a story of the failures and corruption of postBlack civil rights politics.
Whereas New York serves as the site of Obamas foray into community
organizing and his initial reception, or lack thereof, from civil rights
organizations, Chicago is the site of Obamas political maturation, a process
that involves a growing skepticism toward the Moses generation. In
different accounts, Obamas time in Chicagos South Side, itself a trope for
both poor and working-class Black Chicago and Black politics, is invoked to
pose Obama as a pragmatic Black candidate in relation to the specter of the
old guard. It is in Chicago that Obama encounters another Ike, the Black
security guard in New York who told him to forgo community organizing
and make money. The Ike of Chicago is an unnamed public school
administrative aide that Obama references in a 1988 essay featured in Illinois
Issues (2008a) titled Why organize? Problems and promise in the inner
city. Obama begins his statement on organizing with:
Over the past ve years, Ive often had a difcult time explaining my profession to folks.
Typical is a remark a public school administrative aide made to me one bleak January
morning, while I waited to deliver some yers to a group of confused and angry parents
who had discovered the presence of asbestos in their school.
Listen, Obama, she began. Youre a bright young man, Obama. You went to
college, didnt you?
I nodded.
I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get
that degree and become a community organizer.
Whys that?
Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and dont nobody appreciate you. She
shook her head in puzzlement as she wandered back to attend to her duties.
61
Similar to Ike of Dreams from my father, the aide encourages Obama to

pursue a different path than community organizing. And related to Ikes
statement, You cant help folks that aint gonna make it nohow, and they
wont appreciate you trying (Obama, 2004, p. 136), the aide suggests that it
is a futile effort because dont nobody appreciate you (Obama (2008a).
Both Ike and the aides comments serve to make Obamas time as a
community organizer an act of moral sacrice that they encourage of him to
be temporary. As Obama writes in Why organize? (2008a): Ive thought
back on that conversation more than once during the time Ive organized
with the Developing Communities Project, based in Chicagos far south
side. Unfortunately, the answers that come to mind havent been as simple
as her question. Probably the shortest one is this: It needs to be done, and
not enough folks are doing it. Ike and the aide, then, become signiers of
an alternative Black politic that eschews long-term community organizing
(and by extension, constant confrontation against structural inequality)
because of its presumed futility in resolving the plight of the Black masses in
which they are a part. Through the stories involving Ike and the aide
particularly the words of the former, old guard Black politics is also
depicted as excessive, incompetent, and corrupt whereas a path dedicated to
making money albeit not greedy (p. 136) is proposed as a more
appropriate remedy for resolving the ills of the Black community. As members
of the proletariat (a security guard and public school administrative aide) as
opposed to the Black political class, Ike and the aide thus serve to authorize
an alternative authentic Black politics that Obama can pursue. This
alternative Black politics is one committed to the working-class and racial
uplift through social mobility but that somehow elides the implied corruption
and greed of the prominent civil rights organization in New York City at
which Obama interviewed and eventually rejected in order to be closer to the
streets (p. 139). Keep in mind Ikes comment, Forget about this organizing
business and do something that thats gonna make you some money. Not
greedy, you understand. But enough y Thats what we need, see (p. 136;
emphasis added). Whereas Obama claims to once believe that poverty was
proof of integrity (2004, p. 135), Ike and the aide absolve him of his
planned long-term sacrice.
Related, by telling the stories of Ike and the aide, Obama is able to
suggest that he must reject the trappings of the old guard, described by Ike
as hustlers or folks running around here, all rhymes and jive (Obama,
2004, p. 136) to truly serve the Black working-class and poor. Pursuing a
path that emphasizes making money but divorced from the old guard civil
rights organizations is somehow redeemed of the immorality and corruption
62
TAMARA K. NOPPER
associated with the hustle and profanity of Black politics. In other words,
Obama depicts himself as a different version of an authentic Black politics
that is presumably more in tune with the needs of the Black proletariat than
the old guard, who is characterized as being exploitative of the Black
working-class whom Obama organizes.
Additionally, Obamas community organizing background is referenced
so as to translate his quest for political ofce into an act of service that can
simultaneously alleviate the plight of the Black masses but pose no threat to
the racial order. Whereas the old guards quest for political ofce has been
considered a call for Black power by both Blacks and non-Blacks, the racial
anxiety of the latter has interpreted such a goal as one of corruption and
reverse racism. Obama instead translates his professional goals of
community organizing into a commitment to service through elected ofce
and in turn, reassures the public that he is not pursuing Black power. In a
revised version of his narrative about his path to community organizing
involving Ike and the aide, Obama on the presidential campaign trail told an
audience in Iowa: People would ask me, You seem like a nice guy, you
have a fancy law degree, you make a lot of money, youve got a beautiful,
churchgoing family, why would you want to go into something dirty and
nasty like politics? (Macfarquhar, 2007, p. 9). This representation, of
Obama seeking political ofce as a moral imperative as opposed to selsh
reasons, such as greed or corruption, associated with old guard Black
politics is also found in a 2007 story in The U.S. News & World Report:
As a community organizer in the Altgeld Gardens public housing project in the mid1980s, Obama, then 23, quickly emerged as a tireless and pragmatic advocate for the
community traits that characterize the kind of president he says he wants to be. His
work as a community organizer was really a dening moment in his life, not just his
career, his wife, Michelle, told U.S. News. It helped him decide how he would impact
the world assisting people in dening their mutual interests and working together to
improve their lives. (p. 1)
What some might see as a goal motivated by the same thirst for power
associated with old Black guard elected ofcials is thus translated into a
moral gesture on behalf of Obama. References to Obamas community
organizing background help him avoid appearing as a corrupt Black
politician or as someone interested in consolidating power along racial lines.
Consider, for instance, Mobergs (2007a) depiction of Obama the
community organizer in The Nation: Often by confronting ofcials with
insistent citizens rather than exploiting personal connections, as traditional
black Democrats proposed Obama and DCP protected community
interests (emphasis added). Rather than being depicted as simply a Black
63
organizer of Black communities which could easily be read as an association with old guard Black politics, Obamas community organizing in
Chicagos South Side promotes an image of him as a populist a term rarely
associated with the democratic tendencies of Black politicians. Thus,
Obamas community organizing can simultaneously demonstrate a commitment to both the Black working-class and multiracial populism; as he
claimed in a 2008 election campaign speech: I can bring this country
together y I have a track record, starting from the days I moved to Chicago
as a community organizer (quoted in York, 2008, p. 1).
Unlike Marables (2008) consideration of Obama as a different new Black
politician because of his community organizing roots, it appears that
references to Obamas community activism serve to represent Obama as
simultaneously supportive of the Black working-class and different from the
old Black guard. It is here that we can consider the disciplinary function of
new Black candidates (James, 2010) and specically, of the invoking of
Obamas community organizing background. Obamas story of political
maturation involves distinguishing himself from the implied corruption, or
the rhymes and jive of the old Black politics (Obama, 2004, p. 136),
purportedly on behalf of the Black masses. Unlike new Black politicians
who often minimize race (Marable, 2008), Obama actually amplies his
Blackness as well as the status of the Black working-class, symbolized by Ike
and the public school administrative aide, so as to draw attention to his new
Black political orientation. Whereas Obama would, in his 2008 speech, A
more perfect union (2008b), suggest that it is others who are xated on his
Black authenticity, his story of community organizing is also one in which
he openly engages questions of Blackness so as to differentiate his political
approach and commitments. As the next section shows, Obamas community organizing narrative is also one that promotes a consideration of class
diversity among African Americans so as to ultimately dismiss Blackness, or
race, as a source of political identity and collective action. I discuss how
Obamas relationship with his (now) former pastor Reverend Jeremiah
Wright is symbolized as a struggle between old and new Black politics so as
to serve as a commentary on the ineffectiveness of racial solidarity to
address the plight of Blacks Obama encounters as a community organizer.
Also considered is how Obama signals a commitment to the Black
proletariat that simultaneously incorporates the Black working-class into
an enlightened multiracial citizenry in which African Americans class status
can be linked to that of non-Blacks, a gesture that ultimately displaces
Blackness as a source of political organizing and treats such a dismissal as a
moral imperative.
64
TAMARA K. NOPPER
REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT AND BLACK

SOLIDARITY
In the aforementioned 1988 essay Why organize? Barack Obama remarks
on the import of Black churches in Chicago Black politics:
Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black
churches. Possessing tremendous nancial resources, membership and most
importantly values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation,
the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of
cities like Chicago. A erce independence among black pastors and a preference for more
traditional approaches to social involvement (supporting candidates for ofce, providing
shelters for the homeless) have prevented the black church from bringing its full weight
to bear on the political, social and economic arenas of the city.
Over the past few years, however, more and more young and forward-thinking pastors
have begun to look at community organizations such as the Developing Communities
Project in the far south side and GREAT in the Grand Boulevard area as a powerful tool
for living the social gospel, one which can educate and empower entire congregations
and not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a mere 50 prominent
black churches, out of the thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decide to
collaborate with a trained organizing staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought
in the education, housing, employment and spirit of inner-city black communities,
changes that would send powerful ripples throughout the city.
Eventually, Obama would become afliated with one such Black church in
Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ, which was under the leadership of
Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Questions of Obamas religious faith would take
on greater signicance in his presidential campaign due to both anti-Muslim
bigotry and anxieties that Obama agreed with the content of Wrights
incendiary speeches that were continuously fed to the public (Miller, 2008,
p. 1). Obama would counter the Wright controversy with his 2008 address
A more perfect union, popularly referred to as his race speech. His
remarks depict his relationship with the Black church, and Trinity United
Church specically, as part of Obamas journey towards afrming his place
in the Black community. Like the Black civil rights organizations he was
eager to work for as a community organizer, the Black church is treated, in
Obamas (2008b) account, as a source of an authentic Black politics and
community in which he yearned to participate:
People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind
carrying the reverends voice up into the rafters y Those stories of survival, and
freedom, and hope became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our
blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a
vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our
65
trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in
chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that
we didnt need to feel shame about y memories that all people might study and
cherishand with which we could start to rebuild. (p. 3)
Several months after delivering A more perfect union, Obama, while on

the campaign trail, discussed the trajectory of his religious beliefs with
Newsweek. Recalling his New York years, he commented, I did a lot of
spiritual exploration (Miller, 2008, p. 1). Obamas spiritual search would
sometimes lead him to the famous Black church in Harlem, Abyssinian
Baptist: Id just sit in the back and Id listen to the choir and Id listen to
the sermon, he says, smiling a little as he remembers those early days in the
wilderness. There were times that I would just start tearing up listening to
the choir and share that sense of release (Miller. 2008, p. 1). As Newsweek
reported:
Obama says his spiritual quest was driven by two main impulses. He was looking for a
community that he could call home a sense of rootedness and belonging he missed
from his biracial, peripatetic childhood. The visits to the black churches uptown helped
fulll that desire. Theres a side very particular to the African-American church
tradition that was powerful to me, he says. The exuberant worship, the family
atmosphere and the prophetic preaching at a church such as Abyssinian would have
appealed to a young man who lived so in his head. And he became obsessed with the
civil-rights movement. Hed become convinced, through his reading, of the transforming
power of social activism, especially when paired with religion. (Miller, 2008, p. 3)
According to Newsweek, Obamas organizing days helped clarify his

sense of faith and social action as intertwined:
Its hard for me to imagine being true to my faith and not thinking beyond myself,
and not thinking about whats good for other people, and not acting in a moral and
ethical way, he says. When these ideas merged with his more emotional search for
belonging, he was able to arrive at the foot of the cross. (Miller, 2008, p. 4)
And how much of the decision was pragmatic, motivated by Obamas

desire, as he says in Dreams, to get closer to the people he was trying to
help? I thought being part of a community and afrming my faith in a
public fashion was important, Obama says (Miller, 2008, p. 4). While the
Newsweek reporter, Lisa Miller, asked Obama about whether his decision to
explore his faith was pragmatic, her question asked whether it was deliberate
in the service of connecting with those on behalf of whom Obama organized
in Chicago. Put simply, Obama is still depicted as exploring his faith as
well as determining which church he would become afliated with out of
altruistic reasons to connect with poor and working class Blacks. Such
representation is also found in Dreams from my father. In it Obama
66
TAMARA K. NOPPER
describes meeting with Wright to encourage the pastor to support the work
of his organization. He also recounts an exchange that ensues about class
differences in the Black community. Obama (1995 [2004]) recalls, Ill try to
help you if I can, he said. But you should know that having us involved in
your efforts isnt necessarily a feather in your cap (p. 283). When Obama
asks why, Wright tells him, Some of my fellow clergy dont appreciate what
were about. They feel like were too radical. Others, we aint radical enough
(p. 283). The then community organizer interjects: Some people say, I
interrupted, that the church is too upwardly mobile (p. 283). In response,
The reverends smile faded. Thats a lot of bull, he said sharply. People who talk that
mess reect their own confusion. Theyve bought into the whole business of class that
keeps us from working together y We dont buy into these false divisions here. Its not
about income, Barack. Cops dont check my bank account when they pull me over and
make me spread-eagle against the car. (p. 283)
And referencing the sociologist William Julius Wilson whose research

Obama mentions in his 1988 essay Why organize? (but who he would not
meet until 1996) (Gates, 2009, p. 18; Obama, 2008a [1988]), Wright,
according to Dreams from my father, also said to Obama, These
miseducated brothers, like that sociologist at the University of Chicago,
talking about the declining signicance of race. Now, what country is he
living in? (p. 283). In response to Wrights reaction, Obama wondered,
But wasnt there a reality to the class divisions (p. 283). Obama later
states in his book, Wright was at least partly justied in dismissing the
churchs critics, for the bulk of its membership was solidly working
class y Still, there was no denying that the church had a disproportionate
number of black professionals in its ranks (p. 285). Eventually, Obama
comes to identify Trinity United Church as a site in which
the former gang-banger, the teenage mother, had their own forms of validationclaims
of greater deprivation, and hence authenticity, their presence in the church providing the
lawyer or doctor with an education from the streets. By widening its doors to allow all
who would enter, a church like Trinity assured its members that their fates remained
inseparably bound, that an intelligible us still remained. (p. 286)
As he did on behalf of Ike and the public school administrative aide, Obama
questions what relevance Black racial politics in this sense expressed through
Wrights commitment to a cross-class Black solidarity and an intelligible
us (p. 286) had for the Black masses:
It was a powerful program, this cultural community, one more pliant than simple
nationalism, more sustaining than my own brand of organizing. Still I couldnt help
wondering whether it would be enough to keep more people from leaving the city or
67
young men out of jail. Would the Christian fellowship between a black school
administrator, say, and a black school parent change the way the schools were run?
Would the interest in maintaining such unity allow Reverend Wright to take a forceful
stand on the latest proposals to reform public housing? And if men like Reverend Wright
failed to take a stand, if churches like Trinity refused to engage with real power and risk
genuine conict, then what chance would there be of holding the larger community
intact? (p. 286)
Consistent with the class versus race debate, in which class diversity is
raised so as to trump the existence of a coherent Black community, or
Black ontology and in turn an authentic Black politics (Gates, 2009),
Obama the community organizer depicts himselfas the class consciousness
of Black nationalist institutions. Obamas rhetoric is similar to African
American scholars such as Wilson as well as Henry Louis Gates both
supporters of Obama who are quick to emphasize class diversity and the
status of the Black poor so as to promote neoliberalism (Gates, 2009).
Black leaders who emphasize the shared racial experiences of African
Americans notably, in Wrights account with the racial state (Cops dont
check my bank account when they pull me over and make me spread-eagle
against the car, p. 283) are depicted as bourgeois or politically out of
touch for promoting an archaic notion of shared racial oppression despite
the class diversity of the Black community or the successes of some Blacks
in the post-Civil Rights era. Indeed, in Obamas telling, those African
Americans who may want to share fellowship with poor and working-class
Blacks may be interpreted as frauds akin to white liberals with racial guilt
because they derive validation from the authenticity of their poorer peers.
Thus, Obama not only makes, perhaps inadvertently, a moral case for
middle-class African Americans to socially distance themselves from poor
and working-class Blacks so as to not to exploit them in a quest for racial
authenticity, he also translates (some may say conceals) his opposition to
racial solidarity into a concern about class differences and the plight of the
people he organizes. Not depicted as the huckster brand of civil rights,
Wright and Trinity United Church nevertheless become metaphors for an
outdated mode of Black politics that Obama, the committed organizer, must
also negotiate. By emphasizing racial solidarity in the post-Civil Rights era,
Wright remains too preoccupied with a purportedly anachronistic sense of
race in the face of class differences. Consistent with new Black politicians
emphasis on class and poverty rather than race (Marable, 2008), Obama
invokes his community organizing background to question the preoccupation with racial solidarity as opposed to class consciousness among the
old guard, as represented by Reverend Wrights diverse Black congregation.
68
TAMARA K. NOPPER
Despite his initial reservations about Wrights church, Obama ofcially

joined Trinity United Church several years later, when he returned to
Chicago after graduating from Harvard Law School (Miller, 2008, p. 5).
Whereas he had expressed reservations about the class diversity of the church
in Dreams from my father, it appears that the presence of upwardly mobile and
well-connected African Americans was much more attractive to Obama than
he intimates in his commentary on Wrights over-emphasis on racial
solidarity. Toni Preckwinkle, who had been the alderman on Chicagos
south side whom Obama approached in 1995 about running for state senate,
says as much in a 2008 New Yorker article Making it: How Chicago shaped
Obama. As writer Ryan Lizza puts it, For anyone trying to understand
Obamas breathtakingly rapid political ascent, Preckwinkle is an indispensable witness a close observer, friend, and condante during a period of
Obamas life to which he rarely calls attention (p. 1). Reported by Lizza
(2008), Preckwinkle suggested that Obama joined Jeremiah Wrights Trinity
United Church of Christ for political reasons. Its a church that would
provide you with lots of social connections and prominent parishioners, she
said. Its a good place for a politician to be a member (p. 1).
Noticeably, Obamas account of his relationship with Trinity United
Church and Wright is dramatically different in A more perfect union
(2008b). Here he does not talk about confronting Wright for having class
diversity or, as mentioned in The New Yorker, his interest in connecting with
prominent parishioners (Lizza, 2008, p. 1). Instead, the speech championed the very class diversity of the church Obama had questioned Wright
about:
Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black
community in its entirety the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the
former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinitys services are full of raucous
laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and
shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the
kindness and cruelty, the erce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and
successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in
America. (p. 3)
As in Dreams from my father, Obamas race speech amplies the class

diversity of Trinity United Church so as to discipline Black solidarity.
Obama is able to both apologize for Wrights commentary and signal his
role in diversifying the Black community by speaking to the dichotomies
that the church represents, thus distancing the then presidential candidate
from the nationalism and radicalism of the Black church and his pastor.
69
Such distancing, as James (2010) describes, attempts to redene whiteness

and rehabilitate Blackness to a non-Black public:
Through electoral politics, both the new black political class and the mainstream white
voter can shed past racial stigma and elevate their social status as pragmatic politicians
and citizens who have moved beyond old antagonisms. In fact, in their electoral
opposition to bad whites i.e. those, particularly the less well educated, who will not
vote for black candidates afuent whites redene racial purity: the good white is
colorblind. In repudiating as divisive blacks who challenge the skewing of material and
moral wealth towards whites, black elites redene racial authenticity: the good black
expresses no racial solidarity. (p. 27)
Consistent with James (2010) account of the disciplinary functions of new

Black politics, Obama emphasizes the diversity of the Black congregation of
Trinity United Church not to promote the cross-class racial solidarity
among Blacks as espoused by Wright but rather to identify his rejection
of the pastors brand of Black politics and the old guard generation it
represents.
CONCLUSION
Far from the centers of power and privilege that have spawned so many commanders in
chief, its an unlikely place to incubate a future president. But the seemingly endless
clumps of drab brick apartment buildings and patchy lawns on Chicagos South Side are
where Sen. Barack Obama learned some of his most enduring lessons about politics,
leadership, and the paths to social change. (Walsh, 2007, p. 1)
These words, Far from the centers of power and privilege y, written
by Kenneth T. Walsh for U.S. News & World Report, speak to the
signicance of Obamas community organizing. Indeed, it appears that
Obamas community organizing has been one source of his popularity. For
example, Jackie Kendall, executive director of Midwest Academy, an
organization in Chicago, was quoted on the internet as saying, Hes given
community organizing a good name y My mother will know what I do now
after all these years (quoted in Moberg, 2007b). When the Republican
candidate for vice-president, Sarah Palin, mocked Obamas community
organizing background at the Republican National Convention (RNC)
I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except
that you have actual responsibilities she was met with applause by her
audience (Lawrence, 2008). But the reaction from many, of all political
stripes, suggested that Obamas community organizing background is
meaningful to many people. In a letter to the editor sent to the Washington
70
TAMARA K. NOPPER
Post in response to the RNC, Tracy M. Soska, chair of the Community

Organization and Social Administration Program at the University of
Pittsburgh (2008), wrote:
Listening to Governor Sarah Palin and Mr. Rudy Guliani [sic] at the Republican
Convention deride Barack Obamas background as a community organizer as less
than valued work, seemed both smug and ignorant of this important and skilled
profession. They demean the thousands of brave and trusted community organizers who
serve, often for very meager wages, to ensure that citizens at our grassroots have a voice
and role in decisions and issues that affect their lives, their communities, and our
country.
And as reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education (Mangan, 2009):

Discouraged by layoffs in the private sector and inspired by President Obamas call to
public service, students are ocking in record numbers to graduate programs in public
affairs and public service, according to program directors who are reporting application
increases as high as 52 percent for this fall.
Despite the inspiration that Obamas community organizing background

may engender, we should also consider how Obamas community organizing
experience and its telling of it make him popular in a post-Civil Rights
era marked by anti-Black racial backlash and hostility toward old guard
Black politics. Part of Obamas popularity may stem from his community
organizing background. But while his community organizing experience
perhaps distinguishes him from other U.S. presidents, the casting of it by
him and others does not distinguish him from new Black politicians. As
shown in this article, discourse by and about Barack Obamas community
organizing background underscores his new Black politics. Whereas Obama
has been considered a different new Black politician because of his
community organizing (Marable, 2008), references to his community work
serve to undermine beliefs in Black ontology and racial solidarity among
African Americans, thus establishing Obama more rmly in the new Black
political tradition. Stories about Obamas community organizing are part of
a larger narrative of him coming to terms with both his racial identity and
the presumed politics of the Moses generation from whom he initially seeks
acceptance. While there are plenty of issues with members and organizations
of the old guard Black politics that African Americans have raised, the
conclusion derived from Obamas community organizing narrative is that
race is an outdated source of political identity and collective action for
African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era, a claim tantamount to
suggesting racism is no longer a primary factor shaping life chances or
71
decisive in structuring social relations. Through stories that depict old guard
Black politics as either racial hucksterism or sincere but out of touch with
the diversication of the Black community, Obama and his supporters
are making a case for the new Black politics, which emphasizes a nonconfrontational class consciousness so as to disregard or minimize racial
solidarity as the basis of political organization among African Americans
(Ford, 2009; James, 2010; Marable, 2008, 2009; Walters, 2007). Related,
Obamas community organizing background is referenced by him and his
supporters to simultaneously condemn old Black politics and subsequently
discipline those African Americans whose political identities are steeped in
race consciousness. His activist background is also invoked to morally
distinguish Obama from the presumed corruption and profanity of Black
politics. In this vein, Obamas quest for political power is represented as an
extension of his community organizing and guided by an appreciation for
both multiracial populism and the Black masses presumably underserved or
exploited by the Moses generation.
Overall, one of the most troubling aspects of Obamas narrative is that
it involves a celebration of community organizing and the championing of
ordinary people in the service of an anti-Black project. Such a gesture is
particularly insidious because people dedicate their lives and put
themselves at further risk of isolation, repression, defeat, and incarceration, to challenge political conditions. Many with opportunities make
thoughtful career decisions to pursue a path of service and in turn resist
the trappings of corporate America or the desire to be wealthy. And some,
in the process, demand a recognition of the centrality of racism in shaping
life chances and are viciously punished for doing so from people of all
political stripes. Unfortunately, rather than support the valor of such risktakers, most notably Black people dedicated to Black liberation, the
casting of Obamas community organizing ultimately works against such
efforts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva for inviting me to submit to this
special issue of PPST and for his helpful feedback on previous drafts. I also
thank two anonymous reviewers for their feedback as well as Ms. Louise
Seamster and PPST editor Dr. Julian Go.
72
TAMARA K. NOPPER
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THE MORE THINGS CHANGE:

A GRAMSCIAN GENEALOGY OF
BARACK OBAMAS POST-RACIAL
POLITICS, 19322008
Cedric de Leon
ABSTRACT
Numerous commentators have suggested that Barack Obama represents a
new post-racial politics in the United States, distinct from a preexisting contentious form that originated with the civil rights era.
Drawing on secondary historical data, Mr. Obamas presidential
campaign speeches, and county-level electoral returns from Indiana and
North Carolina, I argue in contrast to such claims that post-racial politics
comprise the latest in a line of successive attempts by the Democratic
Party to articulate the New Deal voting bloc, in which the white suburban
middle class is the primary constituency while African Americans are of
secondary importance. By addressing the question of Obama and the
Politics of Race in this way, this chapter seeks to integrate political
parties into the study of racial ideologies. Specically, it suggests that the
latter may originate and subsequently develop in the context of partisan
struggle.
Rethinking Obama
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022010
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From the beginning of his presidential campaign in 2007, commentators

described Barack Obama as a new post-racial black candidate. In a New
York Times op-ed piece, for example, Juan Williams wrote, Mr. Obama is
in the vanguard of a new brand of multi-racial politics. He is asking voters
to move with him beyond race and beyond the civil rights movement to a
politics of shared values (New York Times, November 30, 2007). Likewise,
National Public Radio (NPR) news analyst Daniel Schorr said, The postracial era, as embodied by Obama, is the era where civil rights veterans of
the past century are consigned to history and Americans begin to make racefree judgments on who should lead them (National Public Radio, January
28, 2008). And in an article on the Newark mayoral contest of the same
year, Peter Boyer compared Cory Booker with Mr. Obama, characterizing
them as African-American politicians whose appeal transcends race. Both
men, reared in the post-Selma era and schooled at elite institutions,
developed a political style of conciliation, rather than confrontation (New
Yorker, February 4, 2008).
Mr. Obama for his part has cultivated this perception. In a 2007 NPR
interview, Steve Inskeep asked the candidate to respond to a statement by
U.S. Congressman Bobby Rush that in contrast to Mr. Obama, he was a
race politician and proud to be African American. Mr. Obama replied,
In the history of African-American politics in this country there has always
been some tension between speaking in universal terms and speaking in very
race-specic terms about the plight of the African-American community y
By virtue of my background, you know, I am more likely to speak in universal
terms (National Public Radio, February 28, 2007). Similarly, in his South
Carolina Democratic Primary speech, Mr. Obama said, When I hear that
well never overcome the racial divide in our politics, I think about that
Republican woman who used to work for [segregationist] Strom Thurmond,
whos now devoted to educating inner-city children, and who went out
into the streets of South Carolina and knocked on doors for this
campaign. Picking up on the message, some in the South Carolina audience
chanted, Race doesnt matter! (New York Times, January 26, 2008;
February 12, 2008).
The commentariats observations and the candidates efforts to abet them
turn on two claims: (1) the prevailing politics of race prior to Mr. Obamas
ascendancy began with the allegedly confrontational style of civil rights era
politicians and (2) Mr. Obama signals a departure from those politics. Such
claims, however, have been asserted more than demonstrated. Accordingly,
I ask two questions in this chapter: what were the pre-existing politics of
race and has Mr. Obama in fact broken with those politics? Drawing on
The More Things Change
77
secondary historical data, Mr. Obamas presidential campaign speeches, and

county-level data from Indiana and North Carolina, I advance a three-part
argument, anchored in a Gramscian theoretical framework that emphasizes
the role of political parties in mobilizing electoral coalitions or blocs.
First, I argue that the foundation of what scholars call colorblind
ideology was laid between 1932 and 1965 when the Democratic Party
granted whites privileged access to well-paying jobs and single-family homes
through a variety of New Deal programs. In doing so, the Democrats
constructed, and consequently garnered the mass consent of, a formidable
white middle-class suburban constituency. At the same time, the Democratic
Party used symbolic gestures and the promise of civil rights to recruit African
Americans into the New Deal voting bloc. Lassiter has referred to the
co-existence of white privilege and black civil rights as the racial
contradiction at the heart of postwar liberalism (2006, p. 7). It is this racial
contradiction that I argue comprises the core element of colorblind ideology,
which suffers the juridical rights of racial others under liberal democracy so
long as they do not impinge upon institutionalized racial inequalities.
Next, I explain why the New Deal voting bloc fell apart and then came back
together again. When the so-called ideological faction of the Democratic
Party pressed for structural change in the areas of school and residential
segregation a violation of the terms of white consent to Democratic rule
middle-class whites in the North and South became a swing vote (rather
than reliable rank-and-le Democrats) that oscillated between whichever
party promised to protect the aforementioned white privileges (Aldrich,
1995, p. 247; Paulson, 2000, p. xxv). But once African Americans
became a captured constituency within the Democratic Party after 1965
(i.e., unwanted by the opposition and increasingly ignored by their own
party), the emergence of the white swing vote prompted Democratic pollsters,
operatives, and leaders most famously Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to
rearticulate the New Deal coalition by courting the white vote while largely
distancing the party from demands for racial equality (Frymer, 1999, pp. 78,
100, 111, 114, 2010, p. 209).
Finally, I show that Mr. Obamas victory in 2008 was built largely on
black turnout and a modest but decisive increase in white middle class votes.
This, I argue, signals a reassertion of New Deal coalitional politics par
excellence. In this sense, Mr. Obama is post in a chronological sense only:
in every other way, he is merely the newest victor in the ongoing struggle to
articulate the New Deal bloc.
By addressing the issue of Obama and the Politics of Race in this way,
this chapter makes three contributions. First, it synthesizes two otherwise
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isolated bodies of work, namely, the literature on political realignment on

the one hand, and the literatures on colorblind ideology and whiteness on
the other. In doing so, the paper contributes to each eld individually.
Focused as it is on the institutional dynamics of long-range party system
change, the research on political realignments is largely silent on the politics
of race a silence that I argue opens the eld to problems of periodization.
That is, where students of realignment see rupture, students of racial politics
may see the gradual unfolding of colorblind ideology. Conversely, the
research on colorblind ideology and whiteness is largely silent on political
parties. Party politics has with a few recent exceptions (see Frymer, 1999,
2008) escaped notice as a strategic site for the production of contemporary
racial discourse. This chapter addresses the foregoing gaps by advancing a
more party-sensitive analysis of the development of colorblind ideology. It is
anchored in Antonio Gramscis articulation framework of political
parties, according to which the latter naturalize and denaturalize electoral
coalitions in their struggle for power (Gramsci, 1921, 1971, p. 192).
So as to pre-empt any confusion, then, my question is not why
Mr. Obama succeeded where other Democratic nominees like John Kerry
have failed. Such a question would require a lengthy discussion, far beyond
the scope of this or any one paper, about the role of the recession, the
strengths and weaknesses of the McCain campaign relative to other
Republican campaigns, and other variables. Nor do I want to suggest that
colorblind racism has been the dominant racial ideology in the United States
since the 1930s. This would deny the very existence of Jim Crow segregation
and its ideological basis in biological racism. Rather this chapter advances a
different and in my view a more delimited and defensible claim; namely that
the framing of Mr. Obama as a post-racial gure comprises the latest in a
long line of successive political projects to articulate the New Deal coalition
and thus elide the racial contradiction at the heart of New Deal liberalism.
In this, Mr. Obama does not represent a departure from the pre-existing
politics of race but, as the saying goes, more of the same.
THE REALIGNMENT OF 19641972

To begin assessing the claim that Mr. Obama is post-racial vis-a`-vis the
putatively divisive politics of the civil rights era, we engage two bodies of
work that conceive of the period between 1964 and 1972 as transformative of
the American party system. The rst, which I refer to here as realignment
studies, uses the civil rights era to revise the general theory of realignment
79
(Aldrich, 1995; Carmines & Stimson, 1989; Ladd, 1980; Lawrence, 1996;
Paulson, 2000). As classically dened by V. O. Key, a realignment is a sharp
and durable transformation of the party system (1955, pp. 4, 12).
Realignments involve a critical juncture (e.g., a revolution, an election) and
a new governing party whose hegemony lasts for roughly a generation.
Recent work in realignment studies has focused on clarifying the timing and
order in which the critical juncture and partisan shift occur. Thus, Carmines
and Stimson, in their now classic account of the emergence of civil rights as a
mainstream political issue, write that realigning issues lie dormant but then
rise from partisan obscurity and become so contentious, so partisan, and so
long lasting that they actually dene the party system in which they arise and
transform the grounds of debate (1989, p. 159). The difference between issues
that remain dormant and those that dene the party system is not race, but
party elites, who, like Barry Goldwater, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon
B. Johnson in the case of civil rights, take the lead by framing the issue in
partisan terms and confronting the mass electorate (1989, pp. 4047, 160).
The other relevant body of work is the Southernization of American
Politics thesis. It traces Republican hegemony after 1968 to Richard Nixons
Southern Strategy, which allegedly tapped into a deep well of racial
resentment owing from the civil rights movement, deindustrialization, and
the cultural assimilation of northern whites (see, e.g., Applebome, 1996;
Carter, 1995; Edsall & Edsall, 1991; Phillips, 1969). Eventually, or so that
argument goes, the segregationist Deep South became the tail that wags the
dog in American politics (Lassiter, 2006, p. 6).
While divergent in focus, both literatures converge on a crucial point,
namely that 19641972 represents the beginning of the end of the New Deal
era and the emergence of a contentious politics based on race instead of
economics. It is this claim that is most problematic about the realignment
literature, for it leads inexorably to a host of theoretical and empirical
missteps. The rst is that it erases the relationship between the 1930s and
1960s. As I seek to demonstrate, it was the threatened reversal of New Deal
policies that made white working- and middle-class Democratic voters
available for Republican recruitment. Second and in a related vein, the
reported death of the New Deal racial order allows scholars and other
commentators to mistake the confrontational posture of the Black Panthers
and George Wallace for the prevailing politics of race since the 1960s, which
overwhelming sociological data demonstrates is anchored in a more subtle
discourse of colorblindness. Indeed, the southernization thesis is particularly
hard pressed to explain why racially moderate candidates defeated their
segregationist counterparts throughout the South from 1964 to 1972 when
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segregationist sentiment burned hottest (Lassiter, 2006, pp. 6, 254, 260272;

Schulman, 1991, p. 131). Lastly, these preceding difculties lead to the
problem of periodization, for as I show below the United States since 1932
has witnessed a gradual unfolding of a regime of race relations grounded in
colorblind ideology. This claim is at variance with the post-racial thesis and
the realignment literature, which conceives of the same period as an earlier
regime of non-racial politics followed by a politics of racial confrontation.
To the extent that there has been any shift, I argue, it has been in the way in
which the Democratic Party has mobilized black voters as the secondary
partner in the New Deal coalition.
WHITENESS AND COLORBLIND IDEOLOGY

But if neither realignment nor southernization gets the prevailing politics of
race before Mr. Obama right, then what mechanism does? Students of
whiteness and colorblind ideology provide a partial answer. Though distinct,
they share at least two analytical themes in common. First, both groups seek
to uncover the origins and effects of white privilege. The research on
whiteness tends to focus on the cumulative advantages of groups (e.g., Jews,
the Irish) who have succeeded in claiming the mantle of whiteness
(Brodkin, 1998; Citron, 1969; DuBois, 1935; Ignatiev, 1995; Lipsitz, 1998;
MacLean, 2006; Mills, [2002]2004; Oliver & Shapiro, 1995; Roediger, 1991),
whereas the research on colorblindness focuses on the ways in which the
denial of racial inequality especially in college admissions and employment
allows whites to evade and thus maintain their privilege in these areas (see,
e.g., Bonilla-Silva, [2003] 2010; Bonilla-Silva, Lewis, & Embrick, 2004;
Gallagher, 2003; Williams et al., 1999).
In addition, both literatures point to the ways in which whites use abstract
liberalism and the tenets thereof (i.e., individualism, egalitarianism, meritocracy, and choice) to justify their opposition to any structural alteration of
white privilege. Within whiteness studies, Mills argues, the transdisciplinary
framing of the United States as y [a] liberal democracy y has facilitated and
underwritten y massive evasions on the issue of racial injustice ([2002]2004,
p. 239). In the literature on colorblind ideology, Bonilla-Silva, Lewis, and
Embrick demonstrate that among the most frequent objections to afrmative
action in the Detroit metropolitan area is the notion that blacks take jobs
that by rights should go to whites. The context, they contend, is depicted as
a head-to-head competition of merit in which race triumphs over merit,
and whites are the real victims of discrimination (2004, pp. 567578).
81
Related survey research on contemporary racial attitudes corroborates

the nding that whites support juridical equality but oppose the
implementation of policies directed at restructuring unequal institutional
arrangements. Early National Opinion Research Center and Gallup Poll
data, for instance, show that whereas white support for federal enforcement
of school integration has never approached 50 percent, northern white
support for school integration on principle grew from 40 to 80 percent
between 1942 and 1970, and southern white support increased from 2 to
almost 50 percent (Oreld, 1978, pp. 108110). Kinder and Sanders note
that although whites support for the principles of racial equality and
integration has increased majestically over the last four decades, their
backing for policies designed to bring equality and integration about has
increased scarcely at all (1996, p. 92). And in a follow up edition to their
previous work, Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan report that there has
been a strong and generally steady movement of white attitudes from denial
to afrmation of equality but that implementation questions do not all
show a clear positive trend over time (1997, pp. 191192).
Although the interlocking emphasis on white privilege and abstract
liberalism represents a signicant advance in the study of race relations,
which has tended to focus on communities of color, there are at least two
limitations to the way in which these scholars have turned the gaze
toward the top of the racial hierarchy. In order to highlight institutional
racism (a worthy intervention to be sure), scholars in both schools describe
the cumulative advantages that whites enjoy as an outcome of state transfer
payments, laws, and regulations. They are, however, largely silent on the
role of political parties that, by virtue of their location on institutional
pathways to elective ofce, often control the levers of state power and
policy-making. Moreover, neither body of work contemplates the ideological projects used by parties to take control of the state, which, because of
the nature of competitive democratic politics, requires the articulation of
otherwise socially distant communities into majority coalitions. We therefore turn to the work of Antonio Gramsci to synthesize the scholarship on
political parties with that of whiteness and colorblind ideology.
A GRAMSCIAN ALTERNATIVE
For Gramsci, social divisions and electoral coalitions have no meaningful
existence unless they are articulated or naturalized by political parties. This
central theoretical premise works well not only with a bedrock assumption
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of sociology that race is socially constructed, but more specically with a

mounting recognition in related elds of inquiry that racialization often
takes place in the political arena (Frymer, 1999, 2008; Gerteis, 2003; Marx,
1998; Redding, 2003; Valelly, 2004). Moreover, scholars of race relations
have found Gramscis concept of hegemony (i.e., rule by consent) to be
useful in explicating the contemporary terrain, where overt biological racism
has given way to more subtle discursive practices (see, e.g., Bonilla-Silva,
2010, p. 26; Omi & Winant, 1986, p. 67; Winant, 2001, pp. 307308).
The backdrop of Gramscis approach was the organic crisis of interwar
Italy in which parties proliferated and none recognized the authority of the
others to rule (see (Fiori, [1965]1990, pp. 110112, 138141; Marzani, 1957,
p. 11; Hoare and Smith, 1971, pp. xxxiixxxix, xliii, xlv). It was in this
moment of frightening possibility, which eventuated in the rise of fascism,
that Gramsci (1921) published his article, Parties and Masses. There he
famously observed, The masses dont exist politically, if they are not
framed in political parties. While in prison, Gramsci continued to write
about the role of political parties in articulating the social world. In a note
from his reections on The Modern Prince, Gramsci wrote,
Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously born in each individual brain: they have a centre
of formation, of irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasiona group of men y which
has developed them and presented them in the political form of current reality. The
counting of votes is the nal ceremony of a long process. (Gramsci, 1971, p. 192)
His reference here to the counting of votes suggests that those who
generate and shape ideas and opinions are the leaders and intellectuals of
political parties. Gramsci is thus suspicious of economic determinists and
others who insist that so-called objective conditions naturally give rise to a
certain kind of politics. For Gramsci, socioeconomic change in and of itself
has no natural political valence. It is up to parties to interpret the
socioeconomic in the political form and channel the resulting energy into
coalition-building.
Neo-Gramscian scholars have echoed the articulation approach to political
parties (de Leon, 2008, 2010; de Leon, Desai, & Tugal, 2009; Desai, 2002;
Przeworski, 1985; Tugal, 2009). In a now classic critique of economic
determinism, for example, Przeworski held that Social cleavages, the
experience of social differentiation, are never given directly to our consciousness. Social differences acquire the status of cleavages as an outcome of
ideological and political struggles (1985, p. 69). More recently, de Leon,
Desai, and Tugal have used the concept of political articulation to denote
the process through which party practices naturalize class, ethnic, and racial
83
formations as a basis of social division by integrating disparate interests

and identities into coherent sociopolitical blocs [their emphasis] (2009,
pp. 194195).
How then do parties articulate the social world? In his essay on The
Southern Question, Gramsci suggests that parties are involved in a twostep process aimed at forging sociopolitical blocs. First, political parties
pose one group as the hegemonic [dirigente] or leading element of the bloc.
Second, parties win the consent of likely allies by framing alternative
leadership groups as impossible choices. Thus, Gramsci writes that the
Italian Communist Party (PCI) made the urban proletariat the modern
protagonist of Italian history, and in doing so succeeded in modifying if
not completely at least to a notable extent their mental outlook
([1926]1992, pp. 4849). But if parties convince one group of their right to
rule, then they must also garner the consent of other groups to be ruled. In
this, Gramsci offers an important clue in his account of the Sardinian
chapter of the PCI, which turned the peasantry off from the local nationalist
party in this way:
Are you poor devils from Sardinia for a bloc with the gentry of the island, who have
ruined you and who are the local overseers of capitalist exploitation? Or are you for a
bloc with the revolutionary workers of the mainland, who want to destroy all forms of
exploitation and free all the oppressed? (1992, p. 34)
As Gramsci tells it, the PCI was able to win the consent of Sardinian
peasants by framing the nationalist alternative as an unimaginable choice.
A bloc with the gentry of the island is said to be an unspeakable
partnership with their hated overseers, whereas a bloc with the
revolutionary workers of the mainland is described as an opportunity
to free themselves and all of the oppressed.
In this chapter, I argue that the New Deal Democrats engaged in a similar
two-step process. The Democratic Party created and then posed white
middle class suburbanites as the principal protagonists of the consumers
republic within which working- and middle-class whites were entitled to the
well paying industrial jobs and single-family homes that drove the postwar
industrial economy and lifted the country out of the Great Depression. The
latters partners in the New Deal bloc were African Americans, whom the
Democrats mobilized in two phases. In the rst phase, 19321965, the party
made symbolic and eventually juridical concessions to blacks, while
simultaneously protecting white entitlements. Then from 1968 to the
present day, in a process that Paul Frymer (1999) has called, electoral
capture, Democrats gave blacks the impossible choice of either staying
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with the party of Civil Rights or returning to the party of Barry Goldwater
and Richard Nixon. The paper then provides evidence that far from
departing from this strategy of centering the white middle class and
marginalizing the black community, Barack Obama has instead recuperated
it and in doing so revived the New Deal voting bloc.
CASE SELECTION AND DATA

Of all the states Mr. Obama carried in 2008, Virginia, North Carolina, and
Indiana appeared from the outset to be the most logical choices for testing
the post-racial thesis. All other states that defected to the Democratic Party
in that year had gone Democratic more recently. In contrast, Virginia,
North Carolina, and Indiana had been Republican strongholds at the
presidential level since the civil rights era and accordingly were hailed as
exemplars of a racial breakthrough in 2008. The Old Dominion and Tar
Heel state had been written off as irredeemable casualties of the Republican
southern strategy. Indiana meanwhile was as non-competitively Republican
as any northern state could be. Conservative and overwhelmingly white,
Indiana had not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964
(Lassiter, 2006; Marable, 2010; USA Today, November 5, 2008).
Virginia, however, complicates matters. Northern white-collar workers
have followed defense and research dollars to the southern metropolitan
Sunbelt since the end of the Second World War. But whereas North
Carolinas high growth suburban counties are seen historically as part of the
New South, similar communities in Virginia are seen as Washington, DC,
suburbs. In other words, if northern Virginias support for Mr. Obama can
be dismissed as support from Washington insiders, North Carolinas
support cannot (CNN, 2008; New York Times, November 4, 2008;
Schulman, 1991; USA Today, April 6, 2011).1
Although North Carolina is not a perfect choice (Jimmy Carter carried it
in 1976 after the Watergate scandal), it works well as a comparison with
Indiana in other important ways, namely that the two states signaled a
North-South convergence in the 1960s toward a politics of racial
moderation yet remained solidly Republican at the presidential level for a
generation. Neither Barry Goldwater in 1964 nor the segregationist George
Wallace in 1968 carried Indiana or North Carolina despite winning the
Deep South in their respective elections. Put another way, given the option
of an avowedly anti-civil rights candidate, a majority of Indianans and
85
Carolinians voted against that option at the height of the civil rights era
(Lassiter, 2006).
In this chapter I draw on three sets of data. First, I cull primary data from
the secondary literature, with special reliance on the historiography of
suburbanization and Paul Frymers (1999, 2008) research on race and the
modern Democratic Party. Second, I conduct a content analysis of those
speeches from the 2008 campaign that were posted to barackobama.com by
Organizing for America, President Obamas political arm. I chose this dataset
over others, assuming that Mr. Obama and his operatives considered these
speeches representative of the campaign. The content analysis was done using
Bonilla-Silvas (2010) four central frames of colorblind racism. Abstract
individualism appropriates ideas associated with political and economic
liberalism such as equal opportunity, choice and individualism to explain
white opposition to race-based programs such as afrmative action.
Naturalization allows whites to dismiss racial phenomena such as
residential segregation as natural outcomes (e.g., gravitation to ones kind).
Cultural racism refers to arguments about minorities putative behavioral
decits (e.g., blacks have too many babies) to justify racial inequality.
Minimization of racism suggests that racism is no longer a factor affecting
the life chances of minorities (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, pp. 2829). Lastly, I use
U.S. Census data, county-level electoral returns, and qualitative data from
county newspapers to gauge the extent to which the Obama campaign was
able to reforge the New Deal coalition. The six counties analyzed here are
Indianas and North Carolinas only entrants on the list of the 100
fastest growing counties in the United States as reported by the U.S. Census
Bureau (2007).
POLITICAL ORIGINS OF COLORBLIND IDEOLOGY:

THE NEW DEAL VOTING BLOC, 19321965
The New Deal Democratic Party created and subsequently framed the white
suburban middle class as the protagonist of modern American history by
breaking with nineteenth-century producerism. To the extent that the Great
Depression had been a crisis of underconsumption, then its solution was the
economic empowerment of the ordinary consumer. Thus, during the 1932
presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt announced, we are at the
threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought y we
are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer.
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Because private markets were unable to reinvigorate aggregate demand on

their own, the Roosevelt administration guaranteed home loans and invested
in defense appropriations to fuel what they hoped would become a selfreinforcing cycle of housing construction, employment, and mass consumption. After the Second World War, New Deal Democrats continued to pose
the United States as a consumers republic. The Employment Act of 1946,
for example, directed the federal government to promote maximum
employment, production, and purchasing power. As Lizabeth Cohen notes,
this period saw the emergence of the purchaser as citizen who simultaneously
fullled personal desire and civic obligation by consuming (Cohen, 2003,
pp. 24, 5455, 119; Jackson, 1985, pp. 203204; Schulman, 1991, p. ix).
There is considerable evidence to suggest that the vision of a consumers
republic approached common sense in this period. Institutional actors as
adversarial as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Congress
of Industrial Organizations linked mass consumption to national prosperity.
Even President Eisenhower, a Republican, credited decit spending on the
interstate highway system for mitigating the effects of the 1950s recession.
Indeed, by 1957, Fortune editor, William H. Whyte, would write, thrift is
now un-American. Brides Magazine advised its readers, [W]hat you buy
and how you buy it is very vital in your new life and to our whole
American way of living (Cohen, 2003, pp. 115119, 121).
White Americans came to see themselves as the central preoccupation of
the New Deal as a result primarily of two initiatives: defense spending and
home nance. Between 1946 and 1965, defense expenditures were 62 percent
of the federal budget. These developments translated into jobs, spurring a
mass migration to centers of defense research and production, located
primarily in metropolitan Sunbelt counties like those in North Carolinas
research triangle. Between 1970 and 1976, population growth in all but
three southern states, whose share of defense dollars more than tripled from
the 1950s to the 1970s, outstripped that of most other states in the Union
(Schulman, 1991, p. 160).
But if defense spending furnished many of the middle-class jobs of the
consumers republic, then federal home nance policy furnished both jobs
and its iconic mass consumption commodity, the single-family home.
Altering forever the rules of mortgage lending, the FHA and GI Bill allowed
for minimum down-payments of 7 percent, with mortgage payments spread
over as many as thirty years. Because the federal government guaranteed all
FHA and GI Bill home loans, bankers approved an unprecedented lending
spree. Federally backed mortgages helped 16 million World War II veterans
purchase homes and in doing so underwrote their jobs in the building trades.
87
The rate of homeownership increased from 44 percent in 1940 to 62 percent

in 1960, and for the rst time in history, a majority of Americans became
people of property (Cohen, 2003, p. 195; Jackson, 1985, pp. 204205).
However, the FHA and GI Bill primarily backed loans for single-family
homes in all-white suburban neighborhoods. The FHAs own underwriting
manual read, If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that
properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial
classes. These and other guidelines reinforced the consumerist framework
of postwar citizenship by creating a racialized brand hierarchy of residential
neighborhoods, within which whites strove to trade up from inner city
ethnic neighborhoods to inner ring suburbs, and then on to outer ring suburbs
now called exurbs (Cohen, 2003, p. 202; Jackson, 1985, pp. 206207;
Lassiter, 2006, p. 7; Sugrue, 2008, p. 202).
The white suburban middle class was therefore the leading or hegemonic
constituency of the New Deal voting bloc, but its pre-eminent, if
paradoxical, partner was the African-American community. The Democratic Party mobilized blacks in two distinct phases, each of which reected
the centrality of white voters to their political strategy and the secondary
status of black voters. The rst phase, 19321965, began as southern blacks
migrated to pivotal areas in populous battleground states. Truman
administration ofcial Clark Clifford observed, the Negro vote today
holds the balance of power in Presidential elections for the simple arithmetic
reason that the Negroes y are geographically concentrated in the pivotal,
large, and closely contested states such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania,
Ohio, and Michigan (Frymer, 1999, pp. 9596).
The Democratic strategy for recruiting black voters evolved from
symbolic gestures to civil rights, but stopped just short of addressing
residential segregation, which, as we have seen, was a core principle of New
Deal home nance. The 1936 Roosevelt campaign named African American
delegates to the Democratic National Convention for the rst time in party
history. In 1940, blacks were mentioned in the party platform again for the
rst time. In 1948, Harry Truman went so far as to endorse the ndings of
his Committee on Civil Rights, which decried the discrimination endured by
blacks. Finally, in the 1960s, symbolic gestures owered into a full-blown
platform of civil rights when pollsters predicted that the loss of white votes
in the South would be more than offset by support among northern and
newly enfranchised southern blacks as well as racially moderate whites.
Robert F. Kennedy admitted that his late brother had hesitated to press civil
rights for fear that it would cost them votes even in the suburbs. But in
1963 the pollster Louis Harris reported that whereas Mr. Kennedy had lost
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4.5 million votes with his qualied support for civil rights, he gained 11
million votes from those who had voted for Richard Nixon in 1960. The
pollsters were vindicated spectacularly in the 1964 presidential election when
Lyndon B. Johnson, running on a civil rights platform, carried all but
six states in the entire Union, including the upper South (Frymer, 1999,
pp. 9495; Lassiter, 2006, p. 229).
The New Deal voting bloc therefore comprised the political incarnation of
colorblind ideology, within which black juridical rights were permissible so
long as white privileges in key redistributive programs remained untouched.
Thus, the Roosevelt administration ofcially forbade racial discrimination
in New Deal entitlements, but, as in the area of home nance, permitted
racial loopholes. For example, the National Labor Relations Act legalized
collective bargaining, but excluded farmworkers and domestic employees
(among whom blacks were disproportionately concentrated) and did not
prohibit racial discrimination with respect to union membership. This all
but guaranteed that the high paying industrial jobs that vaulted workers
into the middle class would be white jobs. Similar loopholes prevented
blacks from participating in signature New Deal programs such as the
Social Security Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, Aid to Dependent
Children, and the National Recovery Act (Frymer, 1999, p. 94; Lipsitz,
1998, p. 5; MacLean, 2006, pp. 1516).
COLORBLIND IDEOLOGY AS RESISTANCE

AND RE-INVITATION, 19681992
The Democratic Party entered a second phase of black mobilization after a
brief period in which its so-called ideological faction moved to address school
and residential segregation. Having acquired middle-class jobs and home
mortgages with relative ease, many white rank-and-le Democrats responded
with puzzlement as to why blacks could not do the same without stateenforced integration. It was at this point that the racial contradiction of the
New Deal voting bloc became expressed as a discourse of white entitlement
and victimization within which residential segregation was an outcome of
individual merit rather than collective racism, and de facto segregation was
an individual consumer right (Lassiter, 2006, pp. 1, 3; Lipsitz, 1998, pp. 5,
20, 22; MacLean, 2006, pp. 1516, 20; Sugrue, 1996, p. 211). Examples of the
discourse are drawn from metropolitan Indianapolis and Charlotte, whose
counties are compared below in the empirical section on Mr. Obama.
89
In the case of Indianapolis, several anti-busing groups organized in

response to a desegregation trial in the summer of 1971. Letters to the editor
of the Indianapolis Star evince themes such as abstract liberalism that the
scholarly literature now associates with colorblind ideology. One letter
writer asks, Are we going to allow a few people to dictate to us on where
our children are to attend school? (Indianapolis Star, July 16, 1971, quoted
in Hayes, 1975, p. 18). Another takes the loss of liberty expressed in the rst
letter to what s/he believes is its logical conclusion: No one wants it, but if
we dont ght it our every freedom is in jeopardy y If its our schools today
what will it be tomorrow? (Indianapolis Star, Oct. 8, 1971, quoted in Hayes,
1975, p. 18). And in a letter that pre-gures the charges of reverse
discrimination that would come to dominate the afrmative action debate a
generation later, still another person intoned,
Is this not the rankest kind of discrimination? That is, making little children sacricial
goats to please the whims of social experimenters and latterday John Browns anxious to
inict punishment on young white children today for the sins committed against blacks
by Southern plantation owners over a century ago? (Indianapolis Star, July 20, 1971,
quoted in Hayes, 1975, p. 17)
Many of the same themes pop up in the Charlotte anti-busing movement

of the mid-1970s. A physician and anti-busing activist from one of the citys
afuent suburbs explained his position in this way: So many of us made the
biggest investment of our lives our homes primarily on the basis of their
location with regard to schools. It seemed like an absurdity that anyone
could tell us where to send our children. Similarly, an insurance executive
and ofcer of the Concerned Parents Association explained, I did not
believe there was any possibility whatsoever that the government was going
to dictate where my kids were going to public school (Charlotte Observer,
July 12, 1975, quoted in Lassiter, 2006, pp. 12).
The above quotations are signicant for several reasons. First, neither
biological racism nor even segregationism is in evidence. This is especially
important in the case of Charlotte, since those who stress the centrality of
southernization or the southern strategy would have predicted a shrill, racist
rhetoric. Instead we hear a rights-based discourse peppered with allusions to
liberty, freedom, and individual autonomy. Thus, opponents of busing describe
the government as dictating, telling, making, and inicting. Indeed, the
emergent discourse is profoundly one of white victimization, innocence, and
entitlement. This is particularly salient in the last Indianapolis passage, where
little children are made sacricial goats. In Charlotte, the New Deal
entitlement to segregated communities appears when the physician justies his
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childrens schooling in terms of the biggest investment of their lives, their

homes. Finally, there is the telltale minimization of contemporary racism,
which is central to colorblind ideology. We are reminded that there are no
longer any Southern plantation owners, the implication being that there is
therefore no longer any racism to warrant latterday John Browns.
Their privileges under the New Deal social contract having thus been
violated, the protagonists of the consumers republic became a swing vote
instead of a reliable base of Democratic support (Aldrich, 1995, p. 247). This
critical defection inaugurated a Democratic strategy for rearticulating the
New Deal bloc one in which blacks became what Frymer calls a captured
constituency: unwanted by the opposition and essentially ignored in the
Democratic Party as the latter scrambled to bring middle America back into
the fold, condent that blacks had nowhere else to go (Frymer, 1999, p. 8,
2008, p. viii). Although the strategy had changed in this new phase of black
mobilization, middle class whites remained the partys central preoccupation,
while African-American voters were increasingly ignored.
Indeed, beginning as early as the Johnson administration, there was a
growing recognition that the party had to recuperate the terms of the New
Deal social contract. Democratic pollster Richard Scammon, for example,
warned Lyndon Johnson that the American voter today is un-young, unblack, and un-poory . Campaign strategy should be carefully aimed at the
white, middle-aged, middle-class voters the people y who bowl regularly. In 1984, after Jesse Jacksons infamous anti-Semitic remarks in New
York, advisors to Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale urged
him to break with Jackson. When he refused, William Galston, a party
advisor said, it was the last opportunity to draw a line that middle-America
could discern as being signicant. Finally, in 1992, after successive defeats
at the hands of the Republicans, Bill Clinton, the partys new nominee,
signaled that he had gotten the message. Mr. Clinton used the occasion of
the Los Angeles riots to distance himself from Jesse Jackson and attack an
obscure female rapper named Sister Soulja for inciting violence. Even black
Democratic leaders, who were sick of losing, copped to the Clinton line.
Thus, Wayne County Commissioner Bernard Parker said at the time, As a
politician, I understand why Clinton is playing down. Its because he is
trying to reach white middle America. Im not bothered by the strategy.
After the election, Washington Post writer Thomas Edsall wrote, the
rhetoric and strategy of the Clinton campaign restored the Democratic
Partys biracial coalition and made the party competitive again in the
nations suburbs (Frymer, 1999, pp. 4. 100, 111, 119).
91
BARACK OBAMA AND THE REASSERTION OF THE

NEW DEAL VOTING BLOC
It is within this broader historical context that we assess Barack Obamas
post-racial politics. Having established that the New Deal Democratic
Party and its descendants posed the white suburban middle class as the
protagonist of the consumers republic and recruited African Americans but
always at arms length, we must now ask whether indeed Mr. Obamas own
racial politics represent a departure or more of the same. My content
analysis reveals that the white middle-class suburban voter remained at the
center of the Democratic rhetorical and organizational strategy.
Rhetorically the Democrats made their claim to the presidency by
advancing a revisionist and non-racial account of New Deal liberalism.
Mr. Obamas personal narrative, so much a feature of his campaign,
contained numerous idealized allusions to New Deal policies. For example,
in El Dorado, Kansas, his grandparents ancestral home, then candidate
Obama said, I am standing here today y because my grandfather got the
chance to go to school on the GI Bill, buy a house through the Federal
Housing Authority [sic], and move his family west (Obama, 2008a). In
Indiana, Mr. Obama compared his own plans to remake the American
middle class to President Eisenhowers embrace of New Deal decit
spending programs: Now, back in the 1950s, Americans were put to work
building the Interstate Highway system and that helped expand the middle
class in this country. We need to show the same kind of leadership today
(Obama, 2008c). Later, in a speech in nearby St. Louis titled, An Agenda
for Middle Class Success, he alluded to his future legislative agenda in this
way: we sent my grandfathers generation to college on the GI Bill, which
helped create the largest middle-class in historyy. And thats what this
country will do again when I am President of the United States (Obama,
2008d). In these passages, Mr. Obama asserts that New Deal liberalism is
the answer for what ails the United States. Indeed, he frames himself as the
very product and embodiment of the aspirations and policies of the New
Deal. Signicantly, he echoes the discourse of colorblind ideology, in that
his nostalgia is an abstract evocation of a putative golden age of the
American economy without any mention of Jim Crow segregation or the
secondary status of black voters in the New Deal coalition.
Beyond these concrete references to the New Deal, Mr. Obama employed
three of Bonilla-Silvas four colorblind discursive frames.2 To repeat, the
frame of abstract liberalism involves the use of concepts such as equal
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opportunity, choice, individualism, and rights to defend white privilege.

Thus, whites explain their opposition to afrmative action because it
supposedly gives preferential treatment to people of color, even though
people of color are underrepresented in most good jobs. Likewise, whites
defend segregation by suggesting that it is their right and choice to live in
exclusive suburban communities, thus sidestepping the fact that residential
segregation was made possible by the FHAs and GI Bills preferential
lending practices (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 28). The application of egalitarianism and individualism in these examples is therefore abstracted from a
reality and history of persistent discrimination and social inequality.
Mr. Obamas campaign speeches were shot through with examples of
abstract liberalism. In the aforementioned Kansas speech, the candidate
articulated a vision of equality and universality that drew a horizontal line
of camaraderie between him and all Americans, saying, Our familys story
is one that spans miles and generations; races and realities. Its the story of
farmers and soldiers; city workers and single moms. It takes place in small
towns and good schools; in Kansas and Kenya; on the shores of Hawaii and
the streets of Chicago. Its a varied and unlikely journey, but one thats held
together by the same simple dream. And that is why its American (Obama,
2008a).
Mr. Obama swept the problems of inequality and discrimination under the
rug on other occasions too, but in a way that eerily echoed white resistance to
busing. In North Carolina, he said that the fundamental promise of the
American creed was that America is a place where you can make it if you
try, where everyone should have the chance to live their dreams (Obama,
2008f). Elsewhere in North Carolina, he declared, I believe that if you work
hard and do everything right, you shouldnt live in fear of losing everything
(Obama, 2008g). In these passages, the candidate not only paints a picture of
abstract equality in which you can make it if you try, but also reafrms the
aforementioned individual right of consumers who work hard and do
everything right to live their dreams. The fear of losing everything is of
course an allusion to the foreclosure crisis and perhaps even to the Great
Depression, which preceded the original rise of New Deal liberalism, but
the phrase simultaneously invokes the fears of busing. It is as if Mr. Obama
was signaling to white voters that he would not relitigate the racial past.
The frame of cultural racism refers to culturally based arguments such
as y blacks have too many babies to explain the standing of minorities in
society. Thus, the failings of people of color are attributed to their lack of
effort, loose family organization, and inappropriate values. Cultural
racism blames the victim (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 28, 40). In Mr. Obamas
93
speeches, cultural racism becomes manifest in the juxtaposition of

American values of hard work and personal responsibility with the
putative cultural degeneracy of the African American community. Thus, in
the aforementioned speech on middle class success, he observed,
Americans Ive met y believe in personal responsibility, and hard work,
and self-reliance (Obama, 2008d). In contrast, at the 99th Annual
Convention of the NAACP, Senator Obama gave voice to white stereotypes
about the fecundity and promiscuity of blacks by urging his audience to tell
young black men that responsibility does not end at conception y what
makes them men is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise
one. He also advised convention goers to be good neighbors and good
citizens, lending credence to white fears that blacks are in fact culturally
decient in these areas (Obama, 2008e). In his now famous speech on the
Reverend Jeremiah Wright, he pointed to still another cultural defect,
namely the anger of black people, which he claimed is not always
productive y it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our
condition, and prevents the African American community from forging the
alliances it needs to bring about real change (Obama, 2008b). Thus, black
people are not only angry, a familiar cultural charge; their anger also blinds
them to their complicity in [their] condition and isolates them from other
Americans. As in his nod to individual consumer rights under abstract
liberalism, Mr. Obama is speaking here not so much to black people, but to
whites, whom he comforts by proclaiming his belief in hard work and
personal responsibility. The implication is that he believes in these values so
much that he is willing to scold the members of a venerable African
American institution to their faces and in their own house. In this way, he
signals to middle class whites that they will be the leading constituency of his
administration.
Finally, the frame of minimization of racism refers to the argument
that discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities life
chances (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 29). In the same speech on Reverend
Wright, Mr. Obama argues that for the African-American community the
path to a more perfect union means embracing the burdens of our past
without becoming victims of our past. He adds that black children must
never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they
can write their own destiny (Obama, 2008b). The candidate thus acknowledges the history and reality of racial discrimination but does not want to
say that it is a central factor affecting minorities life chances. Hence, he
speaks about the burden of the African-American community as past and
warns against playing the victim. The path to a more perfect union therefore
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consists of teaching black youth in the language of abstract liberalism

that they can write their own destiny. Again, Senator Obama addresses
whites as much as blacks in this speech. It was, after all, an attempt on the
part of the campaign to put to rest white fears that the candidate shared the
militant politics of race evinced by his pastor. However, he also takes care to
stand by whites who believe in the declining signicance of race.
The internal dynamics of the Obama campaign, to the extent that they
have been reported, conrm that the organization was doing what so many
Democratic campaigns had done before it, namely court white voters above
all while doing just enough to guarantee the black vote. Thus, the New York
Times reported that Mr. Obama walked a rhetorical tightrope reassuring
whites without seeming to abandon blacks. Senior aide David Axelrod
conded that there was a certain physics to winning votes across racial
lines, while another aide said, there was certainly the feeling among some
of the black staff that some of the white staff did not care about winning
black votes. Cornel West recounted his early criticism of Mr. Obama and
the campaigns subsequent attempt to reach out to him. Dr. West said,
Hes got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and
anxieties y Hes got to speak [to] them in such a way that he holds us at
arms length; enough to say he loves us, but not too close to scare them
away. He recalled that Mr. Obama expressed the fear that hed be pegged
as a candidate who caters only to the needs of black folks (New York
Times, February 12, 2008).
But if Mr. Obama was addressing the old constituents of the New Deal
voting bloc, to what extent did he succeed in reuniting them? To answer this
question we turn now to county-level electoral data from Indiana and North
Carolina. The returns reveal three patterns. First, though not reported here,
Senator McCain carried the rural counties of both states overwhelmingly
often with 60 percent of the vote or more. Second, the Democrats
predictably offset the rural vote by carrying the major cities. But third,
the Obama campaigns advantage was made possible by black voters in
urban centers and white middle class voters in suburban areas, especially the
high growth suburbs that have given the Republican Party super-majorities
in the last several election cycles.
Table 1 reports the returns of two counties that were critical to the
Democratic victory in Indiana. Hamilton and Hendricks are Indianas only
entrants in the 100 fastest growing counties in the United States. Both are
afuent suburbs of Indianapolis and are over 90 percent white (U.S. Census
Bureau, 2007, 2009).
95
Table 1. Democratic Share of Popular Vote in High Growth Counties

in Indiana and North Carolina, 20002008.
County
2000
2004
2008
Hamilton, IN
Hendricks, IN
Brunswick, NC
Mecklenburg, NC
Union, NC
Wake, NC
23.7
26.8
45.5
48.2
31.6
46.0
25.2
25.9
39.2
51.6
29.5
48.7
38.4
37.7
40.5
61.8
36.2
56.7
Sources: Indiana Secretary of State; North Carolina Board of Elections.
The Democrats increased their share of the popular vote in each of these
key areas. Although the Republicans carried Hamilton and Hendricks as
they typically do, their margin of victory dropped by a combined total of
32,504 votes relative to 2004. The loss of what are routinely bankable
Republican votes in the suburbs was therefore decisive given the urban-rural
stalemate and the fact that the Democratic margin of victory in Indiana was
a mere 28,391 votes (USA Today, November 5, 2008). Additionally, while
black turnout was far more important in North Carolina as we shall soon
see, there was nevertheless a net gain to the Democratic Party of 11,534
black voters from 2004 to 2008 (Philpot, Shaw, & McGowen, 2009, p. 998).
U.S. Census data and the local paper of record, the Indianapolis Star,
provide important clues about who voted for Mr. Obama and why,
especially in Hamilton County. First, as Table 2 reports, although both
countries remain overwhelmingly white, the U.S. Census estimates a drop in
the percentage of whites from 2000 to 2009 and therefore an increase in the
percentage of people who are more likely to vote Democratic. Second, the
Obama campaign beneted from some 240,000 newly registered Democrats
but primarily in defecting counties: the twelve counties that President
Bush carried in 2004 but were carried by Senator Obama in 2008.3
Demographic shifts and voter registration notwithstanding, however, a
closer look at Hamilton County suggests that the Democrats 13.5 percent
improvement over their 2004 performance appears to be due in large part to
the defection of already registered Republican voters. One sure sign was the
relatively enthusiastic turnout for Republican Governor Mitch Daniels:
whereas Senator McCain carried Hamilton by 30,000 votes, Daniels carried
it by 80,000. Indiana Republican Party Chairman Murray Clark called
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Table 2.
Percentage White Population in High Growth Counties in

Indiana and North Carolina, 20002009.
County
2000
2009
Net Change
Hamilton, IN
Hendricks, IN
Brunswick, NC
Mecklenburg, NC
Union, NC
Wake, NC
94.4
96.7
82.3
64.0
82.8
72.4
90.4
92.3
86.1
64.1
84.4
72.3
4.0
4.4
3.8
0.1
1.6
0.1
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau (2000a, 2000b, 2009).
the disparity jaw-dropping. Moreover, an important component of the

Obama campaigns county organization was a chapter of Republicans for
Obama (R.F.O.). One R.F.O. activist, Chuck Lasker, had been a straightticket Republican since 1980 and identies himself and his fellow Obama
Republicans as the religious right, both Catholics and Southern Baptists.
Further, while there is no denitive data to suggest that the defection of
Hamilton County Republicans was due primarily to Mr. Obamas postracial appeal, county residents either mentioned it outright or alluded to it.
A white lawyer and college professor from Carmel, for instance, called
Mr. Obama the rst really post-racial candidate, adding, he offers at
least the promise of healing the polarization weve had in this country.
Chuck Lasker echoed these sentiments, explaining that he crossed party
lines to support Obama because he believes Obama can draw the country
together (Independent Star, April 21, 2008; July 25, 2008; July 26, 2008;
November 9, 2008).
Table 1 also reports the results of the presidential election in key counties
in North Carolina. Like Hendricks and Hamilton, all four counties listed
here are among the nations 100 fastest growing counties. Wake County is
the anchor of the Research Triangle and houses the city of Raleigh. It is
the fourth largest high growth county in the United States, and threequarters of its residents are white. Mecklenburg County contains the city of
Charlotte and its suburbs. It is the second largest high growth county in the
country and is two-thirds white. Union County is a Charlotte exurb and is
84 percent white. Brunswick County is a suburb of Wilmington at the
southernmost tip of the state and is 86.1 percent white (U.S. Census Bureau,
2007, 2009).
97
The returns suggest that the Democrats carried North Carolina by

expanding their share of the black vote in cities and their share of white
votes in the suburbs. George W. Bush carried Wake County in 2000 and
2004, but in 2008, the Democrats surged dramatically, improving on their
2004 showing by 8 percentage points. Mecklenburg County had been
trending Democratic since 2000, yet it too witnessed a higher-than-expected
20-point Democratic margin of victory in 2008. As in Hamilton and
Hendricks counties, the Democrats lost Union and Brunswick counties, but
not until they shaved several percentage points off the 2004 Republican
advantage. Finally, Democrats increased their already formidable advantage in the African-American community. According to the New York
Times, 22 percent of North Carolinas electorate in 2008 was black,
compared to 18.6 percent in 2004 (November 6, 2008). The net gain due to
increased black turnout was 156,816 votes from 2004 to 2008 (Philpot et al.,
2009, p. 998). In a state where the Republicans lost by just 14,177 votes, the
Democrats expansion in city centers and suburbs was sufcient to tip the
state over to a Democratic nominee for the rst time since 1976.
Once again U.S. Census data and local newspapers offer valuable clues as
to who voted for Mr. Obama and why. Table 2 reports that the percentage
of whites in all four counties either increased or remained constant between
2000 and 2009. If the in-migration of non-whites played a role in North
Carolina (which I do not deny), then they do not appear to have played a
role in these four counties. It is possible that the in-migration of northern
whites played a role, but as Schulman (1991) demonstrates, substantial
white migration to the Sunbelt has been ongoing since 1938. Local
newspapers point instead to other dynamics. In a precinct-by-precinct
analysis of how whites boosted Obama in Mecklenburg County, the
Charlotte Observer reported that although the GOP still managed to carry
heavily white Republican precincts, the Democrats dramatically improved
on their 2004 performance. For example, in the Charlotte suburb of
Huntersville, which is 88.4 percent white, Mr. Obama took 41 percent of the
vote to Mr. Kerrys 28 percent. A similar pattern was found in Charlottes
neighboring counties, which voted heavily for McCain, including Union
County. At the same time, the article described a massive turnout among
African Americans in which a number of rst-time voters y said they
came to the polls solely because of Obama. Thus, in the predominantly
black precinct of Barringer Elementary School in west Charlotte, where
Democrats are accustomed to overwhelming margins of victory, Senator
Kerry defeated President Bush 723 to 36, while Obama defeated McCain
1617 to 16 (Charlotte Observer, November 6, 2008; U.S. Census Bureau,
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2009). In Wake County, the story seemed to center more on the 47,000 newly
registered Democratic voters, but many of these were former registered
Republicans like Nancy Anderson, a resident of the Raleigh suburb of Cary,
which is 82.2 percent white. The article notes that eleven precincts that voted
for President Bush in 2004 ipped for Mr. Obama in 2008, including heavily
Republican Brier Creek Community Center in northwest Raleigh (News and
Observer, November 8, 2008; U.S. Census Bureau, 2009). Once again it is
difcult to discern why these voters chose Mr. Obama, but it is telling that the
sentiments expressed in Hamilton County, Indiana were echoed in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. In an article titled, Obamas win not just for
blacks, Kevin Caston of the Charlotte Observer asked Leigh Robbins, a
white woman who works in admissions at UNC Charlotte, why she supported
the Obama campaign. She said that he is a non-polarizing gure y Hes
genuine, and thats something that people white and black or whatever your
race can relate to (Charlotte Observer, November 9, 2008).
News reports also conrm the centrality of white suburban voters to the
2008 Democratic coalition nationally. The Democrats carried fteen of the
fastest growing 100 counties (compared to just three in 2004) and ran ahead
of John Kerry in 94 of those counties. According to Politico, Democratic
success in high growth areas provided his margin of victory in at least two
closely contested states: Indiana and North Carolina. Mr. Obamas win in
Wake County was especially decisive, because it had been one of the 13
fast-growing Bush counties (Nov. 9, 2008). Regarding Indiana, USA
Today observes, the Democrats reduced the typical Republican advantages
in some GOP strongholds. In Hamilton County, the states most afuent
just north of Indianapolis, McCain won with 60% of the vote far less than
President Bushs 75% in 2004 (November 5, 2008).
CONCLUSION
Barack Obamas post-racial politics therefore have a very long pedigree
indeed. They originated in part, I argue, with the Democratic Partys
articulation of the New Deal voting bloc, whose racial contradiction
emanated from posing the white suburban middle class as the protagonist
of the consumers republic while recruiting and eventually capturing
African-American voters with symbolic gestures and the promise of juridical
rights. The result through two instantiations of this bloc (19321965 and
then 19682008) has been the extension of citizenship to blacks without
much alteration to the structural conguration of white privilege. Within
99
this context, Mr. Obamas post-racial mystique can be understood as a

device cultivated by the Democratic Party to revive and hail the New Deal
voting bloc.
Mr. Obama offers more of the same in other ways as well. He may be
Americas rst black president, but the mechanisms through which President
Obama rose to power are profoundly classical. The vehicle for his ascendancy
has been the oldest mass party in world history, the Democratic Party, and his
home base within that party was nothing less than the Chicago Democratic
machine. Moreover, his victory and that of his party were achieved through
the mobilization of majority coalitions, which, since the beginning of mass
party formation in the United States, has demanded the unication of
mutually isolated social groups into coherent political blocs (de Leon, 2010).
By situating Mr. Obamas ascendancy in the context of partisan struggle,
this chapter tells a story about colorblind ideology and whiteness that is
different from other accounts on offer. Although the existing literature
has rightly shifted our attention to the subtleties and implications of
contemporary racial ideologies, it has been largely silent on the role of
political parties in shaping those ideologies. Put another way, we know
much more about the content and internal structure of colorblind ideology,
for instance, than we do about its partisan origins. This paper has tried to ll
that gap. As I have already noted, I do not mean to suggest by this that
sociologists of race are unaware of Gramsci. Quite the contrary, the widely
held notion that race relations have passed from domination to hegemony
(Omi & Winant, 1986, p. 67) is a Gramscian inspired idea that has been
around for a while and points importantly to a non-coercive form of racial
rule. However, this important insight has been divorced from the political
party, which, for Gramsci, is responsible for acquiring mass consent to rule.
This chapter contributes to the extant scholarship by offering a way to
integrate political parties into our research.
The above data also raise questions about the periodization of race
relations in the realignment literature, which views the post-civil rights era
as a systemic break with the New Deal. This is less true of more historically
oriented social scientists like Valelly (2004) and Frymer (1999), but there is
nonetheless also a tendency in this scholarship to spend much less time on
the New Deal relative to the two reconstructions. My research joins
Jackson (1985), Sugrue (1996), and others in suggesting that there is more to
the intervening period than the entrenchment of Jim Crow segregation. It
argues that the New Deal, so long gloried by the Left as a social
democratic golden age, was formative of, and in fact complicit in, a new and
insidious regime of racial rule.
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Future research should turn to at least three potential lines of inquiry.

First, this chapter views the political projects of the Democratic Party in
part as racial projects. Students should explore other such projects to better
understand the interface between political parties and racial ideologies. In a
related vein, theories of colorblind racism have rightly focused our attention
on the dynamics of racial hegemony in liberal democracies. As a result,
however, we have become less attentive to the dynamics of both racial
hegemony in regimes of overt racial coercion and racial coercion in liberal
democracies. How, for example, did the Nazi Party acquire German consent
to rule even as they coerced and dominated those deemed to be racial
others? Conversely, how and to what extent do political parties in liberal
democracies use coercion to complement their more discursive racial
projects? This points to the need for a third endeavor, namely more crossnational comparative work on the partyrace interface. These and other
challenges comprise the horizon of a more party-sensitive sociology of race,
which takes as its starting point the claim that parties naturalize and
denaturalize electoral coalitions in their struggle for power.
NOTES
1. The same might be said for Lake County, Indiana, which is considered a
Chicago suburb and thus part of Mr. Obamas hometown base. For this reason,
Lake County is not part of this study.
2. Mr. Obama did not appear to use the frame of naturalization, which allows
whites to explain away racial phenomena by suggesting they are natural occurrences.
He did not, for instance, suggest that residential segregation was natural because
people instinctively gravitate to their own kind (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 28).
3. All these counties are over 80 percent white. Two-thirds have median incomes
below the Indiana state average, which suggests that these are predominantly white
blue-collar counties (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Kara Cebulko, Emily Heaphy, and Eric Hirsch for
commenting on previous drafts of this chapter and to Eduardo BonillaSilva, Julian Go, and the anonymous reviewers of PPST for their invaluable
advice. I would also like to thank Louise Seamster for her logistical help
with the review process.
101
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THE TEA PARTY IN THE AGE

OF OBAMA: MAINSTREAM
CONSERVATISM OR OUT-GROUP
ANXIETY?
Matt A. Barreto, Betsy L. Cooper,
Benjamin Gonzalez, Christopher S. Parker
and Christopher Towler$
ABSTRACT
With its preference for small government and scal responsibility, the Tea
Party movement claims to be conservative. Yet, their tactics and rhetoric
belie this claim. The shrill attacks against Blacks, illegal immigrants, and
gay rights are all consistent with conservatism, but suggesting that the
president is a socialist bent on ruining the country, is beyond politics. This
chapter shows that Richard Hofstadters thesis about the paranoid
style of American politics helps characterize the Tea Partys pseudoconservatism. Through a comprehensive analysis of qualitative interviews,
content analysis and public opinion data, we nd that Tea Party
Author names are listed alphabetically, authorship is equal.
Rethinking Obama
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022011
105
106
MATT A. BARRETO ET AL.
sympathizers are not mainstream conservatives, but rather, they hold a

strong sense of out-group anxiety and a concern over the social and
demographic changes in America.
INTRODUCTION
In 2010, the Tea Party boasted major electoral wins in the U.S. House and
Senate defeating both incumbent Republican and Democratic lawmakers
alike. These results should come as no great surprise, given the widespread
support the movement enjoys. The Tea Party claims a core membership of
approximately 300,000 who have signed up to be members of at least one of
the national Tea Party groups: 1776 Tea Party, ResistNet (Patriot Action
network), Tea Party Express, Tea Party Nation, and Tea Party Patriots.
Beyond this core group are two additional constituencies. One consists of
the people who have attended at least one rally, donated, or purchased Tea
Party literature: an estimated three million people.1 Another layer consists
of Tea Party sympathizers, people who approve of the Tea Party. According
to data from a 2010 University of Washington study, 27% of the adult
population, or 63 million Americans, strongly approve of the Tea Party.2
Given this level of support, what does the Tea Party want? From at least
one account, the Tea Party believes in a reduced role for the federal
government, more scal responsibility, lower taxes, a free market, and a
commitment to states rights.3 Indeed, these are core conservative, even
libertarian, principles, very much in keeping with traditional American
political culture (see among others Rossiter, 1982; Smith, 2007). Whats
more, commitment to these values is widely considered patriotic. Yet, time
after time, supporters of the Tea Party seem to be united by something
beyond a belief in limited government. Specically, Tea Party sympathizers
appear united in their fervent disdain for President Barack Obama, and seem
to be squarely opposed to any policies that might benet minority groups.
In this chapter, we take up the question of the Tea Partys emergence and
common Tea Party attitudes in the age of Obama. We argue that the Tea
Party represents a right-wing movement distinct from mainstream conservatism, that has reacted with great anxiety to the social and demographic
changes in America over the past few decades. Through a comprehensive
review of original data, including a series of qualitative interviews with Tea
Party supporters, and extensive content analysis of ofcial Tea Party
websites, we show that Tea Party sympathizers hold strong out-group
The Tea Party in the Age of Obama
107
resentment, in particular toward gays and lesbians, Blacks, and immigrants.

We then assess quantitative survey data to determine if the ndings can be
generalized to the population of Tea Party sympathizers at large.
Contemporary observers and Tea Party events gesture toward concerns
that transcend limited government and scal conservatism. Recently, for
instance, the NAACP has charged the Tea Party with promoting racism,
and Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams has been chastised by other
Tea Party leaders for penning an overtly racist letter poking fun at the
NAACP. Their activists were a driving force behind the Arizona state
statute SB1070, which many said would result in the targeting of Latinos for
racial proling. They may be best known for their many caricatures of
President Obama, often depicting him as a primate, African witch doctor,
and modern-day Hitler, among other things. Consider, moreover, the
constant references to President Obama as a socialist. In fact, a recent study
issued by Democracy Corps reports that 90% of Tea Party supporters
believe President Obama to be a socialist; as such, they view him as the
dening and motivating threat to the country and its well-being
(Greenberg, Carville, Gerstein, Craighill, & Monninger, 2010). Perhaps the
fact that the movement harbors members of white nationalist groups helps
to explain the apparent intolerance of the movement (Burghart & Zeskind,
2010). However, beyond a perception of intolerance, we think there is
something deeper in the emergence of the Tea Party that is more in line with
studies of paranoia, conspiratorial beliefs, and out-group suspicion.
THE TEA PARTY AND PRESIDENT OBAMA

The roots of this movement can be traced to the December 2007 anniversary
of the Boston Tea Party, when Ron Paul supporters held a money bomb to
raise funds for Pauls 2008 presidential run (Vogel, 2007). Paul, while
campaigning for the Republican nomination, was not considered a mainstream Republican based on his Libertarian beliefs, and the money bomb
reected this. Organized by a 37-year-old rock promoter, the money bomb
relied on the enthusiasm and donations of online supporters, many of whom
were rst time donors. Pauls Campaign for Liberty (CFL) went on to play a
signicant role in the growth of the Tea Party, according to a recent NAACP
report, though there is little crossover in membership (Burghart & Zeskind,
2010). Paul himself has embraced the Tea Party, speaking at a number of
rallies around the country since the birth of the movement.
108
Though Pauls candidacy may have provided some of the initial impetus,
the Tea Party itself did not emerge during the 2008 campaign, rather it was
following the election of Barack Obama that the term Tea Party began to
be used to describe a political movement. The Libertarian Party of Illinois
formed the Boston Tea Party Chicago in December of 2008 to protest for
lower taxes and reduced government spending. Its founder Dave Brady later
claimed he gave Rick Santelli the idea for the Tax Day Tea Parties that
marked the real explosion of the movement onto the national political
scene.4 Santelli, a CNBC on-air editor, delivered a speech from the oor of
the Chicago stock exchange on February 19, 2009 that was largely credited
with popularizing the concept of the Tax Day Tea Parties.5 Following
Santellis broadcast, the character of the Tea Party movement shifted
toward something more organized.
Crucial in the transition of the movement from localized antitax,
antistimulus protests to something more organized and national in character
was Brenden Steinhauser and the D.C. lobby and training organization
Freedomworks. After Santellis on-air diatribe, Steinhauser wrote a 10 step
program for holding your own Tea Party and posted it to his website.
Shortly after the program was posted, Steinhausers website saw a
signicant increase in trafc (Burghart & Zeskind, 2010). Freedomworks,
founded by former Congressman Dick Armey, quickly became involved,
calling supporters across the country and asking them to organize their own
Tea Parties and announcing a nationwide tour. On February 27, 2009 the
rst ofcial Tea Party was held, organized by Freedomworks, the free
market oriented Sam Adams Alliance, and Americans for Prosperity.
Freedomworks was just one of the six national Tea Party factions that arose
in February 2009. Along with Freedomworks, ResistNet and Our Country
Deserves Better PAC had existed before Santellis speech, and three more
formed in its wake: 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Patriots, and Tea Party Nation.
The September 12, 2009 rally hosted by Freedomworks in Washington,
DC marked the rst large-scale, national rally and the emergence of the Tea
Party as a national movement.
Although Tea Party organizations have tried to portray the movement as
one made up of small donors and driven by grass-roots organizing, the truth
is much more complicated. Freedomworks receives 1520% of its funding
from corporations, according to an NPR article, while Americans for
Prosperity is nanced by David and Charles Koch, two long-time
libertarians whose opposition to nearly all Obama Administration policies
earned their ideological network the nickname the Kochtopus (Mayer,
2010). Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity have largely been
109
credited for the bulk of the public relations and logistical work behind Tea
Party protests, despite claims that these were spontaneous and organized at
the grassroots level.6
Although the Tea Party operated on the fringes of U.S. politics for much of
2009, they became a nationally recognizable movement following President
Obamas signing of the Affordable Care Act on March 30, 2010. The socalled Tea Party Patriots led protests across the country, and allegations
were made that Tea Partiers spit on members of Congress, shouted racial
epithets, and threw bricks through windows of Congress members.7 By now,
Tea Party sympathizers had perceived the increased inuence of African
Americans, Hispanics, and gays in national politics, accompanied by
signicant growth in the minority and immigrant populations (Zeskind,
2011). The health-care bill was called a socialist takeover of America on most
Tea Party websites. Indeed, following the passage of health-care reform, the
Tea Party was visibly positioned as a counter movement in American politics
and began to loudly proclaim, I want my country back.
Many years ago, the noted historian, Richard Hofstadter, made what many
of his contemporaries viewed as a hyperbolic claim. In his seminal essay, The
Paranoid Style in American Politics, he believed the far right wing to practice a
style of politics consistent with paranoia. For him, there was no other way to
explain the heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and the conspiratorial
fantasy associated with the Goldwater movement (Hofstadter, 1965). He is
careful to distinguish paranoid politics, or the paranoid style, from the clinical
version. However, he cites important similarities between political and clinical
paranoia in that both tend to be overheated, over-suspicious, overaggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression (Ibid., p. 4). The key
difference, as he sees it, is that the clinical paranoid perceives himself the
object of the conspiracy. The paranoid politico, however, perceives the
conspiracy to be directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate
affects not himself but millions of others y His sense that his political
passions are unselsh and patriotic, in fact, goes far to intensify his feeling of
righteousness and his moral indignation (Ibid., p. 4).
Hofstadter also outlined a belief system on which the paranoid style rests:
pseudo conservatism. Before we embark on Hofstadters account of the
pseudo-conservative, though, we rst identify a social-scientic path so that
we may arrive at our destination. Conceptually, we can do so through what
some have come to call paranoid social cognitions. The distrust and suspicion
that are at the root of paranoid social cognition are generated by ones
location in a social system (Roderick, 1998). Stanford social psychologist
Roderick Kramer argues that people with paranoid social cognition are
110
trying to make sense of, and cope with, threatening social environments y
these ordinary y forms of paranoid cognition can be viewed as y responses
to disturbing situations rather than manifestations of disturbed individuals
[that are paranoid in a clinical sense] (Ibid., p. 254). Part of the coping
mechanism for dealing with alien situations among individuals prone to such
psychological discomfort includes what Kramer identies as a hypervigilant
and ruminative mode of information processing that contributes y to a
variety of paranoid-like forms of social misperception and judgment (Ibid.,
pp. 254255).
Kramers work suggests that, among other factors, paranoid social
cognitions emerge from ones uncertainty about their social standing. One
of the ways that paranoid social cognition is produced, as we understand it,
is when a newcomer enters a new social environment in which the existing
group has been intact for sometime. The long-tenured members of the group
are, understandably, more secure, more certain of their status in the group.
However, amidst rapid social and demographic change, does the dominant
group question their position and standing in society?
As we touch upon below, it is not hard to imagine that members of the
dominant group are introduced to a new social order in which some perceive
their dominant position threatened. It is possible that some in the dominant
group may think themselves unjustly under siege, something that results in
whats known as poor me paranoia (Tunnels-Ambrojo & Garety, 2009).
With this type of paranoia, people believe they are innocent victim[s] while
condemning others for their persecution y where the individual maintains
high self-esteem and views the persecutor as bad as inferior (Ibid., p. 142).
Combining poor me paranoia with the framework of paranoid social
cognition permits us to transition to the belief system associated with the
paranoid style.
Returning to Hofstadter, we learn that the pseudo-conservative is a
person who is quick to use the rhetoric of conservatism, a belief system that
prizes traditions and institutions and has an appreciation for the history of
both. Yet, according to Hofstadter, the pseudo-conservative fails to behave
like a conservative in that in the name of upholding traditional American
values and institutions and defending them against more or less ctitious
dangers, consciously or unconsciously [he] aims at their abolition (Adorno,
1950). Furthermore, the pseudo-conservative believes himself to be living
in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very
likely destined for ruin (Hofstadter, 1965, Chap. 2). This state of mind
pushes him to attack a way of life and institutions he purports to revere,
pressing his representatives to insist upon a rash of Constitutional
111
amendments, including abolishing the income tax, cutting spending on

welfare, and charging with treason people who try to weaken the
government.
Hofstadter believes such a person is attempting to get a x on his position
in the rapidly changing social system in which members of this group believe
their material and/or cultural status to be in decline. Moreover, as Hofstadter
suggests, they no longer have something to which they may anchor their
American identity. Indeed, the pseudo-conservative has lost his bearings
amidst a raft of social changes, much as someone suffering from paranoid
social cognition does upon induction into a new social order be it at school,
in a neighborhood, or new job. In this environment, the pseudo-conservative
in the paranoid style is simply trying to maintain their social status.
We argue that the Tea Party bears an uncanny likeness to the extreme
right-wing groups that are its forbearers. Drawing on content analysis and
public opinion data, we show that the Tea Party movement is, in fact, full of
pseudo-conservatism, in part, marked by suspicion and resentment of outgroups. This chapter unfolds as follows. First, we briey review right-wing
extremism in American history. We then turn to the content analysis of Tea
Party websites to illustrate the point that Tea Party discourse is in fact far
beyond that which one may credibly call conservative. We then turn to
public opinion data, both qualitative and quantitative, evidence that allows
us to further test our claims that support for the Tea Party is associated with
pseudo-conservatism. We close with a discussion of the implications.
A Brief History of Right-Wing Extremism and the Tea Party

Right-wing extremism and paranoid politics are well established parts of the
American political landscape. These phenomena have their roots before the
20th century, but focusing exclusively on this period provides ample
examples of the two in action. Although right-wing extremism, by
denition, can only exist within right-wing movements, the paranoid style
that births them is a tendency that exists across the political spectrum.
Consider the Populist and Progressive movements around the turn of the
20th century. Populists were concerned with protecting agrarian economic
interests and a rural way of life from the ever-encroaching inuences of
urbanization and industrialization. In contrast, the Progressive movement
was rooted in the city and was primarily interested in protecting the urban
masses from the vicissitudes of newly industrialized life. Among other
things, Progressives were concerned with social welfare and consumer
112
protection. Both movements were undertaken with different constituencies

in mind one rural, the other urban, respectively. Although neither maps
perfectly into a contemporary left/right dichotomy, both contained strong
leftist elements. Both movements were also marked by a paranoid style of
politics. The formers paranoia was directed primarily toward immigrants;
the latters was towards Catholics (Higham, 1955; Hofstader, 1955).
The Second Ku Klux Klan, whose putative principal goal was the
preservation of traditional white Protestant morality, provides a third
example of paranoid politics that used both extra legal violence and claims
that they were enforcing law and order to achieve its ends. The nature of this
threat was wide-ranging; the KKK of the 1920s labeled Blacks, Catholic
immigrants and Jews as threats. Unlike the previous two movements, its
paranoid style went hand in hand with right wing extremism.
Although McCarthyism was more mood than movement, it was a reaction
to Americas perceived decline on the world stage and dominated policy
formation and political discussion at mid-century. It is yet another example
of paranoid politics merging with right-wing extremism. Joseph McCarthy
and his followers identied Communism as the alien presence similar to
immigrants, Catholics, Blacks, and Jews of the aforementioned periods
that would ultimately infect, corrupt, and destroy the American state. This
logic meant that those who were opposed to McCarthyism or perceived as
susceptible to communist inuence were additional targets for censure.
Robert Welch and the John Birch Society (JBS) institutionalized
McCarthyism by using a relatively small cadre of mainly wealthy business
leaders to advance their program. The JBS also eventually argued that the
conspiracy to undermine America predated the rise of Communism. The
candidacies of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace would witness the
combination of paranoid racial politics with the emerging New Right. Race,
paranoid politics, and right-wing extremism all united in these campaigns.
These latter mobilizations were, at least in part, fueled by whites anxiety
over Blacks increasing assertiveness and increasing civil rights success
during the latter stages of insurgency. These campaigns also promised to
enforce law and order, similar to the Klan of bygone years (Daniel, 1963;
Hofstadter, 1965; Lipset & Raab, 1970).
American history suggests that right-wing movements have at least ve
things in common. First, these movements typically follow on the heels of
major social and economic change that threatens to dislodge dominant
groups from positions of inuence and privilege to which they have become
accustomed. Religious Fundamentalism, second, is another important
feature of right-wing extremism. Christian fundamentalism generally centers
113
on a literal interpretation of the Bible. A product of the 20th century, many

fundamentalists support Biblical exegesis that calls for the maintenance of
the nuclear family and traditional gender roles.
This serves as the cultural touchstone of the right wing. Third, the
movements frequently construct the world in morally absolute terms.
These good-versus-evil narratives justify a crusade against the violation of
the aforementioned order and can continue despite logical inconsistencies.
Fourth, as a logical extension, many movement adherents prefer to maintain
social arrangements that support their dominance. They invoke a past during
which their economic and/or social comfort went unchallenged.8 Fifth,
conspiracies are central to right-wing extremism insofar as the displaced
group requires a target on which to pin its decline. For the Ku Klux Klan of
the 1920s, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants conspired to undermine the
morals of white Protestants; members of the John Birch Society and followers
of McCarthy feared some American elites had sold out the country for
Communism.
This summary is not intended to be exhaustive. Instead, we offer this as a
mere illustration of the most general tendencies we have observed over time.
We believe the Tea Party conforms to this framework for a few reasons.
Current conditions are ripe for a right-wing movement that employs paranoid
politics. The near collapse of the nancial system, with its attendant un- and
underemployment, along with a continued rise in immigration from Latin
American and Asia, court victories for gay rights, and the election of the
nations rst Black president all represent the rapid social change that has
often inspired such movements. The Tea Party movement is also relatively
prone to conspiratorial discourse, and much of its literature frames opponents
as folk devils (Cohen, 1972). Fundamentalism, both religious and secular,
governs the aforementioned second, third, and fourth points. It is relevant to
the Tea Party inasmuch as Tea Partiers are both against abortion and gay
marriage, two positions that support traditional family relationships (Public
Religion Research Institute, 2010). The zealousness with which the movement
attacks Obama, variously depicting him as Hitler, a socialist and communist is
evidence of a secular moral absolutism so often linked to right-wing
extremism. Repeated cries by movement leaders, such as Sarah Palin to
take back our country, as well as references to the real America in which
hardworking, patriotic Americans reside touches upon a different type of
fundamentalism. These declarations resonate most in small towns, in the
Midwest and South, which are predominantly white and, for the most part,
working class. Perhaps this can be attributed to a more social fundamentalism, one on which the prototypical American rests (Devos & Banaji, 2005).
114
The Tea Party is not the only place within contemporary American politics
where we see some of the elements of paranoid politics. The paranoid style of
politics is a mode of politics that has deep roots within American history, and
it is not uncommon for movements across the political spectrum to use one or
more of the elements we have highlighted. What is unique about the Tea Party,
however, is the extent to which it combines the aforementioned elements of
paranoid politics with those of right-wing extremism. As such, it provides a
case study par excellence of the role that paranoid politics and right wing
extremism play in a changing America.
A CHANGING AMERICA AND THE EMERGENCE

OF THE TEA PARTY
We think it likely that the election of Barack Obama, as the rst Black
president, and the change it symbolizes, represents a clear threat to the
social, economic, political, and hegemony to which supporters of the Tea
Party had become accustomed. More to the point, his ascendance to the
White House triggered anxiety, fear, and anger among those who support
the Tea Party. It is hard to argue with this assessment considering the fact
that Obamas predecessor, George Bush, exploded the decit, and it was his
watch on which TARP was hatched. Yet the Tea Party was nowhere to
be found. With this in mind, it should be uncontroversial to assert that the
election of Obama is at the root of the growth of the Tea Party. These
emotional responses, we believe, ultimately resulted in the present day
heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that
characterize the Tea Party movement.
However, it was not only conservative Republicans who expressed these
feelings, as feelings of anxiety among poor and working class whites were
quickly swept up by the Tea Party. Scholars have recently highlighted
Democrats failure to gain the political support of poor and working class
whites, and, at times, progressive politicians have even added to their
discontent. In fact, many white Democrats felt under attack when Barack
Obama suggested that bitter working class Americans cling to their guns and
religion during the 2008 Democratic primary elections (Fowler, 2008). The
lack of attention poor and working class whites received from Democrats
became central to Howard Deans 50-state strategy that attempted to garner
the support of all Americans, across many different walks of life (Martin,
2008). However, in many cases Democrats left the door open for Republicans,
115
and subsequently the Tea Party, to court poor and working class whites
despite the fact that many Republican policy stances go against poor and
working class whites economic interests. Poor and working class whites are
swayed by conservative stances on moral social policies, de-prioritizing
economic self-interest as noted by Frank (2004) and Bageant (2007). The need
for a political base alongside Democrats inability to relate to poor and
working class whites sends them elsewhere to express their anxieties.
However, it was not just the election of Obama that triggered the Tea
Party, but also the changing demographics and political debates in America
over the past 40 years. In 1970, 83% of the U.S. population was White, nonHispanic, and in 2010 63% was White a 20 percentage point decline in one
generation. Accompanying this change has been an increase in the Black,
Hispanic, and Asian populations in the United States and a vigorous debate
about civil rights and immigration. At the same time, strides have been made
in rights for gays and lesbians from the election of Harvey Milk in 1977
through the repeal of Dont Ask, Dont Tell in 2010. Across all these groups
Blacks, immigrants, and gays the Tea Party has seemingly taken an
oppositional stance to the expansion of rights and projects to aid minorities.
Racial Resentment
For many, the election of the Nations rst African American President is
evidence of the end of racism in America. Yet, the emergence of the Tea
Party in the months following the inauguration of Barack Obama, and the
propensity of racially charged antics exposed at many of the groups events
and rallies, warrants a closer look at the immediacy of racism in America
today. As research has shown, racism and racial resentment play an
important role in determining not only support for Obama, but also support
for Black candidates in general (Kinder & Sears, 1981; Parker, Sawyer, &
Towler, 2009; Tesler & Sears, 2010). The inuence of modern day racism is
most known for its place in opposition toward afrmative action and other
race-conscious programs (Bobo, 2000; Kluegel & Bobo, 1993; Feldman &
Huddy, 2005; Sidanius, Levin, Liu, & Pratto, 2000). The racism that
commonly guides contemporary white attitudes has been coined racial
resentment and relies upon anti-Black affect, or a pre-existing negative
attitude toward blacks (Feldman & Huddy, 2005, p. 169). In other words,
racial resentment is fueled by the gains and growing demands of Black
Americans (Kinder & Sanders, 1996), a new level of fuel with the rst
African American commander-in-chief.
116
Old-fashioned racism, based on biological differences between Blacks and

whites, is no longer acceptable in society today and a new, subtler, racism
works to predict attitudes and behaviors (Parker et al., 2009; Sears & Henry,
2003). This new form of racism relies on stereotypes surrounding African
Americans; stereotypes that put Blacks in opposition to treasured American
values such as hard work, honesty and lawfulness (Kinder & Sanders, 1996;
McConahay, 1982; Sears, 1993). In addition, ascribing these stereotypes to
Blacks allows for whites to continue justifying their privileged position in
society (Bobo & Kluegel, 1997). The centrality of American values in racial
resentment links the language of American individualism to expressions
of prejudice (Feldman & Huddy, 2005, p. 169). The attributes (or stereotypes)
assigned to Blacks laziness, preference for welfare, predisposition to crime
place them in opposition to the values American society rests on, isolating and
alienating Blacks from the ideals that go hand-in-hand with being a good
citizen in America.
The timing behind the emergence of the Tea Party in American politics
begs for a further examination of a group that is determined to take back
their country and ght against a government absorbed by socialism. The
Tea Party movements emphasis on American values and individualism
places many of their policy stances and positions in opposition to minority
policies, such as an increase in social programs, including spending for the
poor and health-care reform. Also, the rhetoric of the Tea Party places its
members in opposition to minority groups in America as well as the new
leadership of the country.
The Tea Partys focus on individualism and American values alone are
not enough to validate claims of racial resentment. In addition, accusations
of racism within the Tea Party have existed since its beginning. A 2010
report by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights
(IREHR) chronicles the involvement of white supremacy groups in the Tea
Party since the movements rst events on April 15, 2009 and, if nothing
more, speaks to the Tea Partys availability as a vehicle for white
supremacist recruitment and thought. Other watchdog agencies, such as
teapartytracker.org, have made it a point to highlight acts of racism and
extremism within the Tea Party and at their rallies and events. Beyond
the consistent chronicling of individual acts of racism and bigotry, much of
the resentment in the Tea Party boiled over at the height of the health-care
debate. As congressmen and women came together to vote on the proposed
health-care bill in March 2010, racial epithets were launched at Rep. John
Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia, and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat
117
from Missouri, was spit on while trying to make it through the crowd at
Capitol Hill (Douglass, 2010).
These instances, among others, led to the denunciation of racism and
bigotry in the Tea Party movement on a national stage. Namely, in July of
2010 the NAACP unanimously passed a resolution to condemn extremist
elements within the Tea Party, which asked the movements leaders to
repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language (NAACP, 2010).
Although making it clear that the NAACP was not condemning the entire
Tea Party as racist, the following reaction from one of the movements
prominent leaders brought racial resentment to the forefront. Mark
Williams, a leader of the Tea Party at the time, released a satirical
commentary in response to the NAACP resolution. The response was a
letter to President Lincoln from colored people and insinuated not only
ignorance on the part of Blacks in America, but also reinforced many of the
stereotypes central to racial resentment. The opening statement of the
response is a blatant attack on African Americans:
We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we dont cotton to that whole
emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and
take consequences along with the rewards.
Williams commentary continues to challenge the work ethic of Blacks

and characterize African Americans as lazy and unwilling to compete in an
American society centered on individual accomplishment:
The racist tea parties also demand that the government stop the out of control
spending. Again, they directly target Colored People. That means we Colored People
would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.
The nal passage of Mark Williams response renders African Americans

subordinate and inferior as he writes that Blacks had a great gig during
slavery when they were afforded Three squares, room and board, all [their]
decisions made by the massa in the house.9 To be fair, the response by Mark
Williams cannot be used as a generalizable measure of the sentiments of the
Tea Party in the wake of the NAACP resolution, especially when considering
the racially charged past of the leader himself; however, a better measure is the
lack of immediate response from the Tea Party leadership across the nation.
Even as Mark Williams Tea Party organization was expelled from the larger
organization, there was little mention of his racist remarks in the process
and other Tea Party leaders still denied allegations of racism in their ranks,
let alone their followers (Burghart & Zeskind, 2010, pp. 6566).
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Although the evidence consistently nds the Tea Party rampant with
racial resentment and extremism, the movements members argue that they
are following their conservative principles centered on small government
and limited spending-stances that do not favor minorities or people of color
by their political nature. This position, though, is not new as ideological
conservatism is habitually argued to avoid accusations of racism (Glazer,
1975; Jacoby, 1994; Sowell, 1984).
Scholars have worked hard to separate the inuence of conservative
principles from racial resentment. Whites disapproval for afrmative action
and social welfare programs has been justied through a violation of norms
central to conservative principles, such as hard work and self-relaince.
The group dominance approach stands in opposition to principled conservatism, explaining that groups will use ideology and political symbols to
legitimize each groups claims over resources (Sidanius, Pratto, & Bobo,
1996). Furthermore, scholars have shown that racism not only works in
conjunction with the individual values associated with principled conservatism Sears and Mendelberg (2000) tell us that individualism becomes part
of racism but racism goes beyond conservative individualism to predict
negative attitudes toward race-conscious policy and politicians of color
(Feldman & Huddy, 2005; Sidanius et al., 1996; Tesler & Sears, 2010). When
specically examining negative attitudes toward President Obama, racism
plays a major role regardless of ideological preference (Parker et al., 2009).
The recent emergence of the Tea Party allows for a closer examination of the
racial attitudes held by this unique group of Americans emphasizing the
principles of individualism over all else.
Anti-Immigrant Attitudes
The passage of Arizonas SB1070 marked the return of immigration to center
stage in American politics after a brief period out of the limelight. The law,
which will allow for the racial proling of Latinos based on the suspicion that
they could be undocumented immigrants, was defended by Arizona Governor
Jan Brewer by charging that the federal government was not doing its job to
control undocumented immigration and that the state had the right to take
steps to do so. This argument was strongly backed by states rights advocates
and a large proportion of the Tea Party Movement, the latter of which
made immigration restriction one of its central issues in the 2010 election.
Statements about immigration from Tea Party politicians and movement
leaders largely portrayed immigration as a threat to Americans or American
119
culture. One glaring example of this is Sharon Angles 2010 campaign ad

Best Friend, which features a voice-over that ominously states, Illegals
sneaking across our borders putting Americans jobs and safety at risk, while
showing video of dark-skinned actors sneaking around a chain link fence.10
Angle was a darling of the Tea Party movement in Nevada and attacked
Harry Reid on immigration in both the Best Friend ad, as well as a second
ad called At Your Expense that charged that Reid supported special college
tuition rates for undocumented immigrants, which would be paid for by
Nevada taxpayers.11 Both ads juxtaposed the dark-skinned actors portraying
illegal immigrants with white Americans working or with their families on the
same screen. The implicit racism in Angles ad was reminiscent of the now
notorious White Hands ad of Jesse Helms and the Willie Horton
campaign ad run by George W. Bush in 1988.
Sharon Angle was not the only Tea Party candidate who tried to use the
threat of Latino immigration to capture votes in the 2010 election. In Arizona,
J. D. Hayworth, John McCains Republican primary challenger made
immigration one of the central planks of his campaign. Unsurprisingly,
Hayworth authored a book on the subject of undocumented immigration in
2005 called Whatever It Takes, in which he argued in favor of increased
immigration enforcement and notes that while immigration is clearly good for
the country, the proportion of immigrants coming from Mexico is too high
because it could lead to American becoming a bicultural nation. In
Hayworths own words, Bicultural societies are among the least stable in
the world (Tomasic, 2010). Hayworth is a strong supporter of Arizonas
SB1070 but believes, that even more steps must be taken against
undocumented immigrants, stating at a 2010 rally in Mesa, Arizona, that,
There is a whole new term: birth tourism. In the jet age there are people who
time their gestation period so they give birth on American soil.12 To prevent
this, Hayworth argued that the state of Arizona should stop birthright
citizenship, a view echoed by Russell Pearce, a state senator from Arizona and
the architect of SB1070.
Tea Party organizations also sought to portray immigration as a threat to
America in the lead up to the 2010 general election. The Tea Party Nation
emailed its roughly 35,000 members in August and asked them to post
stories highlighting the victimization of Americans by illegal immigrants.
The group specically asked for stories about undocumented immigrants
taking the jobs of members, committing crimes, or undermining business
by providing cheap labor to competitors.13 The Americans for Legal
Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) assisted two Tea Party groups, Voice of the
People USA and Tea Party Patriots Live, in coordinating rallies in support
120
of Arizonas SB1070. The ALIPAC mission statement points out that, Our
state and federal budgets are being overwhelmed. Schools, hospitals, law
enforcement, and public services are being strained while the taxpayers incur
more costs and more debt. Our nations very survival and identity are being
threatened along with our national security.14 ALIPAC is supported by the
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group designated
a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of its links to
white supremacist organizations.
The Tea Party, while disavowing that its anti-immigrant rhetoric was
based on racism, has continued to portray immigration in starkly
threatening terms, which while not explicitly racist has strong undercurrents
of implicit racism, with Sharon Angles campaign videos being the most
obvious example of this. A New York Times/CBS News poll released in
August of 2010 unsurprisingly found that 82% of self-identied Tea Party
supporters believed illegal immigration was a serious problem.15
Perceived threats from immigrant groups have been shown to be a powerful
predictor for immigration restriction and anti-immigrant attitudes in the
sociology, psychology, and political science literatures.
Group position theory, pioneered by the sociologist Herbert Blumer,
argues that prejudice is composed of four feelings: a sense of superiority, a
feeling that the subordinate group is in some way intrinsically different or
alien, a feeling of entitlement to certain privileges or advantages, and nally
a suspicion that the subordinate group poses a threat to these privileges or
advantages (Blumer, 1958). Perceived threat is necessary for prejudice with
Blumer stating that the feeling essential to race prejudice is a fear or
apprehension that the subordinate racial group is threatening, or will
threaten, the position of the dominant group (Ibid., p. 4). Blumer never
stated that the threat had to be a realistic one, and thus a subordinate group
could be perceived as a threat even if there was no real evidence that they
truly were one. A body of literature on group threat theory grew out of the
work by Blumer but emphasized the role of threat over the other aspects of
group position theory. Both Hubert Blalock and Lawrence Bobo extended
Blumers original concept of the role of threats to group position, with
Blalock explaining competition between minority groups through group
threat and Bobo arguing that realistic threats are the best predictors of
opposition to policies beneting minorities (Blalock, 1957; Bobo, 1983,
1988; Bobo & Hutchings, 1996).
There is a good deal of support for group threat theory. For example,
Zarate, Garcia, Garza, & Hitlan (2004) found that people reported more
prejudice when they were induced to identify differences between their group
121
and Mexican immigrants on interpersonal traits. When immigrants were

seen as differing from the norm they were believed to pose a threat to the
social fabric of the country and were subsequently evaluated in a more
negative fashion (Zarate et al., 2004). Sniderman, Hagendoorn, and Prior
(2004) similarly found that perceived threats to the national culture was the
strongest predictor of hostility toward immigrants in the Netherlands, as
well as support for the role of economic threat perceptions. This latter
nding was supported by Espenshade and Hempstead (1996), who found
that those who believed that the U.S. economy was worsening had more
negative attitudes toward immigrants. Examining both realistic and
symbolic threats, Stephan, Stephan, and Gudykunst (1999) found evidence
for the role of both threat types in prejudice against immigrants. Symbolic
threats were conceptualized as threats to national culture or values, whereas
realistic threats, drawing on the work of Lawrence Bobo (1983, 1988), were
threats to the economic, social, or political resources of whites.
Thomas Wilson provides further evidence conrming the impact of group
threat on immigration attitudes in his 2001 study on American views toward
immigration policy. He notes that, native-born Americans opposition to
policies beneting immigrants is based in large part on their perceptions that
immigrants pose a direct threat to their interest y (Wilson, 2001).
Interviews with Tea Party supporters suggested these attitudes were real.
When asked how immigrants made them feel, one respondent said,
I dont know really, but maybe nervous. I see what they have done. Here
they come, they have no insurance. They are draining state governments.
We have to provide for them because they are here. Other respondents
conated illegal immigrants, immigrants, and Hispanics while explaining
their cultural deciencies, Nevada has grown to be heavily Hispanic in
the last 15 years. And Good Lord, education reects that. You know, the
education standards they are just plummeting because yeah, I mean, the
Hispanic children everybody needs to be educated, but if they werent
here illegally, our kids would be in better shape. Its wrong for the American
people. Still others suggested an actual criminal threat from immigrants,
saying They make me nervous. I have relatives down in Tucson; one is a
law enforcement ofcer. You never know if they are going to get killed.
Homophobia and the Tea Party

Many supporters have denied that social issues, including rights for gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people (LGBT), have played a large
122
role in the Tea Party movement. The movement, they claim, is fundamentally built on principled conservatism, limited government, and lower
taxes. Others have claimed that gay men and lesbians should ock to the
Tea Party because its libertarianism will result in greater political freedom
for GLBT people. The campaign websites of two major 2010 Tea Party
candidates, Rand Paul and Christine ODonnell, do not mention lesbian or
gay issues at all, while Sharron Angle, mentions opposition to same-sex
marriage only in passing.
Despite the limited mention of sexuality on the front pages of the Tea
Party movement, subsequent campaigning frequently took on antigay tones
in these three major campaigns. In addition to opposing same-sex marriage,
Angle took stands against adoption by lesbians and gay men as well as
extending antidiscrimination laws to cover sexual orientation and gender
expression.16 She also declared in a candidate questionnaire that she would
not take campaign money from any group that supported homosexuality.17
Previous comments about gays and lesbians were some of the many
soundclips that plagued ODonnell during election season. She had claimed
that being gay was an identity disorder and also worked with ex-gay
ministries, which claim to change sexual orientation, and with the Concerned
Women for America, which espouses very conservative views regarding
sexuality.18 In stating his disapproval of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the
Americans with Disabilities Act, Rand Paul signaled that he would
disapprove of similar proposed legislation, including the Employment NonDiscrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit workplace discrimination against lesbians and gay men.
Libertarianism and these antigay, socially conservative impulses create
tension in the Tea Party, and this is evident both in the above examples from
campaign websites and Tea Party message boards. The tension further
reveals itself in qualitative interviews with Tea Party supporters, who
frequently claim nominal tolerance of gay men or lesbians while
categorically dening them as nonnormative and beyond the pale of full
inclusion in the U.S. polity. A Tea Party supporter from our 2010 MSSRP
study best encapsulates this tension. I think theyve got a right to exist, he
explains, but I dont particularly want them around me.
These tensions between libertarianism, and grudging acceptance on the
one hand and social conservatism and condemnation on the other
illustrate a site of contestation within the Tea Party Movement. Who is
a real American? From whom are they taking back the country? Who
are the folk devils? Are lesbians and gay men a part of real America,
or not?
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We believe that racial resentment provides a framework for understanding this ambivalent position regarding GLBT people. Several factors
lead us to believe that this comparison is valid (Feldman & Huddy, 2005;
Kinder & Sanders, 1996; Morrison, Parriag, & Morrison, 1999; Morrison &
Morrison, 2002). Key facets of racial resentment appear when discussants
talk about nonracial groups, specically gender and the role of gender
discrimination and afrmative action programs for women (Swim, Aikin,
Hall, & Hunter, 1995). Questions of whether or not gay Americans believe in
and live by the American Creed, e.g. a belief in hard work, self-reliance, and
individualism, are key elements of the debate over the role of gay men and
lesbians; place in public life. It would not be surprising for people who hold
racially resentful attitudes to transfer those attitudes onto other emergent
minority groups, as they have with gender.
Overall, qualitative interviews seem to conrm that many Tea Party
members antigay attitudes can be classied as more resentful than old
fashioned, or traditional heteronormative (Massey, 2009; Morrison,
Parriag, & Morrison, 1999; Morrison & Morrison, 2002). These Tea Party
supporters protest gay men and lesbians inability or unwillingness to adopt
community norms by aunting their sexuality publically. They tend to not
express antigay sentiment violently, and few claim to want to arrest or
physically harm members of the GLBT community. Some do express antigay
sentiments in terms of old fashioned heterosexism and the language of sin,
such as the North Carolina respondent who said:
I just pity them y because I know where they are going at the end of time.
Just as most white Americans express racist views in terms of racial

resentment, many antigay views will be expressed in more subtle ways that
clearly mark gay men and lesbians subordinate role in American public life.
Respondents voice this subtler, resentful homophobia, which has
parallels to racial resentment, by expressing tolerance toward gay men and
lesbians so long as they are secondary citizens. Few will deny the right of queer
people to exist in the abstract, and many, will oppose policies that actively
seek out gay men and lesbians for punishment, such as military policies prior
to Dont Ask; Dont Tell by using the logic of limited government. This does
not mean that respondents view lesbians and gay men as equal members of the
polity. Indeed, the logic of Dont Ask, Dont Tell appears to guide many
members beliefs of the normative role for lesbians and gay men in American
life. The ideal gay or lesbian citizen is one who never aunts her sexuality.
Practically speaking, this is difcult to for any individual gay man or lesbian
to attain because the respondents expansively dene sexuality. Many
124
actions whose sexuality is erased for heterosexuals are dened as explicitly

sexual for homosexuals. These can include holding hands with a partner,
discussing a relationship, otherwise visibly embodying gender difference.
Membership in political movements and groups that protest for gay rights
also have the potential to end nominal Tea Party support for lesbians and gay
men. By both denying that systemic discrimination against sexual minorities
exists (Massey, 2009) and by claiming any governmental remedy for
discrimination is reverse discrimination or special rights (Dugan, 2005),
this rhetoric denies political action to gay men and lesbians.
Ultimately, the rhetoric of Tea Party members follows this logic,
dichtomizing gay men and lesbians. A good, or respectable, gay man
believes in the American Creed and avoids the identity politics of the
mainstream gay rights movement. His demeanor is assimilated to heterosexual norms, and he does not challenge anyones right to disagree with his
lifestyle. On the contrary, a bad, or unacceptable, lesbian is one who has
politicized her sexual orientation, either by challenging the right to disagree
or by pushing for legislation such as DADT or ENDA. She may also reject
heteronormativity and dress in a way that dees gendered norms or is
amboyant. A respondent from California best sums up this distinction I
have it in my family; and as individuals, I feel positive. As a group, I feel
negative, because I think that when your child is being taught by a teacher y
youre going to be very unhappy when theyre teaching a ve-year-old child
how to be a good little lesbian or homosexual. Likewise, a respondent from
Nevada distinguished between not caring what they [gay men and lesbians]
do amongst themselves and being negative if they try to push marriage.
This characterization is not unique to sexual minorities. Similar shifts in
public opinion have been observed either between favorability of Black
Americans in general compared to Black nationalists on the ANES (Black and
Black, 1989).
Some Preliminary Findings from a 2010 Pilot Study

Despite such similarities with right-wing extremism, some who are
sympathetic to the Tea Party think its squarely in the mainstream (Williams,
2010) or insist that the Tea Party is simply more conservative.19 We gathered
evidence to determine if this is true.
The data in the ensuing analysis were from the Multi-State Survey of
Race and Politics (MSSRP) research project, a nonpartisan academic
project conducted by the Center for Survey Research at the University of
125
Washington. The 2010 MSSRP survey is drawn from a probability sample

of 1,006 cases, stratied by state. The MSSRP included seven states, six of
which were battleground states in 2008. It includes Georgia, Michigan,
Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio as the battleground states.
For its diversity and its status as an uncontested state, California was also
included for comparative purposes. In addition, follow-up phone interviews
were conducted for a number of the respondents who participated in the
2010 MSSRP survey. The qualitative interviews were randomly drawn from
respondents who participated in the 2010 MSSRP, and were stratied by the
same states in the original survey. The survey conducted open-ended followup interviews with 35 respondents, asking them to expand on their attitudes
toward the Nation and different groups in America.20
To get a sense of Tea Party dialogue, we examine content from over thirty
major Tea Party websites. The data for the analysis on Tea Party websites
was collected from ve states identied as top tea party venues by a
Rasmussen Reports (2010) as well as from six more battle ground states that
match our individual level survey data. In total, 1,079 articles and postings
from 31 ofcial Tea Party websites were examined, dating back no further
than 2009. Only ofcial Tea Party websites that represent a particular state
in its entirety, such as the Colorado Tea Party, or websites from a major city
or region of the state, were included in our analysis. The content from these
websites was randomly sampled in order to accurately represent all of the
content within the website over time. Websites and blogs that did not
represent the state, major city or region within the state, blogs that did not
have ofcial domain names, and the comments on blog posts and articles
were not part of the analysis. By limiting our examination to these ofcial
Tea Party-sanctioned websites, we are focusing on a section of the elite
dialogue taking place online between the communication leaders within
the tea party. If anything, our results present a conservative estimate of
the online content circulated and discussed by Tea Party supporters, as we
are not analyzing the comments by members of the websites, but only the
ofcial blog posts.
In addition, content from the National Review Online, a major conservative commentary, is compared to content from the Tea Party websites. If
the Tea Party is a reection of mainstream conservatism, the content from
their online websites should be similar to the content from the National
Review Online. The content for the National Review online consisted of
754 articles from the online website that were sampled by examining
every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday throughout 2009 to achieve a
representative sample of the entire year. Content was coded by identifying
126
the main topic of each blog post or news story for the ofcial Tea Party
websites or the NRO. Thus, there are a total of 1,079 coded posts for the
Tea Party and 754 coded posts for the NRO, and each post is categorized
for its main theme or topic. Finally, content from the Glenn Beck show, a
less traditional conservative talk show is also compared to the Tea Party
websites. The Glenn Beck show content was examined by analyzing
transcripts from 844 segments on 170 different shows randomly selected
throughout 2009 and 2010. The content analysis had a nal intercoder
reliability of 0.84.
Throughout 2010, we tracked entries on ofcial Tea Party websites, and
systematically coded the content of each. As a point of comparison, we also
coded entries from the National Review, considered by many the gold
standard of conservative intellectual thought in America (Smith, 2007,
Chap. 5). If the Tea Party was truly a conservative movement, we should see
the content of the Tea Party websites mirror that of the National Review. If,
as we suspected, that the Tea Party is more about pseudo-conservatism than
conservatism, we should see content centering upon conspiratorial discourse
of some kind. Table 1 contains the results.
If the Tea Party movement were really about conservatism, i.e., particularly
concerned with the size of government the content of its websites would
mirror that of the National Review. This failed to materialize. For instance,
the National Reviews content focused primarily on core conservative issues:
the size of government and national security. Indeed, these issues constitute
more than 75% of the content on the National Review Online. Only 15% of
its content centered upon conspiracy theories, attacks on Obama, or attacks
on gays, lesbians, or immigrants.
Table 1.
Content Analysis of Competing Conservative Voices in 2010.
Primary Topic of Content
Race/immigration/GLBT
Personal attacks on Obama
Conspiracy/socialism
Take our country back
Complaints about media bias
Govt too big/states rights
Foreign policy/homeland security
Nontopical/not categorized
Total N (total pieces coded)
Tea Party
Websites (%)
National Review
Online (%)
Glenn Beck
Show (%)
10
8
23
10
15
14
18
2
8
2
6
2
2
39
38
3
6
8
19
11
4
23
20
9
1,079
754
844
127
If their ofcial websites are any indication, the Tea Partys priorities are
quite a bit different. Only 32% of the content found on their websites
confronts core conservative issues of government spending, states rights,
and foreign policy. Rather, over 50% is devoted to conspiracies, attacks on
the president, gay men and lesbians, and immigrants, and calls to take our
country back. Perhaps most important, almost one-in-four of the issues
addressed on their websites entertains conspiracies that the president is a
communist, socialist, or the that the policies sought by the government
Obama leads will ultimately result in the demise of America.
What we have presented so far validates our claim that the Tea Party at
least many of its elites is brimming with right-wing extremists insofar as a
good portion of its discourse skews away from traditional conservatism, and
toward conspiracies and the derogation of perceived others. In addition
to collecting more than a years worth of content analysis in 2010, we also
analyzed mass opinion.
First, we wish to show that people in the mass public who sympathize
with the Tea Party (true believers) differ in their attitudes and behavior from
the public at-large. Second, we wish to control for competing explanations
of why Tea Party sympathizers retain the intolerant attitudes they so often
display, including conservatism.21 The data from 2010 are important
because they provide one of the earliest comprehensive views of Tea Party
supporters and opponents, and establish a baseline of attitudes to which
scholars can compare into the future.
Our preliminary analysis suggests that Whites who support the Tea Party
are statistically more likely to hold negative attitudes toward Blacks, toward
immigrants, gays, and relatively more likely to violate due process for persons
the authorities deem suspicious. Further, we nd that Tea Party sympathizers
are much less supportive of civil rights and liberties, and instead favor
surveillance, proling, and detention of suspicious persons. Not surprisingly, they are also more likely to be politically aware and politically active.
Even after accounting for ideology, partisanship, authoritarianism, and
ethnocentrism, in a variety of regression models, the results hold.
We begin with racial attitudes. In measuring racial attitudes toward Blacks,
we nd a statistically signicant increase in anti-Black attitudes among Tea
Party supporters. Even after controlling for well-known covariates and
competing theories such as ideology, authoritarianism, and ethnocentrism,22
we nd moving from low to high approval of the Tea Party, on its own,
produces a large increase in anti-Black animus (see appendix for full
regression table). That is, racially conservative view points among Whites
result not just from ideology or ethnocentric world views (which have their
128
own statistically signicant effect), but rather the additional independent

contribution of Tea Party mentality. Again, we want to be clear: beyond
ideology, ethnocentrism, or authoritarianism, supporting the Tea Party leads
Whites to increase animosity toward Blacks. In the example in Fig. 1, we
demonstrate that Tea Party supporters are considerably more likely to believe
Blacks need to try harder in order to gain equality with Whites.
Likewise, we nd a very similar result for attitudes toward immigrants.
Although an estimated 44% of Tea Party opponents believe immigrants
take jobs from Americans, a much higher 88% of Tea Party supporters are
estimated to agree that immigrants are taking jobs away. In our full
analysis, we nd that this rate of anti-immigrant attitudes is surpassed only
by the most strident White ethnocentrists. The same trends hold for other
immigration variables such as the belief that state and local agencies should
be enforcing immigration laws and checking immigration status, where we
nd Tea Party approvers are signicantly more likely to hold strict antiimmigrant positions after accounting for ideology. This should come as no
surprise as the Tea Party has mobilized thousands of supporters in the state
of Arizona to promote and defend the controversial SB1070, which required
police to check illegal immigrant status of any suspicious offender, and went
further in supporting a second bill in Arizona that banned the teaching of
Latino ethnic-studies or history in public schools, and prevented people with
Spanish accents from teaching public school.
Another potential out-group in America today consists of gays and
lesbians. Despite their reported small government and states rights claims,
we wondered if Tea Party supporters would favor government limits into the
lives of gays and lesbians. Across a variety of topic areas, we nd true
believers of the Tea Party are statistically less likely to support equality for
gays and lesbians in terms of marriage, military service, adoption, and more.
Even after controlling for items such as ideology, religiosity, and moral
traditionalism there is an additional and sizable effect for Tea Party support
and antigay attitudes. Although 55% of all Whites support gay adoption,
only 36% of Tea Partiers do.
Finally, we asked respondents a battery of questions that tap their views
on civil liberties, including whether or not its appropriate for the
government to detain people without a trial, something prohibited by the
U.S. Constitution. However, during current war on terrorism, Tea Party
supporters are statistically less likely to support these liberties, including the
right to a trial as reported in Fig. 1 below. Although the 6th amendment
states the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial almost
40% of Tea Party supporters strongly agree that the government should be

Public Support for Tea Party and Out-Group Attitudes. Source: 2010 Multistate Survey on Race and Politics Pilot
Study.
129
Fig. 1.
130
able to detain terror suspects as long as they wish without putting them on
trial. Although just 7% of those who disapprove of the Tea Party agree with
suspending trials, 39.5% of Tea Party supporters agree with unlimited
detentions. On other civil liberties topics such as proling, phone taps, and
police searches, our pilot study nds Tea Party supporters are consistently
willing to give the federal government more authority to intervene in
peoples lives.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Over the past few decades America has experienced many social, demographic, and political changes. In particular, the minority and immigrant
population has grown dramatically, and this has culminated in the election of
many prominent African American, Latino, and Asian American candidates
to ofce. At the same time, minority groups have continued to promote equal
rights, especially civil rights, for a range of groups including racial/ethnic
minorities, but also women, gays and lesbians. To an extent, the shock of
these social changes to the dominant in-group was absorbed by the previous
eight years of the Republican presidency of George W. Bush. Even as society
and demographics changed, calling into question the perceived social order of
yesteryear, political control of the country rested in the hands of a Republican
administration. In 2008 everything changed, with the election of Barack
Obama as the rst African American president in Americas history.
Although this alone was not the sole inspiration of the Tea Party movement,
the election of Obama provided an opening for his staunchest critics to reach
out to those disaffected by the social change in America, and to perhaps
question, what happened to my country? Not only did the social and
demographic landscape of America look different in 2008 than it did a
generation before, but so too did the President of the United States.
In this chapter, we set out to assess the extent to which Richard
Hofstadters pseudo-conservative framework t with the Tea Party.
Ultimately, we observed a fairly snug t. The Tea Party, as the contemporary
representation of the extreme right, is pretty consistent with its predecessors,
sharing with them the major tenets of right-wing extremism. All share an
aversion to social change, and tend to transform the manifestly political into a
crusade of good versus evil, often White heterosexual versus other. These
groups also share a preference for maintaining the status quo, and tend to
subscribe to conspiratorial thinking, demonizing their enemies. Though
many pundits describe the Tea Party as the conservative wing of the
131
Republican Party, we nd that conservatism alone is not driving the Tea

Party. At a much deeper level, Tea Party sympathizers are concerned with the
distribution of goods and rights in a changing America. Although spending
on Social Security is something that must be protected at all costs, spending
on public education, English as a second language, or health care for all must
be avoided at all costs.
With the analyses, insofar as its possible to do so, we sought to explore
the contours of pseudo-conservatism. If, as many sympathetic to the Tea
Party claim, they are really simply die-hard conservatives, and not
extremists, this should have evident in the content analysis. Yet, as we
make plain, the discourse taking place on the Tea Party websites, in their
ofcial posts, are at sharp variance with the principal organ of conservative
thought, the National Review. Further, our in-depth interviews with Tea
Party sympathizers suggest a connection to the rhetoric used online. Those
who strongly supported the Tea Party avoided any explicit racist language,
but clearly stated a general disdain for minority groups and questioned
whether groups like immigrants or gays should have equal opportunity in
America. Taken a step further, our quantitative analysis of a large public
opinion survey nds very clearly that Tea Party supporters hold statistically
distinct attitudes toward minority groups. After parsing out the effects of
ideology, partisanship, and authoritarianism, we nd a lasting effect for Tea
Party support, in which support for the Tea Party is statistically associated
with negative attitudes towards Blacks, immigrants, and gays and lesbians.
Our hypothesis that the support for the Tea Party is commensurate with
pseudo-conservatism received support from the models we estimated.
Specically, we reasoned that if support for the Tea Party continued to
predict attitudes and behavior, after accounting for conservatism, it is a
good bet that the Tea Party and pseudo-conservatism are related. This is
exactly what we found.
NOTES
1. Data compiled by Devin Burghart, Institute for Research on Education &
Human Rights.
2. 2010 Multi-State Survey on Race and Politics (MSSRP).
3. http://www.teapartypatriots.org/mission.aspx;
4. http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/04/libertarian-party-of-illinoiswe-gave-rick-santelli-the-idea-for-the-tax-day-tea-parties/
5. http://www.lp.org/news/press-releases/libertarians-cordially-invite-you-to-atea-party
132
6. http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/09/lobbyists-planning-teaparties/
7. http://www.hufngtonpost.com/2010/03/20/tea-party-protests-nier-f_n_507
116.html
8. Daniel (1963), Lipset & Raab, Hofstader (1955). For an alternative interpretation of the McCarthy phenomena as it pertains to classical right-wing
movements, see Rogin (1967).
9. Entire transcript of Williams response can be found at http://gawker.com/
5588556/the-embarrassing-racist-satire-of-tea-party-leader-mark-williams?utm_sour
ce feedburner&utm_medium feed&utm_campaign Feed%3A gawker%2Ffu
ll %28Gawker%29
10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v tb-zZM9-vB0&feature channel
11. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v uJC_RmcO7Ts&feature channel
12. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/jd-hayworth-arizona-immigrat
ion-anger
13. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/03/tea-party-seeks-stories-horrorsillegal-immigration/
14. http://www.alipac.us/content-16.html
15. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/us/20immig.html?_r 1
16. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/05/politics/main6748062.shtml
17. http://www.hufngtonpost.com/2010/08/05/sharron-angle-make-gay-ad_n_67
2549.html
18. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-16/christine-odonne
lls-gay-former-aide-speaks-out/
19. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/04/25/tea_partiers_racist_not_
so_fast_105309.html
20. On average, the 2010 MSSRP took 45 min to complete and the survey had a 51%
cooperation rate (COOP4). The study has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1% and
was in the eld February 8March 15, 2010. The MSSRP qualitative follow-up survey
was in the eld August 1530, 2010, with an average interview time of 25 min.
21. In FebruaryMarch 2010, we elded an original public opinion survey called
the MSSRP to examine what Americans thought about issues of race, public policy,
national politics, and President Obama, exactly one year after the inauguration of
the rst African American president. The survey was drawn from a probability
sample of 60,000 household records, stratied by state and resulted in 1,006
completed interviews. The completed sample included 505 White non-Hispanics, 312
African Americans, 99 Latinos, and 90 of other race. Throughout this chapter, we
focus especially on the attitudes of Whites. Our study included seven states, six of
which were politically competitive states in 2008, including Georgia, Michigan,
Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio. For its diversity and its status as an
uncontested state, California was also included for comparative purposes. The study,
using live telephone callers, averaged about 40 min in length and was in the eld
February 8March 15, 2010. Overall, AAPOR cooperation rate, 4 was 47.3, the
margin of error is plus or minus 3.1% for the full sample, and plus or minus 4.4%
when examining the White and non-White samples independently.
22. The full regression model includes: Tea Party approval, age, education, income,
gender, partisanship, ideology, federal government thermometer, religiosity, authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, and state and region controls and are found in the appendix.
133
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank Eduardo Bonilla-Silva for his thoughtful review
and suggestions. We also received helpful feedback from Devin Burghart,
Luis Fraga, Mark Sawyer, Loren Collingwood, and Marcela GarciaCastanon. Research for this chapter was supported by the Washington
Institute for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (WISER), and the University
of Washington Research Royalty Fund.
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APPENDIX: MULTIVARIATE ORDERED LOGIT

REGRESSION RESULTS
Independent
Variable
Tea Party
support
Age
Education
Income
Male
Republican
Independent
Ideology
Blacks Should Immigrants

Gays should Govt can
Try harder
take jobs away not adopt
Detain indef.
Coefcient
(SE)
Coefcient
(SE)
Coefcient
(SE)
Coefcient
(SE)
0.8098
(0.1362)
0.0158
(0.0071)
0.0761
(0.0721)
0.0068
(0.0759)
0.2477
(0.2242)
0.2566
(0.4051)
0.3395
(0.3004)
0.0135
(0.092)
0.3550
(0.1214)
0.0104
(0.0067)
0.1058
(0.0656)
0.0093
(0.0739)
0.3133
(0.216)
0.0708
(0.3991)
0.1710
(0.3011)
0.2486
(0.0840)
0.3835
(0.1790)
0.0287
(0.0104)
0.1724w
(0.1005)
0.2442
(0.1141)
1.1482
(0.3418)
1.0452
(0.5492)
0.2905
(0.4562)
0.6151
(0.1311)
0.6339
(0.1491)
0.0131w
(0.0078)
0.0922
(0.0734)
0.2076
(0.0872)
0.3669
(0.2475)
0.8862
(0.4481)
0.0168
(0.3629)
0.3950
(0.0959)
137
Federal Govt
Therm
Church
attendance
Born again
0.0404
(0.0515)
0.0219
(0.0809)
0.5732
(0.2826)
Ethnocentrism
0.0359w
(0.0214)
Authoritarianism
0.4847
(0.0932)
Rural geography
0.1842
(0.2566)
Ohio
0.2820
(0.3255)
Georgia
0.2888
(0.403)
Michigan
0.8706
(0.3423)
Missouri
0.2996
(0.4167)
Nevada
0.9933
(0.6418)
Carolina
0.0756
(0.4016)
Cut1
30.976
(14.041)
Cut2
30.093
(14.039)
Cut3
29.572
A
(14.036)
Cut4
27.927
(14.027)
N
340
0.2854
Pseudo R2
w
0.0459
0.0268
(0.0471)
(0.0715)
0.0794
0.1383w
(0.0775)
(0.1117)
0.1484
0.6596w
(0.2699)
(0.3671)
0.0354
0.0074
(0.0168)
(0.023)
0.1282
0.4814
(0.0861)
(0.1279)
0.0503
0.4238
(0.2559)
(0.3768)
0.4132
0.9042
(0.3217)
(0.4713)
1.6833
1.2464
(0.3831)
(0.5713)
0.5791w
1.1276
(0.3417)
(0.5159)
0.6338
1.3325
(0.3954)
(0.5784)
0.7756
0.2615
(0.6015)
(0.9501)
0.4750
2.4521
(0.3895)
(0.6037)
20.118
48.940
(13.139)
(20.402)
21.794
48.669
(13.143)
(20.399)
23.045
(13.150)
319
0.1036
po.100; po.050; po.010; and po.001.
324
0.3834
0.0284
(0.0554)
0.2110
(0.0909)
0.4086
(0.3072)
0.0067
(0.0184)
0.3202
(0.0991)
0.6316
(0.2892)
0.2681
(0.3635)
0.6954w
(0.4219)
0.0215
(0.3858)
0.3017
(0.4459)
0.2029
(0.7180)
0.0745
(0.4425)
21.332
(15.197)
22.157
(15.201)
23.062
(15.205)
303
0.1413
THE SWEET ENCHANTMENT OF

COLOR BLINDNESS IN BLACK
FACE: EXPLAINING THE
MIRACLE, DEBATING THE
POLITICS, AND SUGGESTING
A WAY FOR HOPE TO BE
FOR REAL IN AMERICA
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Louise Seamster
ABSTRACT
This essay tackles the Obama phenomenon, from his candidacy to his
election, as a manifestation of the new color-blind racism that has
characterized U.S. racial politics in the post-civil rights era. Rather than
symbolizing the end of race, or indeed a miracle, Obamas election is
a predictable result of contemporary U.S. electoral politics. In fact,
Obama is a middle-of-the-road Democrat whose policies since taking
ofce have been almost perfectly in line with his predecessors, especially
in terms of his failure to improve the lot of blacks and other minorities.
Rethinking Obama
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022012
139
140
EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA AND LOUISE SEAMSTER
In this essay, I review the concept of color-blind racism and its application
to the Obama phenomenon. I also revisit some of my past predictions for
Obamas presidency and evaluate their accuracy halfway through his
term. Finally, I offer suggestions for constructing a genuine social
movement to push Obama and future politicians to provide real,
progressive change we can believe in.
This chapter is based on a chapter I added for the third edition of my
book, Racism without Racists. Louise Seamster, a wonderful graduate
student at Duke, helped me update some material, locate new sources, and
rework some sections, as well as abridge some of the many footnotes
(interested readers can consult the chapter). I kept the rst person to
maintain the more direct and engaged tone of the original piece and
because the ideas (the good, the bad, and the ugly ones) in the chapter are
mine, and thus, I wish to remain entirely responsible for them.
Madness is rare in individuals but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1966), p. 90.
WE ARE ALL MAD HERE. ON MADNESS

IN THE AMERICAN WONDERLAND
Since the 2008 presidential campaign, Americans have behaved much like
the characters in the upside down world of Alices Adventures in
Wonderland.1 In many ways, the entire nation succumbed to Obamania.
Fortunately, some progressive critics had a shield that protected them from
this social current. They were able to navigate the turbulence for two
reasons: rst, given that this country does not have a traditional left and has
extremely weak labor unions (Aronowitz, 1991), it has never been easy to be
a progressive in America. Second, now that Obama is president, many
leftists feel vindicated, as the concerns they expressed about Obamas
progressive credentials and their predictions about an Obama presidency
have become a reality. Unfortunately, this vindication is somewhat Pyrrhic
as Obamas victory has increased (I hope temporarily) the madness in the
nation and even further reduced the space for criticizing his policies from
the left.
First and foremost, this chapter represents my explanation of the
miracle: the election of a black man as president of the United States.
The Sweet Enchantment of Color Blindness in Black Face
141
My explanation runs counter to those who believe his victory represents the
end of racism and the beginning of the era of no more excuses (Reed &
Louis, 2009) for people of color. In contrast, I contend Obamas ascendancy
to the presidency is part and parcel of the new racism and the All in the
(Color-Blind) Family soap opera that began running on a U.S. TV station in
the early 1970s. Second, this chapter is a call for progressives and liberals
who believed in Obamas message of hope and change to get serious. Obama
is close to the end of his rst term as president, and we must all scrutinize his
actions, as we have done with all presidents until now. As I was involved in
debates about Obama leading up to the 2008 election, I will use my
assessments and predictions to evaluate whether he has delivered on his
promises so far, or whether, as I predicted, he has been a neoliberal
politician.
But before I begin, several caveats. First, my criticism of Obama is neither
of all he stands for nor of all of his actions in ofce (after all, I label his
politics center-right, not right-wing). At the end of this chapter I enumerate
some of the good things he has done so far and outline a course of action to
make sure he delivers more good things for we the people. Third,
although I will criticize President Obamas image, politics, and policies,
I want to be absolutely clear on one important point: in comparison to the
president he replaced and the Republican candidate he faced, Obama seems
like pure gold. Fourth, since Obama emerged as a viable candidate, the bulk
of the American intelligentsia ceased its critical mission. Being critical (or
analytical) is part of the job of intellectuals in any society and when they
are not critical, they abdicate their responsibility. With these caveats out
of the way, we can now begin the slow ascent out of the rabbit-hole we
call Obamerica.
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: THE REAL QUESTION

POSED BY OBAMAS VICTORY
George Orwell stated a long time ago that To see what is in front of
ones nose needs constant struggle (Orwell, 1946). In the 2008 election
cycle, Americans did not see what was in front of their noses; they saw
what they wanted and longed to see. Although blacks and other people of
color saw in Obama the impossible dream come true, whites saw the
conrmation of their belief that America is indeed a color-blind nation.
But facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things (Adams, 1965) and
142
astute social analysts knew that since the late 1970s, racial progress in the
United States had stagnated and, in many areas, regressed. The evidence
of such a state of affairs was, as the title of a report of the early 1990s put
it, clear and convincing (Struyk & Fix, 1993). All socioeconomic
indicators revealed severe racial gaps in income, wealth, housing, and
educational and occupational standing. Since I have addressed these
inequalities in previous work (particularly in Bonilla-Silva, 2001, Chap. 4),
I will review here some economic disparities for 2008 the year Obama
was elected president. All the statistics I cite, unless otherwise specied,
come from the report State of the Dream 2009: The Silent Depression
(Rivera, Huezo, Kasica, & Muhammad, 2009), a very useful compendium
of information from sources such as the Census Bureau and the Bureau of
Labor Statistics.
The Black unemployment rate is currently 11.9%. Among young Black
males aged 1619, unemployment is 32.8%. [Unemployment for whites in
2008 was 5.8%; see page 13 of the report].
The median household incomes of Blacks and Latinos are $38,269 and
$40,000, respectively, while the median household income of whites is
$61,280 (v).
People of color are disproportionately poor in the United States. Blacks
and Latinos have poverty rates of 24% and 21% respectively, compared
to a 10% poverty rate for whites (v).
People of color are more likely to be poor (24.5%), remain poor (54%),
and move back into poverty from any income class status than their white
counterparts (vi).
Nearly 30% of Blacks have zero or negative worth, versus 15% of
whites (vi).
Only 18% of people of color have retirement accounts, compared to
43.4% of their white counterparts (vi).
Since Obama has taken ofce, things have only worsened for blacks.
According to data from the BLS, by November 2010 the rate had increased to
16.0% for blacks, 13.2% for Latinos, and 8.9% for whites, for an overall
unemployment rate of 9.8% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). The
unemployment rate for black men between 16 and 19 has now risen to
50.1%. And in August 2011, just before this chapter went to press, the Pew
Research Center issued a report stating that median wealth for whites is now
20 times that for blacks and 18 times the median Latino wealth these are
the widest gaps in 25 years (Kocchar, Fry, & Taylor, 2011).
143
The racial inequality that existed in 2008 and which remains today is not
the product of impersonal market forces (Wilson, 1978, 1987) or due to
the presumed cultural, moral, ethical, intellectual, or family deciencies
of people of color, as conservative commentators such as Charles
Murray (1984), Murray and Herrnstein (1994), and Abigail and Stephan
Thernstrom (1997) and many others have argued. Racial inequality today is
due to the continuing signicance of racial discrimination (Feagin, 1991).
The scholarly community has documented the persistence of discrimination
in the labor and housing markets and has uncovered the co-existence of oldfashioned as well as subtle smiling discrimination (Brooks, 1996; Pager &
Sheppard, 2008).
But racial discrimination is not just about jobs and housing. Discrimination affects almost every aspect of the lives of people of color. It affects them
in hospitals (Blanchard & Lurie, 2004; Penner et al., 2009), restaurants
(Rusche & Brewster, 2008), trying to buy cars (Ayres, 2002) or hail a cab
(Kovaleski & Chan, 2003), driving (Meehan & Ponder, 2002) or ying
(Harris, 2001), or doing almost anything in America. Indeed, living while
black [or brown] (Gabbidon & Peterson, 2006) is quite hard and affects the
health (physical and mental) of people of color tremendously, as they seem
to always be in ght or ight mode (Smith, Allen, & Danley, 2007).
Indicators of subjective matters also denote trouble in paradise (we limit the
discussion to racial attitudes, but could include data on perceptions of wellbeing and the like). Although the rst wave of researchers in the 1960s and
1970s assumed tremendous or moderate racial progress in whites racial
attitudes, most contemporary researchers believe that since the 1970s, whites
have developed a new way of justifying the racial status quo distinct from
the in your face prejudice of the past. Analysts have labeled whites post
Civil Rights racial attitudes as modern racism, subtle racism, aversive
racism, social dominance, competitive racism, Jim Crow racism, or
the term I prefer, color-blind racism. Regardless of the name given to
whites new way of framing race matters, their switch to color-blind racism
did not change the basics, as color-blind racism is as good as, if not better
than, the old method of safeguarding the racial order. Despite its suave,
apparently nonracial character, the new racial ideology is still about
justifying the various social arrangements and practices that maintain white
privilege.
The overall contemporary racial situation I have described is compounded by a mean-spirited white racial animus. The rst component of this
animus is the anti-afrmative action and reverse racism mentality that
emerged in the early 1970s and that took a rm hold of whites racial
144
imagination since the 1980s (Pincus, 2003; Chap. 2 in Crosby, 2004). This
mentality, which was in evidence during the conrmation hearings in July
2009 of Judge Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, and its connection to
racial prejudice is well-documented (Unzueta, Lowery, & Knowles, 2007).
The second component of the racial climate people of color face is the antiimmigration mood that started slowly in the latter part of the 20th century
and has become one of the central axes of racial politics in the early part of
the 21st century (Esses, Dovidio, & Hodson, 2002). With the economy in
shambles, and with agitators such as Lou Dobbs fueling enmity toward
undocumented workers (whom he calls illegal aliens), a thick nativist
mood is palpable, nding expression in draconian anti-immigrant measures
enacted in localities across the nation, not to mention the Tea Party
movement (examined by Barreto et al. in this section).
And then out of nowhere, paraphrasing the much-maligned Father
Peger, came a relatively unknown black politician who said, Hey, I am
Barack Obama, and almost the entire nation said (like Hillary Clinton),
Oh damn, where did this black man come from? (in McCormick &
Bracchaer, 2008). Since January of 2008 the nation has been mesmerized by
Obama; by his Yes we can; by his appeal to our better angels; and by
his relentless call for national unity. Many Americans have felt inspired,
proud, and a few, like MSNBCs Chris Matthews, have even felt a thrill
going up [their] leg (Matthews, 2008). But the question we must ponder
now that Obama is the president of the still (Dis)United States of Amerika
is: Were we all wrong? Were neoliberal and conservative analysts right when
they claimed America had seen DSouzas (1995) end of racism or, at
least, William Julius Wilsons (1978) declining signicance of race? Were
whites right in claiming that America had become a color-blind nation and
that minority folks were the ones who kept race alive by playing the
infamous race card?
Analytically and politically, too many liberal and progressive commentators dug a deep hole for themselves in the 2008 election as they either went
with the ow and assumed Obama was truly about social and racial change,
or took the stand that white racism would prevent Obama from getting
elected. But there is a more tting, historically accurate, and sociologically
viable explanation. The miracle the fact that race matters in America
tremendously, yet we elected a black man as our president is but an
apparent one. Obama, his campaign, and his success are the outcome of
40 years of racial transition from the Jim Crow racial order to the racial
regime I have referred to as the new racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2001). In the
new America that presumably began on November 4, 2008, racism will
145
remain rmly in place and, even worse, may become a more daunting
obstacle. The apparent blessing of having a black man (and we should truly
say this black man) in the White House is likely to become a curse for
black and brown folks.
In the remainder of this chapter I do three things. First, I describe the
context that made it possible for someone like Obama to be elected
president. Second, I discuss what Obama did in order to be elected
president. Finally, I conclude by discussing a few things we can do if we wish
to attain real change at this juncture when so many whites (and many people
of color) believe we are nally beyond race even though racial inequality
remains entrenched.
BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING ...: THE CONTEXT

THAT ALLOWED THE MIRACLE
In the midst of the trial against the Knave of Hearts in Alices Adventures in
Wonderland, the King instructed the White Rabbit to read some verses. The
rabbit asked the King, Where do I begin? The King replied: Begin at the
beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop. Americans have
not placed the election of Barack Obama as president in its proper context
and, thus, in order to understand where we are today we must begin at the
beginning.
From Jim Crow to the New Racism Regime
The Obama phenomenon is the product of the fundamental racial
transformation that transpired in America in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike
Jim Crow, the new racial order that emerged the new racism
reproduces racial domination mostly through subtle and covert discriminatory practices which are often institutionalized, defended with coded
language (those urban people or those people on welfare), and bonded
by the racial ideology of color-blind racism (for a full discussion of the new
racism, see Chap. 4 in Bonilla-Silva, 2001; cf. Smith, 1995). Compared to
Jim Crow, this new system seems genteel, but it is extremely effective in
preserving systemic advantages for whites and keeping people of color at
bay. The new regime is, in the immortal lyrics of Roberta Flacks song, of
the killing me softly variety. This new regime came about as the result
of various social forces and events that converged in the postWWII era:
146
(1) the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s; (2) the contradiction
between an America selling democracy abroad and giving hell to minorities
at home, which forced the government to engage more seriously in the
business of racial fairness; (3) the black migration from the South that made
Jim Crow less effective as a strategy of social control; and (4) the change of
heart of so-called enlightened representatives of capital, who realized they
had to retool the racial aspects of the social order in order to maintain an
adequate business climate. The most visible positive consequences of this
process are well-known: the slow and incomplete school desegregation that
followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision; the
enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
and the Housing Rights Act of 1968; and the haphazard political process
that brought afrmative action to life.
Unfortunately, alongside these meaningful changes, whites developed
very negative interpretations of what was transpiring in the nation.2 The
concerns they expressed in the late 1960s and early 1970s about these
changes gelled into a three-headed beast in the 1980s. The rst head of the
monster was whites belief that the changes brought by the tumultuous
1960s represented the end of racism in America. Therefore, since they
believed racism had ended, they began regarding complaints about
discrimination by people of color as baseless and a product of their
hypersensitivity on racial affairs. The second head of the beast was that a
substantial segment of the white population understood the changes not just
as evidence of the end of racism, but also as the beginning of a period of
reverse discrimination.3 Hence, this was the ideological context that
helped cement the new racism. The third head of the beast was whites
increasing tendency, particularly after the increased militancy and urban
rebellions of the 1960s, to view blacks (especially young black males) as a
threat and to become increasingly concerned with law and order.
Elsewhere I have described in detail how the new racial practices for
maintaining white privilege operate ideologically, socially, economically,
and politically (again, interested parties should see Chapter 4 in BonillaSilva, 2001 and, for an update, see Bonilla-Silva & Dietrich, 2009). Given
the focus of this chapter, I will just briey review my analysis of
developments at the political level. Nowadays three major factors limit the
advancement of people of color in the political arena. First, there are
multiple structural barriers to the election of black and minority politicians,
including racial gerrymandering, multimember legislative district members,
and the like. Second, despite some progress in the 1970s, people of color are
still severely under-represented among elected and appointed ofcials
147
(whites still show a preference to vote for white candidates); the proportion
of minority elected and appointed ofcials still lags well behind their
proportion in the population. Third, because most minority politicians must
either compromise to get elected or are dependent on local white elites,
their capacity to enact policies that benet the minority masses is quite
limited.
More signicantly, in an early analysis of these matters I mentioned the
emergence of a new type of minority politician. By the early 1990s it was
clear that both major political parties (but the Democratic Party in
particular) had learned from the perils of trying to incorporate veteran civil
rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson. Regardless of the limitations of Jackson
as a leader and of his rainbow coalition strategy of the 1980s, he and his
coalition proved to be too much of a challenge to the powers that be
(Marable, 1989, pp. 34). Hence, both parties and their corporate masters
developed a new process for selecting and vetting minority politicians. After
the Democratic Party co-opted civil rights leaders such as John Lewis,
Andrew Young, and the like, they began almost literally manufacturing a
new kind of minority politician (the Republican Party followed suit later).
Consequently todays electorally oriented minority politician (1) is not the
product of social movements, (2) usually joins the party of choice while in
college, (3) moves up quickly through the party ranks, and, most
importantly, (4) is not a race rebel.4 The new breed of minority politicians,
unlike their predecessors, are not radicals talking about the revolution
and uprooting systemic racism. If Republican, they are anti-minority
conservatives such as Michael Steele (the former chairman of the
Republican National Committee), Tim Scott (the rst black congressman
elected by South Carolina since Reconstruction), Bobby Jindal (governor of
Louisiana since 2008), Alan Keyes (conservative commentator and
perennial candidate for any ofce), and J. C. Watts (former Congressman
from Oklahoma and still a very inuential leader in the GOP). If a
Democrat, they are post-racial leaders with center to center-right politics
such as Harold Ford (former congressman from Tennessee and currently
head of the conservative Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and an
MSNBC commentator), Cory Booker (Newarks mayor since 2006), Deval
Patrick (governor of Massachusetts since 2006), Adrian Fenty (D.C.s
mayor from 2006 to 2010) and, of course, Barack Obama. Not surprisingly,
plutocrats love these kinds of minority politicians because, whether
Republican or Democrat, neither represents a threat to the power structure
of America, instead representing Booker T. Washington-style accomodationism.
148
Obamas case is illustrative. Although during his carefully orchestrated

presidential campaign he and his team touted his credentials as a
community organizer, Obamas real story at the moment of his political
conception is quite different. During the campaign Obama said community
organizing is something I carry with me when I think about politics today
obviously at a different level and in a different place, but the same principle
still applies (Judis, 2008). His wife, Michelle Obama, added, Barack is
not a politician rst and foremost and that Hes a community activist
exploring the viability of politics to make change (Judis, 2008). But the
historical record is quite different. First, Obama accomplished quite little in
his two years as a paid community organizer (all reports, including Obamas
own account in The Audacity of Hope, reveal he was very disappointed with
the pace of change) and second, by 1987 he had all but abandoned Saul
Alinskys ideal of the community organizer and was dreaming of getting
elected to ofce. Hence, in the same article, which is sympathetic to Obama,
the author states that Obama y has become exactly the kind of politician
his mentors might have warned against (Judis, 2008).
The record also shows that by the time Obama ran for ofce in 1996, he
had already acquired many of the typical characteristics of postcivil rights
minority politicians. After he won the Illinois state race in 1996, Adolph
Reed, a black political science professor and contributor to various
progressive magazines, said the following about Obama:
In Chicago, for instance, weve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundationhatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with
impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neo-liberal politics, has won a
state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His
fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic
community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and
the predictable elevation of process over program the point where identity politics
converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I
suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and
wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist
response hasnt been up to the challenge. We have to do better. (Reed, 1996)
Obama negotiated Chicago Democratic politics quickly and successfully,

and by 2002, he had become the darling of the citys black elite, and soon
after, of the white elite. Christopher Drew and Mike McIntire, in a 2007
article in The New York Times, state that Obama improbably raised
fteen million dollars for his senate campaign (Drew & McIntire, 2007). But
their characterization of this quick turnaround (from having problems
settling his campaign debt from his loss to Congressman Bobby Rush in
149
2000 to the success of his campaign in 2004) as improbable is inaccurate,

because by 2003 Obama had already received the blessing from the
Democratic Party elders and nanciers, beginning with a fundraiser held at
the home of Vernon Jordan, according to Paul Street. Street states that
Obama passed this preliminary trial with ying colors (Street, 2009,
p. xxiii; my emphasis). The people in the meeting liked his academic
background, suave and cool style, and political outlook. Attendees such as
Gregory Craig (prominent attorney and former special counsel to Bill
Clinton), Mike Williams (legislative director of the Bond Market Association), and other big wheelers appreciated that Obama was not a racial
polarizer (i.e., that he was not like Jesse Jackson) and that he was not
anti-business. This explains the seemingly improbable victory of
Obama in the 2004 Senate race and the 700 million dollars he was able to
raise in the 2008 presidential campaign. According to an investigative report
by Ken Silverstein (2006) and a book by David Mendell (2007), Obama rose
quickly beyond the connes of Illinois because the American elite resolutely
loved his reasonable tone.
Therefore, postcivil rights minority politicians like Obama are not truly
about fundamental change and challenges to the American social order, but
about compromise. If they were truly about fundamental change and
frontal challenges, they would not be the darlings of the two mainstream
parties. Although some postcivil rights minority politicians may, from time
to time, talk the talk, their talk is rather abstract almost to the point of
being meaningless, and they seldom if ever walk the walk. For instance,
Obama talked during the campaign about corporate lobbyists, but said
nothing about corporate power; complained about big money in politics,
yet raised more money than any politician in American history; subscribed
to the Republican lie about a crisis in Social Security and is likely to follow
through with destructive policies to save a program that is actually
solvent;5 and talked about alternative energy sources and clean energy, yet
was allied with folks in the clean coal and safe nuclear energy camp
(see Chap. 1 in Street, 2009; also, see the commercials by the energy sector
that ran on national TV in the late spring and early summer of 2009, and
how they used Obamas speeches during the campaign to bolster their
agenda).
Based on all the information at hand, there is no question that politicians
like Obama are accomodationist (Marable, 1991) par excellence and teach
the wretched of the earth (Fanon, 1968) the wrong political lesson: that
electoral, rather than social-movement politics, are the vehicle for achieving
social justice. In the next section we show that Obamas political road to the
150
(still) White House perfectly matches the practices and tone of postcivil
rights minority politicians.
WHO ARE YOU? SAID THE CATERPILLAR:

ON THE MEANING OF OBAMAS POLITICS
When questions arose during the campaign about Obamas progressiveness
due to his support of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and
other seemingly reactionary positions he held, Obama said in an interview
with the New York Times that I am someone who is no doubt progressive
(Powell, 2008). However, true to the style of postcivil rights minority
politicians, he insisted he did not like to be labeled as right or left and
preferred to be regarded as a nonideological and pragmatic politician.
As the campaign advanced, Obamas nonideological stand betrayed a
conservative bent, and some commentators questioned his commitment to
progressiveness. For instance, in harsh yet prophetic words, Hufngton
Post blogger Taylor Marsh labeled Obamas brand of progressiveness as
progressive cannibalism. He was referring to Obamas willingness to do
whatever he can to get elected, cannibalizing his own and our ideals as he
goes; bringing as many people along as he can, including conservatives who
will have no allegiance to what progressives have worked for over decades to
achieve (Marsh, 2007).
In this section, I restate doubts I raised about Obama during the
campaign and argue his politics and tone were not, as so many liberals and
progressives believed, tactical maneuvers to get elected, but represented who
Obama truly was and how he will be as president. Because the concerns I
expressed about the Obama phenomenon in events during the campaign
were borne out by subsequent events, I reproduce them here almost
verbatim. I maintain the present tense used in the original, but print the
statements in a different font to distinguish them from the brief (and
contemporary) discussion that appears after each one.
The rst concern I have is that Obama does not represent a true social movement, but an
undercurrent of various actors and contradictory forces that did not necessarily agree on
fundamental issues. Lacking a social movement with a common agenda, I believe his
presidency will become problematic, as we have no way of predicting his actions and will
not have people in the streets to curb them if needed.
When I wrote this, many commentators thought Obama had a grassroots approach to politics (see Sullivan, 2008 as an example). However, all
151
his political praxis during the campaign was in line with mainstream party
politics (in fact, all he did was through the Democratic Party) and did not
emanate from or create a social movement. The massive rallies and the 700
million-plus dollars he raised in the campaign did not emanate from the
organized (or unorganized, as many social movements follow a more
spontaneous path; Piven & Cloward, 1978) efforts of activists with a
common agenda. The mantra of his campaign, Change we can believe in,
was so abstract that almost anything and anyone could have t in. The most
signicant matter, however, was that Obama supporters lacked a common
agenda and belief system. What I surmised during the campaign that white
support was not indicative of post-racialism has now been corroborated in
post-election studies. Noted survey researchers Professor Tom Pettigrew
from UC-Santa Cruz and Professor Vincent Hutchings from the University
of Michigan found that Obamas white voters were just slightly less
prejudiced than McCains white voters. And because Obamas white voters
were younger than McCains, as they age and face real life issues (e.g.,
getting a job, getting married, selecting a neighborhood and schools for their
kids, etc.), they are likely to regress to their racial mean that is, will
develop views similar to those of older whites today (Blinder, 2007; Forman
& Lewis, 2006). (Professor Pettigrew puts some weight on the fact that most
young whites voted for Obama, while Professor Hutchings is less impressed
with this fact.)6
Second, none of the policies Obama has offered on the crucial issues of our time (health
care, NAFTA, the economy, immigration, racism, the Wars, etc.) is truly radical and
likely to accomplish the empty yet savvy slogan he adopted as the core of his campaign:
change.
I will say a bit more about some of Obamas policy preferences later, but
want to point out here that few of his ardent supporters knew about his
policy proposals and even about his positions on crucial issues. For
instance, while on vacation in the summer of 2008, I had a discussion with
several minority professors about Obama in which they told me I was too
harsh on Obama. As the discussion proceeded, I said, I cannot believe
you are all for Obama so blindly given his support for the death penalty.
One of them laughed and told me that Obama was not for the death penalty.
I urged the colleague to check the matter on the Internet and, a minute later,
the person said, Well, but Obama has a nuanced position, to which I
replied, When one is dead there is no nuance.
Third, Obama has reached the level of success he has in large measure because he has
made a strategic move towards racelessness and adopted a post-racial persona and
152
political stance. He has distanced himself from most leaders of the Civil Rights
movement, from his own reverend, from his church, and from anything or anyone who
made him look too black or too political. Obama and his campaign even retooled
Michelle Obama7 to make her seem less black, less strong, and more white-lady-like for
the white electorate.
Obamas post-racial stand during the campaign was not a new thing.
Those who have read his books, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of
Hope, are familiar with his long-standing attempt to be, if not beyond race,
at least above the racial fray. Hence, it was not at all surprising when
President Obama answered the only question he was asked about race in his
second press conference by suggesting race was a factor in life, but that he
was dealing with Americas real problems.8 It was also not surprising
when in his third press conference he answered a question by Andre
Showell, a black journalist for BET, about what specic policies he had
enacted to benet minority communities, with ideas reminiscent of how
conservatives frame race matters. So my general approach is that if the
economy is strong, that will lift all boats as long as it is also supported by,
for example, strategies around college affordability and job training, tax
cuts for working families as opposed to the wealthiest that level the playing
eld and ensure bottom-up economic growth. And Im condent that that
will help the African-American community live out the American dream at
the same time that its helping communities all across the country.9
As part of his post-racialism, Obama avoided the term racism in his
campaign until he was forced to talk about race. And in the race speech so
many commentators heralded and compared to speeches by MLK, he said
Reverend Wrights statements expressed a profoundly distorted view of
this country a view that sees white racism as endemic and classied them
as divisive. This should be surprising to race scholars across the nation
who regard racism as indeed endemic and know that race has been a
divisive matter in America since the 17th century!
For readers who are familiar with my work (particularly Bonilla-Silva,
1997, 2001), it should not be surprising to learn that I agree with Reverend
Wright about his claim that racism is endemic to America. Thus, I do not
believe his statements were divisive. As I have suggested in my speeches,
our nation has been deeply divided by race (and class and gender as well)
since colonial times! Obamas speech was clearly a political speech intended
to appease the concerns of his white supporters riled by the media-driven
frenzy in March of 2008 based on a snippet of a sermon given by Reverend
Wright.10 Some readers may be surprised by the fact that many blacks
liked Obamas race speech (Halloran, 2008). This puzzle, however, can be
153
solved. First, whites and blacks heard Obamas race speech and interpreted
the controversy over Reverend Wright differently. A poll commissioned by
Fox News indicated that whereas 40% of whites had doubts about Obama
because of his relationship with Reverend Wright, only 2% of blacks did.
Thus, for blacks, his association with Reverend Wright was not a big deal. A
CBS-New York Times poll taken in late March (2008) showed that blacks
regarded Obamas campaign and his race speech as having had a positive
effect on race relations. Second, progressive black dissenting voices on this
speech and on all matters related to Obama did not get much play in the
media. Hence, the black public did not see or hear a critique of this speech on
mainstream TV stations or on black stations or radio shows. Third, the black
masses experienced (and as I write these lines, still are experiencing) an
understandable yet problematic nationalist moment that did not allow for
meaningful dissent about Obama and his politics to be expressed in the black
community. Accordingly, all these factors help explain why blacks heard
Obamas condemnations of racism and his comments about the continuing
signicance of discrimination, but paid little attention to his implicit
denition of racism, his acquiescence to whites claims of reverse racism,
or his rather desperate attempt to placate whites concerns in the speech.
The text of the speech11 can be deconstructed as a play with ve acts. In the
rst act, Obama stated that America is a great country, but recognized that it
is still a work in progress. His campaign, Obama insisted, had worked to
continue the long march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring
and more prosperous America. In the second act, he inserted his usual I am
the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. In the
third act, Obama chastised Reverend Wright and expressed his profound
disagreement with his views, but said he could not disown him more than [he
could] disown [his own] grandmother who had also uttered racist statements
in the past. In the all-important fourth act of the play, Obama justied the
anger both whites and blacks have and stated that racism has affected both
groups (he said white racial resentment was partly grounded in legitimate
concerns). And in the last act of the play, Obama called for racial
reconciliation and for all Americans to be our brothers keeper and
continue working together to build a more perfect union.
His speech had three serious problems. First, Obama assumed racism is a
moral problem (he called it a sin) that can be overcome through goodwill.
In contrast, I have argued that racism forms a structure and, accordingly,
the struggle against racism must be fundamentally geared toward the
removal of the practices, mechanisms, and institutions that maintain
systemic white privilege. Second, Obama conceived racism (in his view,
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prejudice) as a two-way street. In the speech he stated that both blacks and
whites have legitimate claims against one another, that is, that blacks have a
valid complaint against whites because of the continuing existence of
discrimination and whites against blacks because of the excesses of
programs such as afrmative action. Obama was wrong on this point
because blacks do not have the institutional power to implement a pro-black
agenda, whereas whites have had this kind of power from the very moment
this country was born.12 He was also wrong because whites claims of
reverse discrimination do not hold much water empirically (Roscigno,
2007). Further (as Tamara Nopper shows in her contribution to this
section), Obamas hints at the excesses of the 1960s in this speech and
many others do not match the evidence. Indeed, afrmative action has been
at best a Band-Aid approach to deal with the hemorrhage of racial
inequality. Third, Obamas post-racial call for everyone to get along13 so
that we can deal with Americas real problems shows the Achilles heel of his
stand: he truly does not believe racism is a serious structural problem in
America. Otherwise he would not insist and he has continued this line of
argument that we must get on with Americas real problems such as the
economy, health care, the wars, and the like. Yet the speech accomplished its
mission: it placated his white supporters who, from then on, hardly showed
more concerns about Obamas racial views.14 The speech, accordingly, can
be classied as a neoslave narrative (Nopper, 2008), an accounting of
Americas progress through the iniquities of slavery to the bright days of
emancipation.
Fourth, as Glen Ford, executive editor of The Black Agenda Report, Adolph Reed,
Angela Davis, Paul Street, and a few other analysts suggest, Obamania is a craze. His
supporters refuse to even listen to facts or acknowledge some very problematic positions
Obama has, such as his support for the death penalty.
Obamas liberal and progressive supporters wanted to believe, in

ahistorical fashion, that Obama was a stealth progressive who once elected
would turn left (what Adolph Reed has jokingly called well come back for
you politics (Reed, 2007). But, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.,
leaders should not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of
their politics and the content of Obamas politics was (and is) center to
center-right on almost all fundamental matters. Black and progressive
America, unfortunately, seems destined to learn this lesson after this neomulatto (Horton & Sykes, 2004) rents the White House for a short while
and does not do any meaningful renovation.
155
Anyone who lived in the United States during the 2008 presidential
campaign knows that the entire country was captivated by Obama who,
despite my criticisms, is a truly outstanding orator, astute politician, and
remarkably charismatic man. The problem, however, remains. If Obamas
charisma and charming smile prevent us from asking the hard questions,
probing his record, and acknowledging his actual positions on issues, then
we risk endorsing style over substance and owery rhetoric over truly
progressive positions.
Lastly, perhaps the most important factor behind Obamas success, and my biggest
concern, is that he and his campaign mean and evoke different things and feelings for his
white and nonwhite supporters. For his white supporters, he is the rst black leader
they feel comfortable supporting because he does not talk about racism; because he
reminds them every time he has a chance he is half-white; because he is so articulate
or, in Senator [now Vice-President] Bidens words, echoed later by Karl Rove, Obama
was the rst mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a
nice-looking guy (Thai and Barrett, 2007) because Obama keeps talking about national
unity; and because he, unlike black leaders hated by whites such as Jesse Jackson and Al
Sharpton, does not make them feel guilty about the state of racial affairs in the
country.15
Since very early on in Obamas campaign, his white supporters were not
on the same page as his minority supporters. He quickly became an Oprahlike gure for whites, that is, a black person who has transcended his
blackness and become a symbol (and it was no small potatoes that Oprah
encouraged him to run and, after he entered the race, endorsed him
wholeheartedly and campaigned for him). For instance, Katie Lang, a white
woman proled in a Washington Post article, stated that Obama speaks to
everyone. He doesnt just speak to one race, one group, and added, He is
what is good about this nation (Duke, 2007). Mrs. Lang also said:
Kind of like, if I could compare him to Tiger Woods. When I look at Tiger Woods, I see
the best golfer in the world. So when I see Barack Obama, I see a strong political
candidate. I do not see Oh, thats a black man running for president, or African
American or multiracial black. Its not what comes to mind rst. What comes to mind
rst is: great platform, charismatic, good leader, attractive. (Duke, 2007)
And many whites, like Joyce Heran in the article I cite erlier, said without
much hesitation that if Obama were like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, they
probably wouldnt like him as much (Ibid.).
In sharp contrast, for many nonwhites, but particularly for blacks, Obama
became a symbol of their possibilities. He was indeed, as Obama said of
himself, their Joshua16 the leader they hoped would take them to the
Promised Land of milk and honey. They read between the lines and thought
156
Obama had a strong stance on race matters. For the old generation desperate
to see change before they die, and for many post-Reagan generation blacks
and minorities who have seen very little racial progress during their lifetimes,
Obama became the new Messiah of the Civil Rights movement.
Since Obamas victory in the Iowa caucus, black America projected onto
Obama its dreams, history, and pride. This, as I stated earlier, is
understandable. In a country with a racial history such as ours and where
successful black leaders end up killed (Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm
X), vilied (Malcolm X, Minister Farrakhan, and Reverend Al Sharpton),
or ridiculed (almost all black politicians), one understands why the
possibility of a having a black president became a symbol of the aspirations
of the entire black community. In interviews with dozens of blacks from
across the nation after the Iowa victory, The New York Times reported they
voiced pride and amazement over his victory [in the caucus] and the
message it sent (Cardwell, 2008).
The love fest between blacks and Obama that began in January after an
initial period of doubt has not ended. As I nish writing this article, few
public black gures or commentators have broken ranks with Obama and,
those who have (Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West) have been ercely
attacked and condemned by other black commentators. Although blacks
nationalist moment has a raison detre, people ultimately do not eat pride,
cannot nd a job by feeling good about themselves, or ght discrimination by
telling white folks We have a black president so you better behave (would
this have helped Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates?).17 Professor Ronald
Walters, a black political scientist at Maryland, has wisely said that one
should not let the honeymoon that President Obama is enjoying among
blacks and their leaders extend too far into the future (Walters, 2003).
WELL! WHAT ARE YOU? SAID THE PIGEON.

I CAN SEE YOURE TRYING TO INVENT
SOMETHING!: MY PREDICTIONS DURING THE
CAMPAIGN AND MY SCORECARD
Social scientists must always verify how their analyses hold up over time. In
this section, I restate predictions I made during the presidential campaign
and assess my batting average. I made two large predictions. First, I
predicted the voices of those who contend that race fractures America
profoundly would be silenced. Obamas blackness, I suggested, would
157
become an obstacle for people of color as whites would throw it back at

them as well as his words and actions (and even Michelle Obamas)18 as
evidence that race was no longer a big deal in America. Second, I argued
Obamas election would bring the nation closer to my prediction about
racial stratication in the United States becoming Latin Americalike
(Bonilla-Silva & Dietrich, 2009). Obamas presidency, I claimed, would
accelerate the pace toward symbolic unity without the nation enacting the
social policies needed for all of us to be truly all Americans. And like in
Latin American countries, Obamas nationalist stance (including his nowubiquitous line, Theres not a black America and white America and
Latino America and Asian America; theres the United States of America)
might shut the door for the recognition of race as a central factor of life.
Obamerica may bring us closer than ever to a regime of multicultural white
supremacy (Rodr guez, 2008) similar to those in Latin America and the
Caribbean, where racially mixed folks are elected to positions of power
without altering the racial order or changing the racial distribution of goods
and services.
These are two broad predictions that cannot be easily assessed at this
juncture, so I will let history and readers judge the accuracy of these two
predictions. I now review more targeted predictions I made during the
election based on President Obamas rst two years in ofce. First, based on
promises and remarks Obama made during the campaign, I predicted he
would increase the size of the military, wait longer than planned for
withdrawing from Iraq, increase the scope of the military intervention in
Afghanistan and, more problematically, bomb Pakistan if he got actionable intelligence. (I did not predict the situation in Libya, obviously,
although this in itself is a troubling indication of Obamas willingness to
involve the United States in another military engagement in yet another
country in the Middle East, and the end of this new engagement is not in
sight). Although the severe economic crisis has prevented President Obama
from fullling his promise of increasing the size of the military by 100,000,
Defense Secretary Gates announced in late July of 2009 that he was going
to increase the size of the U.S. Army by up to 22,000 troops (Bumiller,
2009). Regarding Iraq, the president has already taken a much weaker and
slower approach. Even though the end to combat operations was
announced in the fall of 2010 (not the rst such announcement), Obama
has left 50,000 troops in Iraq, justifying their continued presence by arguing
that the remaining troops are no longer combat forces but are now called
advisory training and assistance brigades. Euphemisms aside, we
should be aware that 50,000 American troops (and an equal number of
158
military contractors) will be viewed as an occupying force no matter what

we call them. And as these troops eventually withdraw, the decreasing
military role will likely be replaced by an extensive expansion of the
American Embassy and its operations, bolstered by thousands of private
contractors (Myers, Shanker, & Healy, 2010). Indeed, contractors have
earned little scrutiny in the debate over timelines for troop withdrawals: it
seems to be assumed that they will remain there indenitely.
And if Iraq was (and still is) a quagmire, increasing the scope of the
intervention in Afghanistan and bombing Pakistan are even more
problematic ventures. No foreign power has ever been able to conquer
Afghanistan, and the last one that tried (the Soviet Union) was forced out
after 9 years, even though it maintained about 100,000 troops in the
territory during its intervention. The Soviets lost more than 14,000 soldiers
and rotated over 600,000 soldiers in this costly incursion (Roy, 1987). To
complicate matters further, whereas Iraq is a country of just 29 million
people, Pakistan is the 6th largest nation in the world with 179 million
people, and Afghanistan has close to 37 million people spread throughout a
very harsh and difcult landscape. Hence, one need not be a military expert
to know that the size of the population, terrain, and history do not bode well
for the success of an American military campaign in Afghanistan (Coll,
2004) or for any kind of military intervention in Pakistan.
Obama earned some progressive credentials by getting the Dont Ask,
Dont Tell law repealed in December 2010. But the lefts Obama-blinders
prevented them from thinking about this course of action intelligently.
Given how many people who supported ending DADT also oppose our
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan or who oppose the military
altogether, we should not be celebrating the entry of more people into the
military, period. The real issue is Obamas support for equal rights for gay
men and lesbians, and it is clear that this is not a priority for him (he stated
unequivocally in 2008 that I do not support gay marriage y I consider
marriage to be between a man and a woman (Giordano, 2007), albeit lately
he has been softening his stand on this matter as the LGBT community has
pressured him hard and forced him to the left).
Second, I suggested Obama was going to put together a very conservative
cabinet. As I predicted, the conservative people who advised him during the
campaign became the core of his cabinet. Worse yet, Obamas intention of
mimicking Abraham Lincoln by having a team of rivals pushed his
cabinet unnecessarily further to the right. His advisers have included Hillary
Clinton, Robert Gates (kept on from the G.W. Bush administration), Larry
Summers (a Clinton-era holdout infamous for his famous sexist speech at
159
Harvard), Paul Volker (who served under Carter and Reagan), and Timothy
Geithner (who has followed the interests of Wall Street). Indeed, Obamas
team of rivals has been described by independent journalist David Sirota
as a team of zombies (2009). So far, President Obama does not have a
single radical voice in his team except perhaps for Hilda Solis (Secretary of
Labor) and, arguably, Eric Holder19 (Attorney General). In the beginning of
2011, Obama has reinforced the rightward bent of his cabinet by replacing
Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Director of the National Economic
Council Summers with William Daley and Gene Sperling,20 respectively,
both Clinton-era advisors (McManus, 2011). Any turnover in staff would be
an opportunity to move in a leftward direction, if Obamas progressive
supporters were right that his early centrist talk was setting up a future turn
to the left, but instead Obama reinforced ties to previous administrations
and nancial interests. Lacking progressive people in his cabinet, who will
defend the interests of poor and working people in his administration? Who
will push Obama to think hard about American interventions abroad?
Obamas cabinet is not as diverse as one would expect (Allen, 2008); and the
few people of color in his cabinet are in secondary positions (in most press
conferences Obama is anked by white folks).
Third, I suggested Obama was going to compromise on his promise of
taxing the rich. He has now denitively done so, most recently extending the
tax cuts for those making over $250,000 for another 2 years and revising the
estate tax according to Republican demands, in a so-called compromise
with Republicans. The president claims this compromise was necessary to
insure unemployment benets: in exchange, he won the extension of
unemployment insurance benets (for only one year), and other tax credits
designed to stimulate the economy and return money to middle-class
Americans. But the small-business benets Obama has touted as making
this compromise worthwhile are smokescreens for more trickle-up
economics. Two hundred billion dollars in new tax breaks are being offered
to small businesses to cover up to $500,000 of their investments in
equipment, etc., doubling the previous amount. But some have pointed out
that few small businesses spend over $250,000 in a year for equipment in
their business and that they need support in other areas such as obtaining
credit or paying employees (Clifford, 2010). In truth, the trick here is that
the small businesses that could potentially be hurt are not really small
businesses (Calmes, 2010): 20,000 of the businesses ling in 2011 under this
category made over $50 million (Dunmoyer, 2010). In other words, even the
liberal policies obtained as concessions are primarily going to benet the
wealthy.
160
Fourth, I suggested Obamas health care plan was weak and that his
pragmatism was going to make it even weaker. Specically, I argued that
Obamas proposed reform was far off from what the country needed: a
universal, single-payer health care plan. This was a bone of contention
during the campaign, as independent observers commented that Obama had
the weakest health care plan of all the contenders for the Democratic Partys
nomination. Although Obama did pass a health-care reform bill in 2009 that
included some xes, the bill ultimately passed without the public option
to buy insurance directly from the government. The debate left a bad taste in
the mouths of progressives, as Health and Human Services Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius, Max Baucus, and other Democrats emphasized that
single-payer insurance was not on the table (NPR, 2009). Obama tried to
exclude members of his own party, including Congressman John Conyers
from Michigan, a leading proponent of a single-payer system, from meetings
on health care reform. Conyers, after he threatened to picket outside the
White House, was invited to the summit and, later on, in a presentation at
Thomas Jefferson University, he described the attendees of the meeting as
follows: It was very heavy with corporate health care interests Big
Pharma, insurance companies the people who dont want single
payer(Vitez, 2009).
Fifth, I predicted that because of Obamas weak stand on race and his
post-racial persona and appeal, he was not going to enact any meaningful
race-specic policies to ameliorate racial inequality. Obamas so-called
middle ground position on race can be examined in Chapter 7 of his
book, The Audacity of Hope. There, he insists that although race still
matters, prejudice is declining, and as proof he heralds the growth of the
black elite whose members do not use race as a crutch or point to
discrimination as an excuse for failure (Obama, 2006, p. 241). He
acknowledges the existence of signicant gaps between whites and minorities
in income, wealth, and other areas, and voices only tepid support for
afrmative action, yet he engages in a Bill Cosby-like critique of blacks and
states they watch too much television, engage in too much consumption
of poisons, lack an emphasis on educational achievement, and do not
have two-parent households (pp. 244245). So what is his solution to deal
with racial inequality? An emphasis on universal, as opposed to racespecic, programs, which he believes isnt just good policy; its also good
politics (p. 247). He also discusses the problem of the black underclass
and chastises those unwilling to accept the role of values in their
predicament (p. 254). Although he mentions that culture is shaped by
circumstances (p. 255), his emphasis is on behavior (see pp. 255257).
161
Is there evidence that President Obamas universalist stand has affected

his decisions in ofce? I believe the $789 billion stimulus package his
administration passed in early 2009, which gave control to localities on how
to use the funds, is a case in point. Giving money directly to localities
without any controls is quite problematic, as localities have historically
distributed funds in a way that preserves existing inequities (Katznelson,
2005). Unless one adopts what John Powell labels targeted universalism
a perspective that takes into consideration that people are differently
situated in the social order and, thus, that some may need more resources
than others universal efforts such as this one will not reduce racial
inequities (Powell, 2009; see also Tienda, 2008).
President Obamas race lite stand was vital during the campaign and
remains so. He has avoided any serious discussion on race and, when forced
to talk about it, has remained frustratingly vague. For instance, in an
interview with ABCs George Stephanopoulos, he took seemingly all sides
on afrmative action. He talked about the importance of how afrmative
action is carried out, mentioned that race still matters, said his daughters
probably will not need afrmative action, and hinted at a class-based
program (Robinson, 2007). In a comment on Obamas performance in the
interview, Peter S. Canellos (2008) observed in The Boston Globe that
Obama rarely deals with the substance of the policies, but focuses on the
values, a tactic that seems to go well with his supporters.
Further evidence of President Obamas weak stand on race matters was
his decision not to attend the 2009 UN-sponsored World Conference on
Racism at Geneva. The reasons he cited for not attending were quite similar
to those of his predecessor concerns about reparations and some attendees
classifying Israel as a racist state. And in what should have been interpreted
as a sign of disrespect by minority organizations, Samantha Power,
Obamas national security aide, had a conference call with Jewish leaders
to let them know how Obama was processing his decision on whether or not
to attend this meeting (Stein, 2008) all interested parties should have been
consulted. Lastly, in his much-heralded trip to Ghana in July 2009, unlike
Presidents Clinton and Bush, who even apologized for slavery, Obama did
not contextualize the sad state of much of Africa and excoriated African
nations for their problems in governance.
Sixth, I criticized the progressive and liberal community in America for
being in silly season, to use Obamas terminology, regarding the amount
of money he raised, how he raised it (bundling), and for ignoring the
implications this money would have in his administration (for a good
discussion of these matters, see Chapter 6 in Paul Street, 2009). Are we not
162
concerned that Wall Street and HMOs support Obama? Do we believe that
700 million dollars in donations will not affect his administration?
These were my predictions and arguments about Obama and sadly, many
have become a reality and others seem very likely. Obama is clearly not a
stealth progressive, but a centrist, pro-market, traditional politician with a
quasi-color-blind view about race matters in America. Obama himself has
accepted part of this characterization as when, in a meeting with centrist
members of his party in April 2009, he described himself as a new
Democrat and as a pro-growth Democrat(Martin & Lee, 2009), both
clear signiers of his pro-business stance.
To be clear, my characterization of President Obama is political and
policy-based rather than moral or personal. I do not believe all of Obamas
policies are wrongheaded. For example, his passage of the Lilly Ledbetter
Fair Pay act; the cessation of so-called enhanced interrogation
techniques (torture);21 his public statements about wanting to extend a
hand to leaders of rival nations like Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, and
Nicaragua; the achievement of a limited reform of our health care system;
his support of the Employee Free Choice Act which would facilitate
workers efforts to get unionized (even though Obama has already
hesitated and urged workers to nd a compromise with the business
community (Stein, 2009); his new emission and mileage standards (Allen &
Javers, 2009); and his legislation to exert some control over the credit card
industry (Reddy, 2009), are good for the nation. (However, Obama has
further dialed back on some of these things in signicant ways.) Like so
many Americans, I also believe President Obama is a more capable,
dignied, and shining representative of this country in the world platform
than his predecessor. There is little doubt that Obama projects to the world
community a much better image of this nation and its possibilities. Even
before he was elected, international polls showed that up to three-fourths
of people in the world believed an Obama presidency would see improved
U.S. relations with the rest of the world(Gharib, 2008).22 This early
enthusiasm for Obama has remained high. A post-election poll, for
instance, revealed that two-thirds of those surveyed in 17 nations,
compared to 47% in 2008, believed Americas relations with the rest of
the world will become better (Texeira, 2009).
Nevertheless, it is important to have clarity about who Obama is, what his
policy stands, preferences, and proclivities are, and what his likely political
trajectory will be, as we can use this information to craft a better political
strategy for the near future. The contour of such political strategy is what I
address in the last section of this chapter.
163
TUT, TUT, CHILD! SAID THE DUCHESS.

EVERYTHINGS GOT A MORAL, IF ONLY YOU CAN
FIND IT: LET SOCIAL JUSTICE NOT DIE AT THE
ALTAR OF PRAGMATISM AND COLOR
BLINDNESS
During the election, my overall claim was that the Obama phenomenon was
not a miracle or an event that denotes how far we have come in the arena of
race relations, but the product of 40 years of racial transition from Jim Crow
to the regime I have labeled the new racism. As such, instead of signifying the
end of racism, Obamas election as president may help bring to the fore a
more powerful type of racial domination: a Latin America-like multiracial
white supremacy (Rodr guez, 2008). In Obamerica the space for talking about
race matters may dwindle, as whites have gained the upper hand symbolically.
Although little has changed in the fundamentals of the racial order, having a
black man in charge gives the impression of monumental change and allows
whites to tell those who research, write, talk, and organize against racial
inequality that they must be crazy. Whites can now say, How can racism be
important in a country that just elected a black man as its president? and add,
By the way, I voted for Obama, so I cannot be a racist. (Racial ideologies are
always works in progress; thus, the I voted for Obama, soy may join the list
of semantic moves I listed in Bonilla-Silva, 2009.)23
I also argued that Obamas politics and stand on racial matters epitomize
the character of Americas racial regime, which, among other things,
brought forth the postcivil rights minority politician. Although Obama is
the most successful exemplar of this new kind of politician, the Democratic
and Republican landscape is dotted with them, and I forecast many will
emerge as central political gures in the near future. For example, before
Obama, former Secretary of State General Colin Powell could have run for
president in 1996. In that year an exit poll conducted the day of the election
revealed that had Powell, rather than Bob Dole, been the candidate for the
Republicans, he would have won the election (Plissner, 2007).
President Obama has emphasized his interest in bipartisanship, on not
being ideological, and on his pragmatic approach to politics as policy.
But what does this mean and what does it imply? I have argued that
Obamas pragmatism and distaste for what he calls ideology betrays his
center-right stand on most issues. This argument is not entirely original, as
New York Times writer David Leonhardt dissected Obamas policy views in
a piece titled Obamanomics, where he described Obama as a University
164
of Chicago Democrat and suggested that Obama simply is more

comfortable with the apparent successes of laissez-faire economics
(Leonhardt, 2008). More tellingly, Leonhardt wrote that [i]nvoking
pragmatism doesnt help the average voter much; ideology, though it often
gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into how a candidate
might actually behave as president (2008).
Interestingly, like all Democratic presidents and presidential candidates
since Lyndon B. Johnson, Obama depends on strong electoral support from
minority communities. If at some point black and Latino supporters, who
were crucial for Obamas victory,24 realize he is not going to enact policies
that will benet them, they may walk out of his electoral coalition. But since
there are no other electoral options at this juncture, what political options
are there for people of color and progressives to make sure the change they
were promised is delivered?
Are you content now? said the Caterpillar:
To-Do List for Change to be Delivered
Since Obama emerged as a political possibility, I raised concerns about his lack
of connection with social movements and about what he was calling a
grassroots movement in truth, Obama engaged solely in mainstream work
in the party system with a predictably short shelf life. Accordingly, the rst
thing in the to-do list is to work hard in organizing social movements the
plural is important. If Americans truly want Obamas campaign slogan
change we can believe in to become a reality, they must develop the vehicles
and mobilize the people that will allow them to produce it. Unfortunately,
progressives have wasted valuable emotions, money, and time in the cultish
Obama phenomenon. The more we continue buying into mainstream politics,
as we did in 2008 and seem bound to do in 2012, the less likely that we will be
able to effect the social change the nation needs. On this, the words of Adolph
Reed ring as true today as when he wrote them in 2007:
Its a mistake to focus so much on the election cycle; we didnt vote ourselves into this
mess, and were not going to vote ourselves out of it. Electoral politics is an arena for
consolidating majorities that have been created on the plane of social movement
organizing. Its not an alternative or a shortcut to building those movements, and
building them, takes time and concerted effort. (Reed, 2007)
Second, in the process of building these social movements, we must develop

individual and collective practices to resist class, race, and gender domination.
These resistance experiences are the political school for those who truly aspire
165
to live in an Amerika without the k, in an America where democracy is

substantive rather than formalistic.25 Far too many of the young (and the notso-young) Americans who participated in Obamas campaign have not
undergone the deep political experience of working with real people and for
real causes in real social movements. Thus, I urge liberals, progressives,
leftists, and people of consciousness to move away from mainstream
Democratic Party politics and engage in social movement-type of work for
health care reform, in anti-racist groups and campaigns, in pro-labor and
feminist organizations, and in all sorts of anti-systemic political work. These
experiences will immunize them against what passes as politics and
political participation in this country and open their eyes and minds forever.
Third, liberals and progressives must radicalize the spaces they inhabit no
matter where and no matter what. They have become too passive and, for
fear of creating controversy, avoid saying or doing much where they work
or live. (This problem aficted or, perhaps, facilitated the Obama
campaign, as those who participated were not encouraged to study the issues
at hand deeply.) The not entirely self-imposed silence of the left has reduced
the space for contestation in the public square. Although it is true that the
public square in America is tilted to the center-right and that the media is
not free, as it is owned by corporations, it is also true that progressives have
retreated further reducing their already limited corner in the square.
Fourth, there is desperate need for critiques of President Obama from the
left. We must not stop debate and dissent because the president of the
United States is black, Latino, Asian, and/or a woman. Only by organizing
movements to oppose and challenge many of the policies President Obama
is enacting will we be able to change the trajectory and content of his
policies. Unfortunately, far too many people in the American left have
avoided any public engagement on Obama whites, because they think that
if they criticize him, they will be called racist, and many people of color,
because even though Obama is not all that, they still think his victory has
at least symbolic value. Any true progressive, regardless of their race or
gender, should never cease having a deep engagement in political matters.
And if through this engagement one concludes a minority politician or a
woman of any racial background does not represent the best interest of the
people, one must say so loud and clear regardless of the consequences (Do
we remember the debate around the Clarence Thomas conrmation
hearings?). Not engaging in critique is not only a sign of cowardice and
accommodation but is also self-defeating. By not criticizing President
Obamas policies and actions now, we are digging our own graves, as it will
be even harder to do so in the future.
166
Finally, we can apply the pressure the Obama Administration needs from
us in creative ways. The progressive community has become somewhat
ossied and not caught up with the times. We need new ways of doing politics,
organizing, and working with people to help folks see what is truly going on in
the world they live in. Some of the strategies of the past (marches, sit-ins,
political rallies, etc.) may still be part of our tool kit, but progressives need to
listen to folks in the younger generation who can help them reinvent their
political praxis. Accordingly, Yes we can use humor, as Michael Moore, the
Yes Men, and others have showed, as an effective political weapon; Yes we
can be postmodern in style and, on occasion, do truly wacky things (would
not it be great to do an all-white post-racial rally lampooning Obamas race
views?); and Yes we can dare talk once again about the revolution and the
signicance of Malcolm X for racial and social change in our America. It is
time the American left recovers from the political depression it has been in
since Reagan was elected president in 1980. It is time the left takes a strong
dose of political Prozac and ends its vote-for-whomever-the-Democratsnominate-for-president political option it has exercised since 1980 voting
for the proverbial lesser of two evils always keeps evil in power.
If we do these things, we can recover from this maddening moment where
things seem upside down. But if we wait until the next election an election
Obama seems to have in his pocket and limit our political engagement to
electoral politics, history is likely to, as Marx wrote, repeat itself: the rst
time as tragedy, the second as farce(Marx, 1982, p. 300). But people can
always alter the course of history through their actions. People can indeed
make their own history (Ibid.). A peoples hope should not be attached to
a charismatic leader who delivers great speeches from a teleprompter.
Historically, hope for the oppressed has come when they have become
protagonists of their own history. Therefore, We the people should, as
Professor Cornel West suggested, put some serious pressure (West, 2008)
on President Obama to make sure the happy summer days26 we dreamt
about when he became president do not become a continuation of our long
racial nightmare.
NOTES
1. Throughout this chapter I use Alices Adventures in Wonderland references. I
do this because it ts the case quite well and because as a child this was one of my
favorite books. All sections have titles partly derived from passages from the book.
2. For books with interview data on this period that show this change, see Judith
Caditz, White Liberals in Transition (New York: Spectrum Publications Inc., 1976)
167
and Bob Blauner, Black Lives, White Lives (Los Angeles and Berkeley: The
University of California Press, 1989).
3. Two books on this broad subject are Jennifer L. Hochschild, Facing Up to the
American Dream (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) and Martin Gilens,
Why Americans Hate Welfare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).
4. Political scientists have been exploring this trend for a while and called it
deracialization. See, for example, Persons, G. (Ed.) (2009). Dilemmas of Black
politics: Issues of leadership and strategy. New York: HarperCollins.
5. On this matter, see Baker, D., & Weisbrot, M. (2001). Social security: The
phony crisis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; and Krugman, P. (2007).
Played for a Sucker. The New York Times, November 16, Retrieved from http://
www.nytimescom/2007/11/16/opinion/16krugman.html?ex1352955600&ena87e0ffad
19b7b62&ei5090?nerrssuserland&emcrss.
6. Professors Vincent Hutchings and Tom Pettigrew delivered papers at the
conference Still Two Nations? at Duke in March of 2009 on their survey work on
Obama and the 2008 election. The highlights of their ndings were the following:
(1) Obamas victory was the result of the perfect storm of factors Obamas lucky
situation in Chicago politics which allowed him to become a senator in 2006, the
extraordinarily high levels of black and Latino support for Obama, an economy in
shambles, and an ineffective Republican candidate. (2) Despite the hoopla, white
support for Obama (45%) in this election was in line with white support for
Democratic candidates over the last 40 years. (3) Obama white supporters were not
beyond race. In answers to questions that have been used over the last 30 years to
assess racial attitudes, Obama white voters were just slightly less prejudiced
than other whites. (4) A similar proportion of whites agreed with typical stereotypes
of blacks, but Obama voters were more likely to hide this fact (the survey used by
Professor Hutchings included an experiment where the mode of administration was
varied randomly face to face or self-administered which allowed the examination
of whether respondents report their beliefs consistently).
7. See AFP, Michelle Obama Working Hard on New Image, The Times, June
24, 2008, at http://www.thetimes.co.za/Entertainment/CelebZone/Article.aspx?
id789896
8. Transcript retrieved from http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2009/03/president_
obamas_press_confere.html
9. Transcript retrieved from www.hufngtonpost.com/2009/04/29/obama-100days-press-conf_n_193283.html
10. History was made based on a snippet of a sermon (or pasting snippets from
several sermons) from a reverend, a church, a congregation, and a religious tradition
white America knew almost nothing about. On March 21, CNNs Anderson Cooper
exculpated Reverend Wright from most of the charges. Cooper listened to the entire
sermon and found that the chickens coming home to roost comment was a quote
from Edward Peck, the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, and he did not nd the
God damn America statement in this sermon, which suggests someone did a job
on Reverend Wright to hurt Obamas presidential chances. See Anderson Coopers
blog, The full story behind Reverend Jeremiah Wright 9/11 sermon, AC360,
March 21, 2008, at http://AC360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/21/the-full-story-behindrev-jeremiah-wrights-911-sermon/
168
11. The full text of his race speech in Philadelphia, titled A More Perfect Union,
can be found at www.hufngtonpost.com/2008/03/18/obama-race-speech-readth_n_92077.html
12. A truly wonderful book outlining the role of race from the moment this
country was born through today is Joe R. Feagin, Racist America (New York and
London: Routledge, 2001).
13. Obama is cited in Newsweek, after the Wright controversy and the race
speech, saying the following: Race is a central test of our belief that were
our brothers keeper, our sisters keeper y Theres a sense that if we are to get
beyond our racial divides, that it should be neat and pretty, whereas part of
my argument was that its going to be hard and messy and thats where
faith comes in. Lisa Miller, July 11, 2008, Finding His Faith, Newsweek
(accessed at http://www.newsweek.com/2008/07/11/nding-his-faith.html on
7/13/2011).
14. A few weeks after this speech, Obama threw Reverend Wright under the
bus (this expression became very popular in this campaign) and, later on,
renounced his afliation to the Trinity United Church of Christ. And a few weeks
after these actions by Obama, a poll by The Pew Research Center for the People and
the Press indicated that most Americans believed he had handled the controversy
well and 48% of whites agreed with this stand (although 45% disagreed). See http://
www.peoplepress.org/report/?pageid1277
15. Many of the arguments I stated early in the campaign were articulated by other
commentators. See David Greenbergs article in The Washington Post, Why Obamania?
Because He Runs as the Great White Hope, January 13, 2008, at www.washington
post.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/11/AR2008011101414.html
16. In his speech in Selma, Alabama, Obama spoke of the Moses generation (the
Civil Rights generation) and thanked them for bringing them 90% on the road to
equality (this pleased some in the audience, even though it was factually wrong).
There he laid claim to the mantel of the Joshua generation, who is charged with
bringing his people to the Promised Land. Although he talked of generations, he
clearly did not mind the implications of talking in the singular about Joshua. The
speech can be found at Lynn Sweet, Obamas Selma speech. Text as delivered,
Chicago Sun Times, March 5, 2007, at http://www.blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/
03/obamas_selma_speech_text_as_de.html
17. In late July 2009, Professor Gates, a world-renowned writer, scholar, and public
gure was racially proled in his own house. For details on this story, see Melissa Trujillo,
Henry Louis Gates Arrested, Police Accused of Racial Proling, July 20, 2009, at
www.hufngtonpost.com/2009/07/20/henry-louis-gates-jr-arre_n_241407.html
18. Michelle Obama has made some statements as First Lady that may be used
against people of color.
19. In an earlier version of this chapter, I stated that the test of Holders
independence and progressiveness would be his decision regarding the reports that
the CIA lied to Congress about plans for various covert operations from 2001 to
2008, given that President Obama had all but said he does not want to prosecute
anyone and prefers to move forward. Now we have a tentative answer: Although
in June of 2010, Holder announced that the Department of Justice had nearly
concluded its investigation into the CIAs destruction of interrogation tapes, its
169
conclusions have still not been presented (as of January 2011), conveniently allowing
the statute of limitations on the tapes destruction to expire in November 2010. See
Ryan J. Reilly, DoJ Mum as Deadline Passes to Prosecute CIA Torture Tapes
Destruction, TPMMuckraker, November 8, 2010 (retrieved from http://
www.tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/11/doj_mum_as_statute_of_limi
tations_passes_on_cia_torture_tapes_destruction.php).
20. Bill Daley, relative of Chicagos mayoral dynasty and Midwest chairman of JP
Morgan, has publicly stated that the Democrats overreached on health care reform
and their attempt to create a consumer protection agency (Hufngton Post).
Obamas appointment of someone who has publicly disparaged his policies as his
public representative, in order to improve his relationship with the nancial
community, is, unfortunately, in step with his other political decisions.
21. Unfortunately, Obama is already backtracking on his promise of releasing
pictures of prisoners who were tortured. See Jennifer Loven, Obama seeks to block
release of abuse photos, AP White House Correspondent, at news.yahoo.com/s/ap/
20090513/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_pentagon_abuse_photos. He also reversed himself on
the military tribunals and has reinstated this Bush-era atrocity. See Lara Jakes,
Obama to revive military tribunals for GITMO detainees, with more rights, The
Hufngton Post, at www.hufngtonpost.com/2009/05/14/obama-to-revive-military_n_203783.html. Just recently, a Wikileaks document revealed that the Obama
administration successfully pressured Spain in 2009 to drop its indictments of top
Bush ofcials for torture (David Corn, 12/1/10, Obama and GOPers Worked
Together to Kill Bush Torture Probe, Mother Jones, available at http://mother
jones.com/politics/2010/12/wikileaks-cable-obama-quashed-torture-investigation).
22. But see also why a crucial segment of the world, the Muslim world, is not
likely to be too impressed with Obama in Ala Al Aswanys piece, Why the Muslim
World Cant Hear Obama, The New York Times, February 7, 2009, at
www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/opinion/08aswany.html.
23. Already, experimental psychologists have found an Obama effect where,
after endorsing Obama, whites are more likely to choose to hire a white person in a
ctional job selection exercise (Daniel Effron, Jessica Cameron, and Benoit Monin,
Endorsing Obama Licenses Favoring Whites, Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology (45), 590593).
24. Ninety-four percent of black voters and 67% of Latinos supported Obama.
The latter vote was more crucial as almost all past Democratic candidates in the
last elections received upwards of 88% support (e.g., John Kerry received 90% of
the black vote in 2004). Furthermore, the Latino vote was decisive in the allimportant battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Nevada. For
superb data on the elections, see the report by conservative analyst Joseph Gimpel,
Latino Voting in the 2008 Election: Part of a Broader Electoral Movement for
the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies which can be located at
www.cis.org/latinovoting (sometimes the data talks more loudly than the ideology
of those who produce it).
25. Political scientists have wasted a lot of time and paper in discussing the
contours of democracy, as they mostly focus on the formal (voting, replacing leaders,
free speech, etc.) rather than the substantive components of democracy. For an
exception, see Joshua Cohen, Procedure and Substance in Deliberative
170
Democracy, in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, edited by

James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 407438.
26. This is the last phrase of Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland. The entire book
is online at www.sabian.org/alice.htm.
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BARACK OBAMA AND CIVIL

RELIGION
Philip S. Gorski
ABSTRACT
In 1967, Robert N. Bellah famously argued that there existed an
American Civil Religion, which was distinct from churchly religion and
captured the transcendental dimension of the American project. In this
chapter, I revisit the civil religion concept and reconstruct it along more
Weberian lines. Specically, I argue that the civil religion tradition is one
of three competing traditions for thinking about the proper relationship
between religion and politics in America; the other two are religious
nationalism and liberal secularism. Whereas liberal secularism envisions a
complete separation of the religious and political value spheres, and
religious nationalism longs for their (re)unication, civil religion aims for
a mediating position of partial separation and productive tension.
Following Bellah, I argue that the two central strands of the civil religion
tradition have been covenant theology and civic republicanism. The body
of the chapter sketches out the development of the tradition across a series
of national foundings and refoundings, focusing on the writings of leading
civil theologians from John Winthrop and John Adams through Abraham
Lincoln and John Dewey to Martin King and Barack Obama. The
conclusion advances a normative argument for American civil religion
and against liberal secularism and religious nationalism. I contend that
liberalism is highly inclusive but insufciently solidaristic; that religious
Rethinking Obama
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022013
179
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
nationalism is highly solidaristic but insufciently inclusive; and that only

civil religion strikes a proper balance between individual autonomy and
the common good.
On March 13, 2008, ABC News broadcast brief excerpts from two sermons
delivered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In the rst, Wright suggested that the
9/11 attacks were Americas chickens coming home to roost. In the second,
Wright condemned the war on drugs as a war on the urban underclass. God
damn America, he thundered, for treating our citizens as less than human.
God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.
Under most circumstances, Wrights words would have attracted little
attention beyond the four walls of his home church. There is nothing more
American, it turns out, than drawing a connection between national calamities and national sins (Young, 2006). The jeremiad form, as it is known,
has a very long history in the United States (Bercovitch, 1978; Howard-Pitney
& Howard-Pitney, 2005; Murphy, 2009; Stout, 1986). Indeed, it has been a
reliable staple of American homiletics since the Puritan founding and
remains so even today, not only within the black church but also among white
evangelicals.
But as we all know, one of Wrights parishioners had become a candidate
for the Presidency a black candidate for the Presidency, it must be added
and so these two snippets quickly made the leap from DVD to TV, where
they ran on endless loop on cable news. Commentators denounced them as
anti-American and even anti-Semitic, evidently unaware or unconcerned about just how ironic and hypocritical these charges really were.
(After all, white Jeremiahs like Pat Robertson speak this way all the time.) At
rst, Wrights defenders Obama among them countered rightly enough
that Wrights remarks were being taken out of context and blown out of
proportion. They had to be seen against the background of the black
church tradition or balanced against Wrights lifelong social justice work.
But veracity and proportion often matter little in American political
discourse these days, and the furor refused to subside. On the evening of
March 18, with his polling numbers in free fall and his Presidential prospects
suddenly in serious peril, Obama sought to defuse and reframe the debate in
his now famous speech on race. The speech was highly successful by most
measures. It was widely praised in the media, viewed millions of times on
YouTube, and quickly lifted Obamas polling numbers back to their preWright levels. Some commentators touted it as the greatest speech on race
since the days of Martin King.
Barack Obama and Civil Religion
181
What most commentators failed to notice about the race speech,

however, is that it was not just about race. Consider the setting: not a sacred
site of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington or Kings church in Atlanta, but the National Constitution
Center in Philadelphia, directly across the street from Independence Hall.
Nor did the preamble to Obamas speech allude to famous perorations on
race and rights such as Lincolns Second Inaugural or Kings I have a
Dream oration; rather, it invoked Preamble of the U.S. Constitution: We
the People, in order to form a more perfect union. Why?
The answer to this question, and the central argument of this chapter, is
that Obamas race speech is best situated in a tradition of prophetic
critique and civic discourse that Robert N. Bellah famously dubbed the
American Civil Religion (ACR), and, moreover, that most of Obamas
major speeches since 2004 can in fact be seen as an effort to revive and
regure this tradition. This tradition includes the Civil Rights Movement,
but begins much earlier. Following Bellah (1975, 2005), I argue that the
ACR is woven around two central discursive strands: covenant theology
and civic republicanism. Breaking with Bellah, however, I also argue that
there are two other competing traditions of American religio-political culture,
which I will characterize as religious nationalism and liberal secularism. The
chapter offers a high altitude overview of the historical development of
the ACR, which focuses on several crucial gures and critical junctures,
including John Winthrop in the Puritan era; John Adams in the Revolutionary era; Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass in the Civil War era;
John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr in the Depression era; and Martin Luther
King and Robert F. Kennedy in the 1960s. In doing so, my aim is not to
provide a comprehensive interpretation of their religio-political visions, but
rather to trace key continuities and highlight certain critical innovations in
Americas civil religious discourse. Against this background, Obamas own
civil religious rhetoric will hopefully become more intelligible and its creative
moments more apparent. In the concluding section of the chapter, I briey
reect on the present potentialities of the ACR as an indigenous, folk form of
critical, social theory.
WHAT IS CIVIL RELIGION?

Outside of American sociology, the term civil religion is most often
associated with the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Book IV, Chapter 8
of The Social Contract, Rousseau famously contended that no State has
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
ever been founded without Religion serving as its base, but that Christian
law is at bottom more harmful than useful to a strong constitution, because
of its otherworldly orientation and its priestly elite (Rousseau & Gourevitch,
1997, p. 146). Accordingly, he argued in favor of a a purely civil profession
of faith whose positive dogmas y ought to be simple and conducive to
good citizenship, to wit: The existence of the powerful, intelligent,
benecent, prescient, and provident Divinity, the life to come, the happiness
of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social Contract
and the Laws. As for the negative dogmas, he continued, I restrict them to
a single one; namely intolerance. (Rousseau & Gourevitch, 1997, p. 147).
Anyone who refuses a public profession of the civil religion or dares to say, no
Salvation outside the Church, is to be banished from the state.
Robert Bellah is responsible for importing the civil religion concept into
American social science, and therefore, it is his conceptualization that is
usually more familiar to most American sociologists. In importing
Rousseaus concept, he also modied it. In his enormously inuential
1967 Daedalus article (republished in 2005), Bellah (2005) dened the ACR
as a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that exists alongside of, and
rather clearly differentiated from, the churches in the United States. In
other words, he conceptualized it not as a replacement for or competitor
with churchly Christianity, but as an altogether separate but complementary
tradition, albeit one rmly rooted in theistic belief. Later, in his less known,
book-length analysis of ACR, The Broken Covenant, Bellah (1992, p. 3)
proffered a more general denition of civil religion as that religious
dimension, found I think in the life of every people, through which it
interprets its historical experience in the light of transcendent reality. Note
that in speaking of a religious dimension and of a transcendent reality,
he subtly reformulated his original denition along more sociological and
phenomenological lines, so as to accommodate the possibility and reality
of nontheistic forms or variants of civil religion. Thus, while Bellah clearly
retained Rousseaus conviction that a polity is well integrated to the degree
that it possesses a religious foundation, he implied that this religion might be
of a more Durkheimian and less dogmatic sort, one that involved a shared
language of civic purpose, rather than enforced afrmation of a civic
catechism, as Rousseau had demanded.
Bellahs vision, then, is much more capacious than Rousseaus. In principle,
at least, it is open to all speakers of Americas inherited language of civic
purpose, be they orthodox evangelicals who truly believe in American
exceptionalism (Reed, 1996) or radical anti-foundationalists who maintain
an ironic distance from strong truth claims of this sort but accept the necessity
183
for shared stories as a framework for civil discourse (Rorty, 1998). In

practice, of course, some refuse to speak this language at all, whereas others
seek to monopolize it for themselves. For instance, some contemporary
liberals prefer a language of individual rights or material interests and
scoff at the very notions of shared values or civic purposes. Conversely, some
contemporary conservatives claim to be in possession of revealed truths,
political as well as religious, which one must afrm, but not discuss.
Unfortunately, Bellahs neo-Durkheimian theory of civil religion could
not easily accommodate the existence of multiple and competing religiopolitical traditions (R. M. Smith, 1997), because it implicitly conceptualized
the ACR as a founding myth, indeed, as the founding myth. In later writings
such as Habits of the Heart, Bellah (1985) corrected this error, acknowledging that American public culture contained other discourses as well, such
as expressivism and utilitarianism. But he never incorporated this insight
back into his theory of civil religion and ultimately disavowed the concept in
favor of Walter Lippmans notion of public philosophy shortly thereafter
(Bellah, 1986). The purpose of this chapter, and the forthcoming book it
summarizes, is to reformulate and rehabilitate the notion of civil religion.
CIVIL RELIGION: A NEO-WEBERIAN

REFORMULATION
Webers theory of value spheres provides a promising starting point for
such a reformulation, one more attuned to the existence of multiple and
conicting visions of religio-politics than Bellahs original, neo-Durkheimian formulation. In his famous essay on Religious rejections of the
world, Weber (1958) argues that the appearance of the world religions
during the Axial Age (Eisenstadt, 1986; Jaspers, 1953) the millennium
stretching from the Buddha to the Prophet cleft a fateful fracture between a
higher, supramundane reality and lower this worldly one, setting in motion
a slow but inexorable process of institutional and cultural differentiation.
He further argued that this process took a particularly extreme form in the
Christian West, eventually giving rise to no less than seven distinct value
spheres or life orders (religious, familial, political, economic, aesthetic,
scientic, and erotic), each organized around a particular set of ultimate
values and dominated by its own elite or carrier group. As the various
spheres became more differentiated, the logical tensions between the
184
PHILIP S. GORSKI
ultimate values at their cores became more and more pronounced and the
conicts between the carrier groups ever more severe.
Note that Weber uses the word tensions (Ger.: Spannungen) and not
repulsions. For while value commitments tend to push the value spheres
apart, practical considerations tend to pull them back together. Thus, in
principal, state rulers may be at odds with clerical elites about the use of
organized violence to defend state territory, for instance. In practice,
however, the two may also need each other. For example, political elites
may be in need of religious legitimation, and religious elites may need help
in suppressing dissenters or heretics. The result is often practical
accommodations of one sort or another, such as the organic social
ethic of Medieval Christendom, which stipulated a cosmically inscribed
division of labor between those who pray, those who ght, and those
who work. Or, less grandly, and more contemporaneously, the political
alliance between business-oriented and Christian conservative fractions of
the present-day GOP. Hence, for Weber, the relation between any two value
spheres is historically and culturally variable and inuenced by material and
ideological factors.
What are the various forms which the relationship between the religious and
the political value spheres can take? Formalizing somewhat, we may distinguish
a vertical axis and a horizontal axis. Along the vertical axis, we may further
distinguish three main permutations: dominance of religion, dominance of the
political, and parity of the religious and political. We may likewise distinguish
three possible relationships along the horizontal axis: separation, fusion,
or overlap. Combining these two sets of distinctions yields a three-by-three
table that generates nine ideal-typical forms of religio-politics (see Table 1).
For present purposes, the middle row comprising liberal secularism,
civil religion, and religious nationalism is of greatest interest. There
Table 1.
Nine Types of Religio-Politics.
Separation
Overlap
Politics/
Radical republicanism
religion
(French laicite)
Parity
Liberal secularism (early

Rawls)
Confessional state
(early Modern
Europe)
Civil religion
(e.g., Obama)
Fusion
Political religion (20thcentury totalitarianisms)
Religious nationalism
(e.g., Dominion
Theology)
Religion/ Radical sectarianism
Two swords (Medieval Clerocracy (Tibet)
politics
(Mormon fundamentalists)
Papacy)
185
have been, and still are, some genuine theocrats in the United States; one
thinks, for example, of present-day dominionists and Kingdom
theologists (Diamond, 1995; Goldberg, 2006) But they have been, and
still are, few and far in between, even if their behind-the-scenes inuence is
probably greater than most people realize. Similarly, there are some
secularists who wish religion occupied a smaller space in public and private
life, but they are generally committed to the preservation of religious
freedom, even if they regard religion itself as mistaken. In short, most
Americans, believers and nonbelievers alike do not wish to see the church
subjugated to the state, or vice versa; rather, they prefer parity.
What is at issue, then, is the exact form this parity should take. Liberal
secularists prefer complete separation of church and state. By this, they
typically mean not only an institutional wall of separation but also a
discursive and symbolic one. In other words, they want religious arguments
and language banished from the public square (Audi & Wolterstorff, 1997;
Rawls, 2005). They insist that the United States was built on a wholly
secular foundation of Enlightenment rationalism (Jacoby, 2004; Kramnick
& Moore, 2005). Religious nationalists, by contrast, would prefer an organic
fusion of the religious and the political communities, in which the American
government would not simply accommodate religious belief, but actively
encourage it, at least in its Christian and Jewish forms, and American
churches would likewise preach an uncritical patriotism (Barton, 1992;
Gingrich & DeSantis, 2010; D. J. Kennedy & Newcombe, 2005; Skousen,
2009). In other words, contemporary religious nationalists view the
United States as a Christian nation or, somewhat more expansively, as a
Judeo-Christian nation, founded on Christian principles, from which,
alas, it has diverged and now must return, if it is to survive and prosper.
From the standpoint of the civil religious tradition, these stances seem
internally inconsistent and politically impracticable. After all, what kind of
liberal advocates restraints on speech of the sort originally proposed by
Rawls? Would they not more likely to lead to hypocrisy than neutrality
(Eberle, 2002)? Little wonder that the boldest statements of radical
secularists have often been followed by revisions and retractions (Rawls,
1997; Rorty, 1999). Likewise, what kind of Christian worships at the altar of
national greatness and military power, while refusing Christian charity to
his fellow citizens (Balmer, 2007; Hauerwas, 1985)? And what would be the
status of non-Christians in a Christian nation? Opposition to an illiberal and
uncivil liberalism and a hubristic and exclusivistic nationalism are among
the negative dogmas of the present-day civil religion. It is to the historical
development of its positive dogmas that I now turn.
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
JOHN WINTHROPS CITY ON A HILL

With the possible exception of Christs own Sermon on the Mount, no
other homily has had a longer and greater inuence upon America life and
letters than John Winthrops sermon on Christian Charity (Bercovitch,
1997; Bercovitch, 2000). Preached to a group of fellow Puritans shortly
before they set sail for the New World aboard the Arbella, its most famous
passage will be familiar to many readers:
Thus stands the cause between God and us, we are entered into a covenant with him for
this work y Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place
we desire, then hath he ratied this covenant y [and] will expect a strict performance of
the articles contained in it, but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which
are the ends we have propounded, and dissembling with our God, shall fail to embrace
this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves
and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us [and ] be revenged
of such a perjured people and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.
(Hall, 2004, p. 169)
What were the terms of this covenant? Nothing less than charity itself, as
Winthrop immediately went on to explain:
[W]e must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in
brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superuities, for the
supply of others necessities, we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all
meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality, we must delight in each other, make each
others conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together,
always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our
community as members of the same body y . (Hall, 2004, p. 169)
The terms of this covenant were not the limited ones of a legal contract as
we would understand it today. The liabilities were unlimited, self-interest
subordinated to the common good at all points (Baritz, 1964). But the
rewards were unlimited as well, and the success of the project of the greatest
possible moment. For if we succeed, concluded Winthrop, then we shall be as
a city upon a hill [and] the eyes of all people are upon us (Hall, 2004, p. 169).
This initial covenant was just the rst of many. Like their spiritual
forebears, the Ancient Israelites, the New England Puritans reread, revised,
and renewed their founding covenant at regular intervals. To these serial
covenants, however, the Puritans afxed numerous subsidiary covenants as
well. There were, rst of all, the church covenants that became the
hallmark of the Congregationalist way (Cotton, 1645; Hall, 2004; Mather,
Hugh, Davenport, & Mather, 1643; Miller 1983, pp. 5364; Morgan, 1965;
Weir, 2004). The civil polity also had need of a founding covenant (Morgan,
187
1958, pp. 8586; Weir, 2004), for in the words of Winthrop, No common
weale can be founded but by free consent (Winthrop, Winthrop, Winthrop,
Winthrop, Winthrop, & Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929, Vol. 3,
p. 423). Over time, the covenant idea was symbolically extended rst to New
England and then to the American colonies more generally. In this vision,
America was not so much a New England but a New Israel (Cherry, 1998;
Tuveson, 1968). Crucially, many Puritans embraced a version of covenant
theology in which God, Himself, was also bound by the Law, foreshadowing a
crucial conceptual and institutional innovation of the American Revolution,
namely, the vision of a popular government limited by a written Constitution
(Miller, 1983).
A REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION
During the rst half of the twentieth century, the dominant view among
American historians and political scientists from Charles Beard (1913, 1915)
through Arthur Schlesinger (1949) to Louis Hartz (1955), was that the United
States was founded on Lockean liberalism. Beginning in the late 1960s, a
series of revisionist works by Bernard Bailyn (1992), Gordon Wood (1969),
and J.G.A. Pocock (1975) upended the received wisdom by persuasively
demonstrating that another political tradition had really been paramount:
civic republicanism. And this work, in turn, decisively shaped Bellahs civil
religion thesis.
What is civic republicanism? The roots of the republican tradition are to
be found in the political thought of the Ancient World, from Plato and
Aristotle to Cicero and Polybius. With the rediscovery of Aristotle in the midtwelfth century and of other ancient classics during the Italian Renaissance,
civic republicanism became tightly woven into Western theology and political
philosophy. It exercised a particularly profound inuence on Puritan radicals
and English revolutionaries, such as John Milton (Armitage, Himy, &
Skinner, 1995; Milton & Dzelzainis, 1991) and James Harrington (1992), was
subsequently kept alive in the works of English radicals from Algernon
Sydney to the Rockingham Whigs, from whence it migrated to the New
World to one day shape the American Revolution (Colbourn, 1965).
How does civic republicanism differ from modern liberalism? In terms of
basic vocabulary, the answer is very little. Terms such as liberty and law,
virtue and corruption, balance and faction gure centrally in both
but with very, very different connotations. In modern liberalism, for
example, the root meaning of liberty is the absence of physical restraint
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
and the ability to do as one pleases (Skinner, 1998). In civic republicanism, by

contrast, liberty denotes the absence of economic dependence and the ability
to govern ones passions according to reason. Likewise with law. For
liberals, law is positive; it is an arbitrary construction of a human
community. In the republican tradition, on the contrary, law is natural; it
is premised on the goal of human ourishing and the good society that
promotes it. Or consider the conceptual pair, virtue and corruption. In the
liberal lexicon, virtue concerns private morality and especially sexual
propriety. As such, it is irrelevant to politics. On the republican reading,
on the contrary, virtue denotes public mindedness and civic devotion. It is the
very foundation of a healthy polity. Contrast this with corruption. In the
liberal vocabulary, it means self-dealing, usually for monetary gain. In
republican parlance, it connotes a pervasive subjugation of the public good
to private interests. Consider, nally, our fourth conceptual couple:
balance and faction. Since Montesquieu, liberals speak of institutional
checks and balances, as between the three branches of government created
by the U.S. Constitution. For republicans, such institutional checks are only
one means to maintaining a social balance between different groups. The
balance of power in a society, argued John Adams, echoing James
Harrington accompanies the balance of power in land. The only possible
way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal libery and
public virtue, is to make the division of the land into small quantities, so that
the multitude may be possessed of landed estates (letter to James Sullivan in
1776). In liberalese, nally, faction connotes an ideological grouping within a
political party. In the republican tradition, by contrast, it refers to a social
group that has hijacked the polity for its own benet. In closing, let us note
one nal contrast: liberals tend to see historical time in linear terms, as a story
of progressive liberation and temporary reversals. Republicans, on the
contrary, tend to view time in cyclical terms, as either a story of backsliding
and revival (Machiavelli) or, more darkly, of inevitable corruption and
decline (Polybius) (Pocock, 1975).
CHRISTIANITY AND REPUBLICANISM

Some of the best known Continental republicans, most notably Machiavelli
and Rousseau, were openly hostile toward Christianity, as are some of their
contemporary champions. But such animosities were less common among
the American founders and within the Anglo-American branch of the
189
republican tradition as a whole. This is not to say that all of the founders
were orthodox Christians; nor is it to deny that some of them were. Rather,
it is to assert that most all of the Founders disagreed with Machiavelli and
Rousseau, insofar as they viewed Christian morality and civic republicanism
as deeply complementary, rather than fundamentally opposed. Even that
poster boy of modern secularism, Thomas Jefferson, would have agreed on
this point. In recent years, a number of scholars have persuasively argued
that the dominant tradition of the revolutionary tradition was not civic
republicanism but Christian republicanism (DElia, 1974; Hatch, 1977;
Noll, 2002; Winship, 2006; Winship, 2010).
Consider the example of Benjamin Rush. After completing his studies at
the College of New Jersey (Princeton), where his evangelical faith was
conrmed, he spent several years in Edinburgh, where he encountered Hume
and other luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, and several more in
London, where he frequented the Club of Honest Whigs, a circle of
republican intellectuals centered around Catherine Macaulay. It was in
London that he underwent his second conversion to republicanism. After
returning to Philadelphia, Rush soon became involved in agitation against
the Stamp Act and later signed the Declaration of Independence. Rush saw
no contradiction between Christianity and republicanism. Republican
forms of government, he argued, are the best repositories of the Gospel
(Rush & Buttereld, 1951, Vol I, p. 611), because true religion requires
liberty, and religious and civil liberty go together. Conversely, he argued that
A Christian cannot fail of being a republican because the Gospel
inculcates those degrees of humility, self-denial, and brotherly kindness,
which are directly opposed to the pride of monarchy and the pageantry of a
court (Rush, 1786, p. 16). So close was the connection between religion and
virtue for Rush that he had rather see the opinions of Confucius or
Mahomed inculcated upon our youth, than see them grow up wholly devoid
of a system of religious principles (Rush, 1786, p. 15). By virtue he not
only understood the public virtues praised by the ancients but also the private
ones promoted by the Puritans: temperance, thrift, diligence, and lial piety.
Still, he remained rmly committed to the American tradition of separating
civil and religious authority. Human governments may receive support from
Christianity, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, but it must be only from the
love of justice and peace which it is calculated to produce in the minds of
men (Rush & Buttereld, 1951, Vol. II, pp. 824825).
The civil theology of the Revolutionary Era also came in less ecumenical
forms, some of which bordered closely on religious nationalism. Consider
the example of Timothy Dwight, a Congregationalist minister and
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
Federalist politician from Connecticut who served in the state legislature

and then as President of Yale College. In many ways, his views were
remarkably similar to Rushs. He believed that the endurance of a republic
depended above all on public virtue. The formation and establishment of
knowledge and virtue in the citizens of a Community, he argued, will more
easily and more effectually establish order, and secure liberty, than all the
checks, balances and penalties, which have been devised by man (Dwight
1795, p. 33). Without religion and virtue, he argued, liberty and republican
government could not long survive: Religion and liberty are the meat and
the drink of the body politic. Withdraw one of them, and it languishes,
consumes, and dies (Dwight, 1798, p. 18). Accordingly, one of the greatest
dangers to republican liberty is atheism, to which he reckoned deism, and
indeed any creed that denied a personal god. For Dwight, atheists were the
fth column of the Antichrist, the shock troops of the end times. Good
Catholics, it goes without saying, could not become good republicans.
THE CIVIC CULT

The American Revolution not only transformed the civil theology, but it
also transformed the civic cult. In its wake, new civic saints were created,
new civic scriptures were appended, and new civic rituals instituted. The rst
new saint to be created was none other than George Washington. In his
personal beliefs, so nearly as we can tell, Washington was more Deist than
Trinitarian and more Stoic than Evangelical (Gaustad, 1987). And yet, in his
public pronouncements, Washington continued to link piety and patriotism,
God and country, and divine benevolence with the well-being of the nation
(G. S. Smith, 2006, p. 41). In his First Inaugural Address, for instance,
Washington (1997, p. 733) skillfully blended the notes of republican virtue
and American chosenness into the now familiar chords of the civil theology:
the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that
disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has
ordained y [T]he preservation of the sacred re of liberty and the destiny of
the republican model of government are y entrusted to the hands of the
American people. And in his famous Farewell Address, he insisted that
of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion
and morality are indispensable supports, adding that reason and
experience both forbid us to expect that National morality in exclusion of
religious principle (Washington, 1997, p. 971).
191
Already during his life, and even more following his death, Washington
became the object of cultic devotion (Albanese, 1976; Kaminski &
McCaughan, 1989; Pierard and D. Linder, 1988; Schwartz, 1987). Even
before he died, people treasured locks of his hair, named their babies for him,
and circulated stories about his miraculous feats (G. S. Smith, 2006, p. 41).
After his death, the hagiography was loosed of all bonds. But not of all tropes.
Two analogies were particularly common. The rst was Moses. Like the
Dutch and English before them (Gorski, 2000; Gorski, 2006), the
Revolutionaries envisioned their own struggle through the lens of the Exodus
narrative (Walzer, 1985), as a quest to escape Pharaonic domination and
found a New Israel (Cherry, 1971) in an howling Wildernesse.
Washington, their deliverer and lawgiver, was naturally cast in the role of
Moses, an analogy that survived at least until the Civil War. The second
favored analogy was Cincinnatus (519 BC438 BC), the patrician farmer who
twice served as Roman dictator, and twice resigned once his task was done,
returning to his pastoral vocation (Thornton & Hanson, 1999; Wills, 1984).
Later generations would praise his humility and civic mindedness. For the
Revolutionary generation, steeped as they were in Latin literature and
Roman history (Richard, 1994; Sellers, 1994), the biographical and
characterological analogies to Washington were self-evident.
The successes of the Revolution also brought additions to the canon. To
the Puritan Old Testament was added a republican New Testament.
This new covenant consisted of two books: the Declaration of
Independence and the United States Constitution. The formation of the
American canon, like that of its Christian predecessor, was driven by
theological controversy and partisan rancor that lasted for the better part of
two generations. Today, the two texts are regarded as equal and
complementary, at least in political discourse, and are best remembered
for their elegant preambles. In the early Republic, by contrast, these were
not the best-known passages and their relationship was a matter of
contention (Albanese, 1976; Detweiler, 1962; Maier, 1997). When the
Declaration was cited, for example, the focus was typically on the
concluding passage renouncing all political connection with Great
Britain and declaring the colonies to be free and independent states.
Federalists like John Adams embraced the Constitution for which they had
fought so hard and held the Declaration at arms length because of their
pro-British and anti-French foreign policies. Democratic-Republicans such
as Thomas Jefferson remained suspicious of the federal government and
of the British while embracing the French cause and gradually embraced
the Declarations principles of natural equality, popular sovereignty, and
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
resistance rights as a counterweight to the social, political, and partisan

pretensions of the Federalists. With the demise of the Federalists, following
the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts and the subsequent
election of Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic emphasis on the Declaration
and its governing relationship to the Constitution was accepted by Henry
Clays Whigs (Howe, 1979) and gradually became inscribed in the political
mainstream. The Constitution, by contrast, became increasingly controversial as the ideological battle over slavery became imbricated with the
constitutional question of states rights. By mid-century, the Declaration
was on public display in the Patent Ofce in Washington; the Constitution,
by contrast, would not be sacralized in this way until the early twentieth
century.
Given the Federalists initial embrace of Independence Day, one might
imagine that they would have been strong advocates of civil religion, more
generally. Likewise, one might have imagined that the DemocraticRepublicans resistance to the one would have extended to the other. In
reality, the leading gures of both parties confounded these expectations.
By the end of his life, Jefferson had come to see the Declaration of
Independence, which he had authored, not only as his greatest achievement
but also as the fundamental act of union of these States, indeed, as a fuller
expression of American principles than the U.S. Constitution itself, in which
he, it must be added, as ambassador to France, had had no hand (Jefferson,
Lipscomb, & Bergh 1904, Vol. XV, p. 464). More than that, the staid deist
had come to advocate a vaguely Catholic version of the civil religion in
which Small things may, perhaps, like the relics of saints, help to nourish
our devotion to this holy bond of Union, and keep it longer alive and warm
in the affections (Jefferson et al., 1904, Vol. XVI, pp. 122123). It was
Jeffersons lifelong friend and enemy, John Adams, the orthodox Calvinist
and arch-Federalist, who evinced the greater misgivings about the dangers
of American idolatry. He compared the idolization of Washington and
other revolutionaries to the canonization of saints and other corrupt
practices of a superstitious hierarchical past, and told young Americans that
his generation was not better than theirs (Maier, 1997, p. 180). Here, we
rst glimpse a pattern that will repeat itself again and again from Adams
through Lincoln to Niebuhr and on to King: a wizened, Augustinian voice
warning against the fateful temptation to national self-worship that is
inscribed at the very heart of the ACR (Deneen, 2005; Gregory, 2008), a
temptation to which many Americans, like Ancient Israelites ocking to
Egyptian eshpots, would soon enough succumb in the heated carnage of
the Civil War (Stout, 2006).
193
THE CIVIL WAR: THE CIVIL RELIGION REVISED

On July 4, 1826, the jubilee year of the Declaration they had labored over
together, Adams and Jefferson both passed from this life, nally and fully
reunited only in death. Many glimpsed the hand of providence behind these
events. Be that as it may, the ensuing moment of national unity was shortlived, a brief reprieve in the sectional conict that rst ared in the heated
debate that led to the Missouri Compromise (1820). The decades of the midnineteenth century, especially the years of the Civil War itself, amounted to
a third founding, a time of trial (Bellah) that would fundamentally alter
the ACR. We can track these changes across the evolving views of three
men John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass two
of whom would drift further and further apart, and two of whom would
move closer and closer together.1
John C. Calhoun (17821850) was one of the most inuential political and
intellectual gures in Antebellum America. In the mid-twentieth century,
intellectual historians offered wildly varying interpretations of him ranging
from the philosophe of the Reactionary Enlightenment (Hartz, 1955) to
the Marx of the master class (Hofstadter, 1948) to a half-hearted follower
of Burke (Kirk, 1953). Although there is some truth to each of these claims
Lockean, proto-Marxian and Burkean themes do gure prominently in his
theorizing recent interpretations have rightly argued that Calhoun was
rst and foremost a student of classical republicanism (Ford, 1988a; Ford,
1988b; Maier, 1981; Vajda, 2001). A disciple of Madison, Calhoun gradually
became disillusioned with his mentors view, most fully spelled out in
Federalist no. 10, that the size and diversity of the American republic would
give rise to so many opposing and cross-cutting factions as to guard
against any possible tyranny of the majority. The new party system and
intensifying sectional conicts showed the limitations of Madisonianism, he
thought. An ardent nationalist in his early years, Calhoun evolved into
perhaps the most able defender of slavery and states rights during the 1830s
and 1840s. His Disquisition on Government and Discourse on the
Constitution and Government of the United States, both published shortly
after his death, sought to defend the slave society of the Old South in
explicitly republican and Constitutional terms. He began by noting that the
classical republics of Greece and Rome were also slave societies and argued
that only a slave economy can sustain the disquisitive and disinterested elite
that Aristotle and Plato demanded. He also contended that the states
preceded the Union and that the Constitution was nothing more than a
compact between the states, which they might leave if they wished
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
(Calhoun and Cheek 2003, p. 62, 68, 74, 152). The opening words of the
Constitution, We, the People, he opined, refer to the peoples of the states,
not the people qua nation, for the United States plural are not a nation,
but a federation (Calhoun & Cheek, 2003, p. 75, 77). What, then, of the
Declarations opening gambit that all men are created equal? Like many
of his contemporaries, Calhoun rejected this premise as an outright
falsehood that was inserted y without any necessity (Calhoun & Cheek,
2003, p. 681). Adam and Eve excepted, human beings are born not created,
and they are born dependent, not free. What is more, they are unequal in
their abilities and these differences are magnied by society. Like other
proslavery intellectuals, he argued that the real spirit of 76 was the right
of revolution, not the equality of creation. Thus, while Calhoun defended
slavery and states rights in republican and Constitutional terms, he was
only able to do so by bowdlerizing a key verse of the American scripture
and renouncing the nationalist vision of his youth.
In many respects, Calhouns arguments are simply particularly elegant
versions of republican arguments for slave society that circulated widely
during the two decades before the Civil War (Cooper, 1983). They are
somewhat unusual in at least one respect however: they make little appeal to
Christian Scripture. Biblical defenses, however, were by far the most
common (Faust, 1981; Irons, 2008; Noll & Blair, 2006) as one would
expect: the average citizen was much more likely to know The Bible than
The Politics. And such arguments were not difcult to make. After all, the
Ancient Israelites kept slaves, and the Apostle Paul urged slaves to obey
their masters (Stringfellow, 1841). Southern Christians often portrayed
African slavery as a form of missionary work, as well, or as a more merciful
institution than the wage slavery that prevailed in the Northern states
(Holmes, 1851). Conspicuously absent from such defenses, however, was the
righteous indignation of the Jeremiad concerning the oppression of the weak
by the strong. In sum, proslavery Christianity abandoned the spirit of the
covenant for the letter of the text.
Until the 1850s, Lincolns views were often not far from Calhouns, nor
Calhouns from Henry Clays. In 1848, for instance, speaking before the
House of Representatives about the War with Mexico and the proper
boundaries of Texas, Lincoln (1992, p. 61) echoed the closing paragraphs of
the Declaration, arguing that
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and
shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a
most valuable,a most sacred right y Nor is this right conned to cases in which the
whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of that
195
people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as
they inhabit.
Could this not be construed as a natural rights justication for

Confederate secession? In these years, he followed Calhoun and presaged
Chief Justice Richard Taney (Farber, 2003) in arguing that the preamble of
the Declaration was the white mans charter of freedom and did not apply
to blacks (Lincoln, 1992, p. 88). Nor can Lincolns views on racial equality at
this point be adjudged much superior to those espoused by Calhoun. Like
Jefferson before him, Lincoln repeatedly afrmed the racial inferiority
of African-Americans during these years, even as he rejected all claims to
social or civic equality. He was against slavery, to be certain, but not for
integration or even abolition: whatever the fate of slavery in the new states
and territories, Lincoln (1992, p. 286) contended, the Federal government
had no authority to abolish slavery in the old states of the South.
Beginning in the 1850s, however, Lincolns opinions underwent a steadily
accelerating process of radicalization, catalyzed by the passage of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), the formation of the Republican Party (1854),
the Dred Scott decision (1857), and nally, the Civil War, itself (Foner, 2010;
Oakes, 2007). As regards the relationship of the states and the Union, Lincoln
gradually elaborated a view that was diametrically opposed to Calhouns.
The Union was not the creation of the states, nor the Constitution a
voluntary compact from which individual states could withdraw at will;
rather, the states were themselves created by the Union, which the
Constitution sought to perfect (Lincoln, 1992, pp. 310311). Likewise, his
interpretation of the Declaration now foregrounded the preambles appeal to
equality more than the conclusions to revolution, so much so that he
eventually came to the view that the promises of the preamble governed the
articles of the Constitution. The Declaration, with its sacred principle of
liberty to all is, in his famous metaphor, the golden apple, whereas the
Constitution is but the picture of silver that frames it. It is against this
background, and out of his encounters with liberated slaves like Frederick
Douglass, that we must understand his eventual espousal of full emancipation and civic equality for American blacks.
As Lincolns views gradually diverged from Calhouns, Frederick
Douglass (18181895) views gradually aligned with Lincolns. Following
his escape from slavery in 1838, Douglass was rst pulled into the orbit of
the radical abolitionists around William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell
Phillips. For them, the Declarations promise of equality was the founding
covenant of the nation, whereas the Constitutions compromise over slavery
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell(Phillips &

Madison, 1845). If the nation were to survive, slavery would have to be
abolished and the Constitution and perhaps even the Union along with it.
Until the late 1840s, Douglass espoused this view as well (Douglass, Foner,
& Taylor, 1999, p. 127). Under the inuence of fellow abolitionist Gerrit
Smith (17971874), Douglass gradually revised his views until he was nally
ready, in 1851, to publicly proclaim that the Constitution was not a
proslavery document. Like Lincoln a decade later, Douglass became
convinced that the meaning of the Constitution had to be read through the
Preamble to the Declaration. The Preamble, he explained to a white audience,
is the ringbolt to the chain of your nations destiny y That bolt drawn, that
chain broken, and all is lost (Douglass et al., 1999, p. 191). It is clearly not
because of the peculiar character of our Constitution that we have slavery,
but the wicked people, love of power, and selsh perverseness of the
American people (Douglass et al., 1999, p. 351). Douglass even rejected
abolitionist arguments for secession: My argument against the dissolution
of the American Union is this: It would place the slave system more squarely
more exclusively under the control of the slaveholding States, and withdraw it
from the power in the Northern States which is opposed to slavery
(Douglass et al., 1999, p. 388).
Unlike Calhoun, and to a far greater degree than Lincoln, Douglass also
used the metaphor of the covenant and the rhetoric of the jeremiad to make
his argument against slavery and for greater civic equality of all kinds.
African slaves, he implied, were as much a part of the founding covenant as
the Puritans themselves:
simultaneously with the landing of the Pilgrims, there landed slaves on the shores of this
continent y We leveled your forests; our hands removed the stumps from your elds and
raised the rst groups and brought produce to your tables. We have been with you, and
are still with you, have been with you in adversity y We are American citizens, and we
only ask to be treated as well as you treat aliens y . (Douglass et al., 1999, p.177)2
And yet, Americans had broken that covenant, had broken Winthrops
promise of brotherly affection: Go where you may, search where you will,
roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World y for
revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival,
Douglass thundered (Douglass et al., 1999, p. 197). Anticipating the activist
orientation of the Social Gospelers, Douglass especially singled out an
American Church that esteems sacrice above mercy; psalm-singing above
right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness (Douglass et al.,
1999, p. 2000). And yet, he remained condent of the certain overthrow of
197
slavery because of the nature of the American Government, the tendencies

of the age, and the character of the American people and, more than that,
because he believed that human beings are created both free and equal and
that slavery is an open rebellion against Gods government that cannot
possibly persist (Douglass et al., 1999, p. 348).
The Civil War, then, catalyzed several important changes in the civil
theology: a new civil hermeneutics that read the Constitution through the
Preamble of the Declaration; a new civic narrative that wrote African slaves
into the American founding; and, perhaps most consequentially, the claim
that human beings are created free as well as equal, that human liberty, in
other words, is a universal and natural right. This new dispensation was
given prophetic voice by Frederick Douglass, and priestly authority by
Abraham Lincoln, and would be baptized in blood by Lincolns assassin.
BETWEEN THE WARS: A COMMON FAITH?

The interwar years (19181940) brought another time of trials for the
United States and another reworking of its civil theology. The trials in
question here were less the product of the Great Depression however great
those trials were than of two concomitant but independent developments:
the dissolution of the Protestant establishment that had long dominated
American culture (Handy, 1991) and the end of geopolitical isolation that
had long shielded the American homeland (Sherry, 1995). Although oldline churches of the Northeast had been losing market share to Protestant
sects and Roman Catholics for some time (Newman & Halvorson, 2000)
indeed, on some accounts, since the Colonial Era (Finke & Stark, 1992), their
inuence within the realms of education, journalism, and even science
remained enormous and disproportionate. By the early twentieth century,
however, the liberal Protestant establishment was faced with powerful
secularist rivals (C. Smith, 2003) and also with a conservative rebellion from
within the Protestant world itself (Marsden, 1991; Marsden, 2006). As time
would show, it was the Protestant establishment, rather than the Fundamentalist upstarts, who were the real losers in the Scopes Trials. Meanwhile,
the diplomatic and institutional failures of Wilsonian internationalism, on
one hand, and the successes of Communism and Fascism in Europe, on the
other, now made it increasingly difcult to reconcile Americas long-standing
policy of disengagement from the Old World with its equally long-standing
vision of itself as the last best hope for republican self-government. These
two momentous developments raised two troubling questions for the ACR:
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
Was it possible to articulate a non-Protestant, and indeed, nontheistic,

version of the American civil theology? And, was it possible to reconcile the
American mission with American power without succumbing to the
temptations of collective self-worship? Answers, or at least attempts at
answers, may be found in the writings of John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr,
two leading public intellectuals of the period who also proved to be
innovative civil theologians as well.
Deweys early years were spent in the very lap of the Protestant establishment. His father was a Civil War veteran and a successful greengrocer in
Burlington, Vermont. His mother was a pious Congregationalist, an ardent
Social Gospeler, and an active Republican. They sent their second-born son
to the local state University, where he imbibed yet more liberal Protestant
orthodoxy, along with a sizeable portion of German idealism. Dewey seems
to have fallen away from his Protestant beliefs during early adulthood, but he
retained a strong faith in ethical culture and social progress, which enduringly
colored his philosophical and political views (Rockefeller, 1991). Although
Dewey was an avowed naturalist and humanist, who eschewed the notion of a
supernatural or personal God, he was neither a materialist nor even a
secularist in the strict sense. He forcefully defended the reality of ideality
throughout his career and late in life proposed a common faith in
democracy as a via media between fundamentalist forms of Christianity and
atomistic and interest-driven versions of liberalism. He rst attempted to
formulate this creed in his 1892 address on Christianity and Democracy
and returned to the problem of democratic faith again in the concluding
chapter of The Quest for Certainty. But his last and fullest statement on the
subject is to be found in his 1934 Terry Lectures, entitled A Common Faith.
Never before in history, he began, has mankind been so much of two
minds, so divided into two camps, as it is today. One camp is composed of
orthodox believers who hold that nothing worthy of being called religious is
possible apart from the supernatural. The other consists of radical
secularists who believe that y not only must historic religions be dismissed
but with them everything of a religious nature (Dewey, 1934, p. 1). Deweys
aim was to chart a via media that is nontheistic without being anti-theistic. To
this end, he argued that we can and must distinguish the religious from
religion. The distinguishing characteristics of religion, he says, include a
belief in the existence of the supernatural and possession of an absolute truth,
on the one hand, with an institutionalized priesthood and an exclusive
community. The religious, on the other hand, is a quality of experience,
which he denes as the idea of a whole, the unication of the self, the
conviction that some end should be supreme over conduct, morality
199
touched by emotion, and better adjustment in life and its conditions

(Dewey, 1934, pp. 8, 1822). The religious may also be contrasted to the
unreligious attitude, which lacks this sense of dependency on others and this
reverence for the whole and attributes human achievement and purpose
to man in isolation from the world of physical nature and his fellows
(Dewey, 1934, p. 25). If Deweys view of the unreligious stance of radical
secularism is clear enough, his attitude toward the organized religion of the
churches was more ambivalent. At several junctures, Dewey contends that the
churches attempt to monopolize religion stands in the way of a more unied
and generalized religious attitude, which could underwrite his expansive
vision of democracy(Dewey, 1934, p. 28, 66). Elsewhere, however, he suggests
that the churches might contribute to the religious by relaxing their claims
regarding religion (Dewey, 1934, p. 82). On one point, though, Dewey is
quite clear: Neither individual interests nor institutional procedures alone will
sufce to sustain the democratic faith; rather, a religious attitude of sorts is
required, not a faith in a supernatural God, for him, but one in the powers of
collective intelligence.
But what of collective stupidity? Or even collective evil? Awash in the
optimism of the American n-de-sie`cle, secular liberals and Social Gospelers
such as Dewey gave little attention to such questions. They were condent
that human nature was essentially good and that proper education was
sufcient to eradicate political stupidity. As a young pastor in Detroit in the
1920s, Niebuhr had shared this optimism; in the decade that followed, he
gradually shed it in favor of a neo-Augustinian realism premised on
the notion of original sin, which he regarded as the only empirically
veriable aspects of the biblical tradition (Deneen, 2005, p. 247). Niebuhr
understood original sin in anthropological terms as the corruption of the
will, a persistent and ineradicable tendency of all human beings to
selshness and pride. This tendency, he argued, inevitably and pervasively
infects human actions and institutions and will always do so to some degree.
To deny this, he charged, is to convict oneself of na ve idealism, and he
found many secular liberals guilty, Dewey included. While Niebuhr afrmed
Augustines emphasis on original sin, he rejected the Calvinist theory of
total depravity and secular variants of it, whether Smithian, Darwinian,
or Nietzschean. To deny that human beings are capable of moral goodness,
even of seless love, he insisted, is to convict oneself of another form of
na vete: na ve realism. Niebuhrs efforts to give both propensities their
proper due led to a complex system of political ethics, which he dubbed
Christian realism. Against left-wing isolationists and pacists and rightwing Fascist sympathizers, for example, he argued forcefully for American
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
intervention in World War II. Whatever its failings, he insisted, AngloAmerican democracy was more just than the political religion of the
Nazis, and evil of great power can only be countered with still greater
power. At the same time, he presciently warned against the temptations of
self-righteousness and self-worship that would attend an American victory,
reminding his fellow citizens that political controversies are always
conicts between sinners and not between righteous men and sinners
(Niebuhr & Brown, 1986, p. 114). Niebuhrs Christian realism also led him
to a view of American democracy that was a good deal less ebullient than
Deweys, if also more sanguine than, say, Schumpeters. Echoing Madison,
he insisted that the U.S. Constitution had been written by men who believed
in original sin and knew that human institutions had to be designed for
human beings as they are, not as we would wish them to be. By pitting
faction against faction, and elite against elite, he argued, the American
system placed a check on the worst propensities of the powerful. Elsewhere,
he sounds a more lyrical note, with faint undertones of Whitman, arguing that
we cannot y leave the total human enterprise unredeemed and that the
pursuit of justice requires a sublime madness in the soul (Niebuhr, 1932).
In essentials, Dewey and Niebuhr were not as far apart as they and others
after them have claimed. Dewey was much more aware of the pervasiveness
of selshness and conict than Niebuhr allowed, and Niebuhr was a good
deal more hopeful about the possibilities for love and reconciliation than
some of his contemporary champions acknowledge. Many of the differences
between them were ones of temperament and tone. Dewey was a jovial
genius, an optimist who preached a religion of uplift. Niebuhr, by contrast,
was an American Jeremiah, who preached a religion of repentance.
MLK/RFK: TRANSCENDING COLD WAR

LIBERALISM
The civil theology of Dewey and Niebuhr was a high church version of
ACR, a farewell sermon from the Protestant establishment, more suited for
print than the pulpit, replete with philosophical and theological allusions,
but short of scriptural citations. However inuential Dewey and Niebuhr
may have been and their public inuence was indeed enormous it
radiated from university lecture halls and the pages of The New Republic. And
by the 1950s, it had ossied into the cautious and satised orthodoxy of social
reformism and geopolitical containment known as Cold War liberalism
201
(Pells, 1985). It would soon be smelted in the re next time (Baldwin) of the
Civil Rights movement and the upsurge of grassroots political activism that
followed in its wake. The kindling for that conagration was a low church
version of ACR whose Moses was Martin Luther King and whose Jesus was
Robert F. Kennedy, a black preacher and a Catholic politician.
King was arguably the greatest homilist of the civil theology and is
certainly the best known to contemporary Americans. Every American
schoolchild has listened to Kings I have a Dream Speech and few adults
can read it without tears, so deeply does it play on our mystic chords of
memory (Lincoln), so powerfully does it invoke our sacred scriptures,
biblical and civic. Standing before the Lincoln Memorial on the centennial
of the Emancipation Proclamation, with the television cameras rolling, King
decried the unfullled promise of racial emancipation and the American
Dream. Two years earlier, he had redened that dream as a dream as yet
unfullled, as a modern version of Winthrops dream, a land where men
of all races, of all nationalities and of all creeds can live together as
brothers, best expressed in the words of the Preamble to the Declaration,
which he cited in full (King & Washington, 1991, p. 208). Echoing Deweys
democratic metaphysics, but in terms of a Biblical metaphor, he argued that
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single
garment of destiny (King & Washington 1991, p. 210). Echoing Niebuhrs
political realism, but with a nod to Gandhi, he insisted that social progress
never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability, but that physical force must
be countered with soul force and not violence. Finally, echoing the
jeremiads of Douglass and other abolitionists, he insisted that we will not
be satised until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a
mighty stream (King & Washington, 1991, p. 219). As such, Kings speech
was itself a might streamy, or rather, a conuence of many streams owing
through the American mind. Nor was it a mere synthesis of preexisting
currents: King introduced new streams of discourse and subtly shifted others.
To the tradition of individual rights, natural and God-given, he added the
Jewish and Catholic personalism of Martin Buber and Gordon Parker
Browne. To Niebuhrs dictum that power be met with power, he added
Gandhis doctrine of nonviolent soul power. He also subtly recast covenant
theology and civic republicanism. To the rst, he added a new page, by
turning his attention from the making of the covenant to the Exodus from
Egypt and the journey toward the Promised Land, thereby linking the
golden age trope of the Jeremiad to the eschatological narrative of the New
Testament and its secular variant, the narrative of human progress. To the
second, he added a new inection, suggesting that the American people were
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
composed not of pre-cultural individuals but of culturally formed peoples

white and black, Jew and Gentile, and Catholic and Protestant whom he
carefully addressed in their own languages, invoking their own authorities.
On April 3, 1968, on the eve of his assassination, with an unnerving
premonition of his imminent demise, King announced that he had seen the
promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know
tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land (King &
Washington, 1991, p. 286). The following evening, having just learned of
Kings assassination from an aide, Robert F. Kennedy clambered atop a
parked car in the Indianapolis ghetto to share the news with the unknowing
throng that had gathered to hear him speak. A collective moan went up.
Kennedy continued, in this difcult day y it is perhaps well to ask what
kind of a nation we are y For those of you who are black y you can be
lled with bitterness y We can move in that direction y in great polarization. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand,
to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across
our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love
(R. F. Kennedy, Guthman, & Allen 1993, p. 356). After noting that
I had a member of my family killed, his rst public mention of the JFK
assassination, he quoted Aeschylus: In our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God that same awful grace of
which Lincoln had spoken in his Second Inaugural (R. F. Kennedy et al.,
1993, p. 357). Kennedy had not always spoken this way. He began his
political career as an anticommunist crusader during the McCarthy years.
After managing his brothers Presidential campaign and following him to the
White House, he strongly supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He was, in
a word, the consummate Cold War liberal. His brothers assassination pushed
him into a period of personal despair and public reclusiveness. During these
years, he became increasingly concerned about poverty and inequality and
increasingly opposed to the Vietnam War and to the militarization of
American society more generally. When he nally reentered the political
limelight in the spring of 1968, it was these two issues poverty and the war
that were the focus of his own Presidential campaign. But the larger message
was a call for national unity and a return to American traditions. Like King,
he sought to (re)dene the American dream in terms of American ideals,
rather than in terms of material goods: However important they may be, he
argued, income and education and homes do not make a nation. Nor do
land and borders. Shared ideals and principles, joined purposes and homes
these make a nation. And that is our great task: to make one nation out of
203
two (R. F. Kennedy et al., 1993, p. 366). He warned, too, against the folly of
trying to export these ideals through the barrel of a gun:
John Adams once said that he considered the founding of America to be part of a
divine plan for the liberation of the slavish part of mankind all over the globe. This
faith did not spring from grandiose schemes of empires abroad. It grew instead from
condence that the example set by our nation y would spark the spirit of liberty around
the planet y . (R. F. Kennedy et al., 1993, p. 372)
In the nal days of his campaign, he called for a new politics that would
transcend the old divide between liberals who wanted to spend more
money and conservatives who pretend that all problems should solve
themselves (R. F. Kennedy et al., 1993, p. 389). He quickly racked up a
string of primary victories against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson
and Democratic challenger, Eugene McCarthy, and in a diverse collection of
states including Kansas, Indiana, and California, demonstrating appeal, not
only to urban liberals and African-Americans but also to Midwestern
farmers and urban ethnics in short, the core constituencies of the New
Deal coalition. Then, on June 6, 1968, he too was felled by an assassins
bullet, just moments after his victory speech in the California primary,
opening the way for Richard M. Nixon to prise that coalition apart using
the wedge issues of race and crime, and initiating 40 years of Republican
hegemony in American politics.
THE CIVIL RELIGION OF BARACK OBAMA

Commentators have often remarked on Obamas hybridity, on his ability to
bridge some of the deepest divides in American politics through his complex
personality and unique life story: black and white, urban and rural, ghetto
and penthouse, and secular and religious (Remnick, 2010). A source of
anguish in his youth, it became a source of strength in adulthood. But there
is also another dimension to Obamas hybridity, which has gone quite
unnoticed up until now: his ability to speak in all of the diverse and
accumulated registers of Americas civil theology. This, too, is a result of his
unusual, even singular, biography (Kloppenberg, 2010). As a scholar of
Constitutional law, he has an almost Talmudic knowledge of American
political scripture and its various historical interpretations. As a youthful
reader of Douglass and King and an adult convert to the black church, he
gained a thorough uency in the language of covenant and the rhetoric of
the Jeremiad. As a student at Harvard in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
was deeply inuenced by the rediscovery of civic republicanism and its

inuence on the American Revolution. There, too, he became conversant
with Dewey through exposure to Hilary Putnam and other champions of the
pragmatist tradition. Later, he would delve deeply into the Christian realism
of Reinhold Niebuhr.
Thus, we should not be surprised to see him blending together the many
strands of American civil theology in his political oratory. Following in the
tradition of Douglass and Lincoln, for example, Obama frequently cites the
Preamble to the Declaration, with its promise of equality and liberty,
natural and God-given, as the canonical statement of American ideals.
Following in that same tradition, he cites the Preamble to the Constitution,
particularly the performative opening, We, the People, as an afrmation
of national unity, rather than a nod to state sovereignty, often in tandem
with the motto, e pluribus unum.3 And like them and like King and
Kennedy after them, Obama treats these ideals, not simply as a social
contract, regulating the relations between atomized individuals, but as
something more binding, as a founding covenant that the nation must seek
to live up to, and to which it must continually return in times of crisis.
Throughout his campaign, for example, Obama attacked the policies of the
Bush administration rst and foremost as a betrayal of Americas founding
ideals. Of the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Katrina, he insisted
that This is not who we are, This is not what American means. A gentle
Jeremiah, to be sure, one tted to an era when many Christians no longer
believe in Hell, but a Jeremiah nonetheless. The inuence of civic
republicanism is equally pervasive if perhaps less obvious. It manifests
itself, rst of all, in the way in which Obama discusses freedom and liberty,
not simply as the absence of restraint, as the right to do as we please, so long
as it does not harm others, as in the liberal/libertarian reading from Hobbes
to Hayek; rather, he treats liberty also as a balance of independence and
interdependence, of rights and obligations, as the opportunity to shape ones
one life plan, to be sure, but also as the responsibility to ensure that fellow
citizens and future generations enjoy this opportunity as well. It manifests
itself, as well, in Obamas deep commitment to a politics that seeks to
transcend party; like the Founders, Obama worries that professional
politicians and partisan rancor will undermine the sense of a common
purpose and a common good that is essential to a republican polity, as
opposed to a liberal one, in which the common good is reduced to a Pareto
optimal welfare function constituted of individual preferences and utilities.
As for the inuence of Niebuhrian realism, it is most evident in the recurring
contrast that Obama draws between a hope that persists despite, and even
205
because of, suffering, struggle and failure, and an optimism that rests on a
Panglossian picture of historical progress, and, relatedly, in his continual
chiding of the cynics, the children of darkness who deride the na vete of
hope. It is also evident in his clear rejection of pacism and his readiness to
use power to confront power, as evidenced, on one hand, in his disquisition
on just war theory on the occasion of his Noble Peace Prize and, on the
other, on his willingness to escalate the war in Afghanistan, even as he
wound down the war in Iraq as well as his readiness to gun down Osama bin
Laden, rather than commend him to an international tribunal, allowing
concrete considerations of prudence to trump procedural versions of justice.
Wherein lies Obamas contribution to the civil theology? First of all, of
course, in his intellectual synthesis of its various strands and his successful
deployment of it in national politics. Bellahs 1976 epitaph for ACR, his
claim that it is an empty and broken shell, appears to have been
premature, now that Obama has indeed put Humpty Dumpty together
again. More than this, however, Obamas contribution consists in subtly
rearranging the pieces to yield something both familiar and new. Of
particular importance is his attention to religio-cultural pluralism. Whereas
King and Kennedy mainly emphasized race and, to a lesser degree, class,
Obama again and again refers to the religious mosaic of contemporary
America and the divide between religious and secular America. Although
many secular liberals were outraged by Obamas selection of superstar
pastor, Rick Warren, to deliver the benediction at his Inaugural, indeed, by
the fact that Obama commissioned a benediction at all, few noticed his
explicit inclusion of nonbelievers in his list of American faith groups. This
is no accident. As Obama astutely explained to a gathering of liberal
evangelicals led by Jim Wallis in 2006:
the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from
effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem here is rhetorical if we
scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through
which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.
(Call for Renewal, June 6, 2006)
As Todd Gitlin (1995) noted long ago, one of the greatest political
handicaps that has limited the liberal left since the late 1960s has been its
renunciation of the language of patriotism and national identity. In burning
the American ag, both guratively and literally, the left allowed the right to
wrap itself up in the stars and stripes. I would add to this a second
limitation: the full-throated embrace of liberal secularism by the intellectual
allies of the Democratic party. In my view, this position is both illegitimate
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
and misguided. Illegitimate insofar as the insistence that religious reasons be

excluded from the public square is at odds with core liberal principles of
freedom of conscience and expression. Misguided insofar as America
remains, for better or worse, a highly religious country in the conventional
sense of that term and a deeply metaphysical country over and above that.
For both those reasons, liberal secularism is not the proper rallying cry for a
new, Democratic majority. Neither, of course, is religious nationalism. That
leaves us with civil religion. And it is Obamas genius to have recognized and
rearticulated it.
CONCLUSION: THE AMERICAN CIVIL THEOLOGY

AS INDIGENOUS CRITICAL THEORY
In closing, let me reect on some possible objections to the idea of an ACR.
The rst is that it excludes nonbelievers. This is simply mistaken. Since its
very inception, Americas civil theology has been tightly intertwined with the
classical republican tradition a tradition that arose well before the advent
of Christianity and that can be defended in wholly secular terms (Laborde &
Maynor, 2008; Pettit, 1997; Skinner, 1998).4 Moreover, as we saw earlier,
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a pragmatist thread
was woven into the civil theology as well. Although most of the pragmatists
(e.g., Peirce, James, and Whitehead) espoused some form of (usually
heterodox) religious faith (Menand, 2001), Deweys rested on a nontheistic
metaphysics.
A second objection is that it divides believers and nonbelievers. This, too,
is mistaken. What currently divides believers and nonbelievers in the United
States is the hegemony of liberal secularism on the left and religious
nationalism on the right, the claim, on the one hand, that religion must be
wholly excluded from public life, and the counterclaim, on the other, that an
avowed atheist cannot be a good American. One of the great advantages of
the American tradition of civil theology is that it provides a shared language
in which believers and nonbelievers can potentially speak to, rather than
past, one another.
A third objection, and one that I want to respond to at greater length is
that the American civil theology is a supercial theory that lacks the critical
potentials of competing traditions, particularly imported ones, such as
Marxian class analysis or Bourdieusian eld theory. This objection is
likewise mistaken. In reality, the American civil theology is a multistranded
207
social theory with profound critical potentials that often go unrecognized, a

theory tradition, moreover, which has the additional (political) advantage of
being an indigenous tradition with deep popular resonances. Consider civic
republicanism. It rests on a view of human agents and political society that
lead to a highly critical appraisal of present-day American society. In
contrast to the liberal view of human freedom as the absence of restraint a
view that runs across the American political spectrum from secular
progressives through libertarian independents to right-wing evangelicals
and pro-market business elites the republican view of freedom emphasizes
human ourishing, a view, moreover, that has been ably elaborated in the
human capacities approach set forth by American thinkers such as Martha
Nussbaum (Nussbaum, 1997; Nussbaum & Cohen, 1996) and Amartya Sen
(1984, 1999). It also leads to a more communitarian understanding of the
polity, in which the overarching aim is the achievement of a common good,
not merely the maximization of individual utilities, indeed, to the view that
genuine human ourishing is only possible within a certain kind of polity
(Etzioni, 2004). Finally, as Eric Nelson has recently shown, the republican
tradition from Plato through Harrington to Adams and onward also
contains an egalitarian strand that can provide a strong rationale for
redistributionist policies, insofar as some measure of material security is
seen a sine qua non of the independent judgment required for good
citizenship (Nelson, 2004). Furthermore, as Richard Rorty (1998), Hilary
Putnam (2004), Richard Bernstein (2005), and others have shown, it is also
possible to arrive at similar critiques without making strong assumptions
about the nature of the human good or human evil.
No doubt, some readers will still feel uncomfortable with the explicitly
religious parts of American civil theology. Secular progressives are more
receptive to notions of human ourishing and the common good than
to talk of original sin and divine wrath. But sometimes discomfort is a
good thing, especially if it unsettles our settled preconceptions and opens us
to the limitations of our own worldviews. How many of us really believe
that Osama bin Laden or Hitler or Stalin, for that matter were just
products of their social environments? Can we so easily dispense with the
category of evil in their cases? And dont most of us think that Hurricane
Katrina was a punishment of sorts for the persistence of racism and
corruption in American society, albeit one visited mainly on innocents? As
that great defender of Enlightenment rationality, Jurgen Habermas, has
recently reminded us, even for unbelievers, the language of our religious
traditions contain moral resources, which are still far from exhausted(Habermas, Pope Benedict, & Schuller, 2006). If he is right, then we
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
would be foolish to discard the prophetic strand of our civil theology, the
strand so skillfully woven by Winthrop, Douglass, King, and others, insofar
as it provides humbling reminders of the limits of human goodness and
reason.
NOTES
1. Here, I closely follow the argument in Oakes (2007), but add Calhoun to the
mix as a third point of reference.
2. There is, of course, a Lockean undertone in this passage, which emphasizes the
connection between labor and ownership.
3. Of course, he is hardly alone in citing the political scriptures these days; perhaps
infuriated that their long-standing claim to be the guardians of American traditions
is now in dispute, American conservatives have begun waving pocket editions of the
U.S. Constitution around as if they were Gideons editions of the New Testament.
Note, however, that their scriptural hermeneutic is different than Obamas. Whereas
Obama treats the founding documents as a set of ideals whose meaning is gradually
disclosed through history and that can never be fully realized in reality, Tea Party
conservatives read them as a set of rules whose meaning is self-evident and must be
fully enforced without delay.
4. And even against it, as the development of republican thought in contemporary
France and Britain well shows.
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CIVIL RELIGION AND THE

POLITICS OF BELONGING
Joseph Gerteis
ABSTRACT
Philip S. Gorskis Barack Obama and Civil Religion seeks to revive
and reform the concept of civil religion. This response addresses two sets
of issues raised by the entwined analytic and normative claims in the
chapter. The rst concerns the denition of civil religion, including how
the civil and religious spheres are connected within it and how civil
religion differs conceptually from other related models. The second
concerns whether a renewed commitment to civil religion will provide a
platform for greater openness and pluralism, as Gorski claims.
The idea of reform is far older than the Reformation and is, in fact, central
to Christianity itself says Robert Bellah (1992, pp. 910). Philip S. Gorski,
like Bellah, aims to reform both the concept of American civil religion and
the society in which it may make its mark. Gorskis main thesis is that
Obamas rhetoric must be understood as existing within the tradition that
has been termed American civil religion. But the chapter does not have
much to say about Obama. Instead, the larger focus of the project is to
reformulate and rehabilitate the notion of civil religion (Gorski, 2011,
p. 180), to make sense of the interwoven strains of civic and religious
Rethinking Obama
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022014
215
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JOSEPH GERTEIS
discourse in American life, and to work out the related tension between
republican and liberal understandings of citizenship.
I think it is undeniable that the two spheres have been intertwined, that
this has been an obvious and important feature in American life, and that it
deserves the kind of scholarly attention that Gorski is trying to bring to it
again. Indeed it seems vital to focus on the nature of American civic
belonging when we have, in Obama, a prominent public and political gure
attempting to nd a way to talk about it in a meaningful and robust way. It
seems important too when we also have among Tea Party adherents and
Republican Presidential candidates a very different but equally passionate
melange of claims about civic and religious belonging.
Because of all this, I read Gorskis chapter with a great deal of interest,
even though I was also left with a number of questions about the connected
theoretic, empirical, and normative arguments. In what follows, I want to
focus on two issues. The rst concerns the denition of civil religion,
including how the civil and religious spheres are connected within it, and
how civil religion differs conceptually from other related models. The
second concerns whether a claim to a stronger American we-ness built
around the civil religious tradition is compatible with greater openness and
pluralism as Gorski claims. Although some of these questions are beyond
the scope of Gorskis current chapter, I hope they may prove useful to the
discussion of the chapter and the larger project.
CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS SPHERES

Looking back, Bellah lamented that much of the initial heated debate about
civil religion concerned the concepts denition, while he wished instead that
critics would engage what he saw as the substance of his argument. Yet, the
denitional problem is important because the concept can be (and has been)
understood in different ways, and because not making conceptual sense of
the differences confuse what is at stake in the discussion.
Gorski offers two kinds of denition of the concept. On the substantive
side, civil religion is dened by its discursive contents. With Bellah, Gorski
holds that two main threads of this discourse are covenant theology and
civic republicanism. On the formal side, Gorski invokes Webers discussion
of value spheres to dene civil religion in relation to other ideal-typical ways
that the political and religious spheres might converge, primarily liberal
secularism and religious nationalism. I generally agree with both of these
Civil Religion and the Politics of Belonging
217
denitions, and I think the combination of the two is a real strength,

providing Gorskis framework an analytic clarity Bellahs did not have.
[M]ost Americans, believers and non-believers alike, do not wish to see
the church subjugated to the state, or vice versa, Gorski tells us. Instead,
they prefer parity between the two spheres. What is at issue, then, is the
exact form this parity should take (Gorski, 2011, p. 182). To be sure, and I
think it is important to raise two questions about the denition and its
relationship with messy empirical reality.
First, I think it is worth asking just what combination of the civic and
religious spheres must be present in civil religion. For example, does it
necessarily involve covenant theology, or religion more generally, or just a
more abstract adherence to some spiritual or transcendent reality? Must it
be a civil religion, as Bellah seemed to have it, or a civil religion, as Rousseau
suggested, and as Bellah seemed to come around to later? For that matter,
must religion necessarily be part of the equation at all, or is a sort of
religion of purely civic belonging possible?
Put differently, does the term always refer to the same thing? At least, the
emphasis between the civic and religious poles shifts in the different
examples Gorski discusses. For John Winthrop and the Puritans, the
covenant theology loomed larger than an abstract political belonging. For
later adherents of the civic cult, the political belonging itself had deep and
perhaps primary meaning. With a gure like Dewey, the properly religious
side was almost absent entirely; his commitment was to the democratic
faith (Gorski, 2011, p. 196). All of these are shared stories but it is not
clear to me whether these are best understood as variants of the same
tradition, or as meaningfully different claims. Indeed, there are other ways
to view some of the more secular of these gures; Hansen (2003), for
example, considers Dewey one of a generation of cosmopolitan patriots
who drew upon both the liberal and the republican political traditions, while
remaining open to religious as well as racial and ethnic difference.
Second, what exactly is the relationship between civil religion and other
models? Gorski is right to point out that we are not forced to choose just
between liberal secularism and religious nationalism, despite the dominance
these models can seem to have in politics and public discourse. In America,
civil religion stands between them with a long and vibrant history. In the
theoretical model Gorski outlines, the distinction comes down to the
difference between separation, overlap, and fusion of the civil and
religious spheres.
This distinction is helpful, but it raises new questions in turn about the
exact meaning of these terms. Does overlap indicate that the two spheres
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JOSEPH GERTEIS
have independent but equal place in the same public discourse? If so, how
does that differ in practice from separation? On the other hand, if fusion
means that the two spheres are inextricably connected, where do we draw
the line either theoretically or practically between religious nationalism and
civil religion, where covenant theology is understood as a central part of
ones commitment to the civic realm?
I do not think it is illegitimate to worry about the fuzzy nature of the
distinction between civil religion and religious nationalism in particular.
This is a theoretical as well as empirical problem. As Gorski says,
contemporary religious nationalists view the United States as a Chrisian
nation or, somewhat more expansively, as a Judeo-Christian nation,
founded on Christian principles, from which, alas, it has diverged and must
return (Gorski, 2011, pp. 182183). By this denition, most Americans
seem to be very close to the religious nationalist pole.
In a recent national survey, my colleagues and I asked directly whether
Americans believe this to be a Christian nation (Hartmann, Gerteis, &
Edgell, 2003). Fifty-nine percent of American adults agreed that it was and
said in a follow-up question that they thought this was a positive thing.1
Another 17 percent said that they did not think it was a Christian nation,
but also indicated that they thought it should be. Taken together, this was
the majority position among people in all income levels, all racial groups,
and all partisan categories. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most reliable
dissenters to this view were religious minorities, including Jews, Muslims,
and religious nones.2
In short, a large proportion of American adults roughly three quarters
could be characterized as religious nationalists by this denition. Gorksis
focus is generally on the dangers of liberal secularism. However, such facts
suggest either that the political space is not so evenly divided between
religious nationalism and liberal secularism as Gorski suggests (indeed, next
to religious nationalism, there is little room left over for anything else), or
that the line between civil religion and religious nationalism is awfully faint.
I think this is the reason that many on the left, religious and secular alike,
are hesitant to abandon the bright-line approach of liberalism.
There is another connected difculty, which is that many or even most of
those who sound like religious nationalists or assimilationists when they talk
about America as a Christian nation may also sound like republicans when
talking about civic commitment and like liberal cosmopolitans when talking
about diversity generally. This kind of slippage happens all the time even in
public discourse. For example, in which of these boxes would we place
219
Michele Bachmann, the religious conservative representative from Minnesota and (as I write this at least) Republican presidential contender? While
she is clearly more often in the religious nationalist camp than Obama, she
and others afliated with the Tea Party movement have no problem
defending individual freedoms in terms of civic traditions or libertarian
principles. For that matter, whether we call Obama a liberal secularist or a
defender of civil religion depends largely on which statements we chose
to parse.
CULTURAL BOUNDARIES AND EXCLUSIONS

The above questions are about the relationship between the denition of
civil religion and how this connects with messy empirical reality. I also think
it is important to bring up a different sort of question about inclusion and
exclusion in the American we. Is civil religion consonant with greater
pluralism and openness, as Gorski suggests? Gorskis argument about this
rests on two points. The rst is that liberal secularism is not a good starting
place for a more unied America. The second is that his approach to
dening civil religion is at least potentially more open to multiple and
conicting visions of religio-politics than Bellahs original, neo-Durkheimian formulation (Gorski, 2011, pp. 180181). Although not stated
explicitly here, Gorskis argument also seems to be that other potential
models for a more unied America (purely civic republicanism and religious
nationalism among them) are either less desirable or less historically
accessible than civic nationalism.
So far, so good. But while I very much appreciate Gorskis attempt to
produce a denition of civil religion on Weberian grounds, I also think that
this raises a rather Durkheimian question of solidarity, while sidestepping
an examination of the kinds of trade-offs solidarity entails. To put it
succinctly, a stronger national we involves both stronger bonds of
inclusion and clearer kinds of exclusion. A largely secular liberal
cosmopolitanism solves the problem in one way, by avoiding strong claims
about belonging in the rst place. Certain integrative forms of multiculturalism attempt to do so in a different way, by positing a model of
commitment much closer to purely civic republicanism, but also by giving
up on a xed notion of what culturally marks that belonging (see Hartmann
& Gerteis, 2005). So where exactly does civic religion give way to exclusions
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JOSEPH GERTEIS
(either civic, religious, or both)? Where must we make the tough choices
between increased tolerance of differences and stronger commitments to
shared belonging?
I should say very clearly here that this is not Gorskis problem alone.
Bellahs Broken Covenant outlined many unjust exclusions that marked
failures of our democracy. The problem of inclusion and exclusion has
been especially acute with respect to racial groups, Bellah said, but it has
also arisen in connection with the national, linguistic, and ethnic groups
who have come as immigrants to these shores (Bellah, 1992, p. 88). To
Bellahs list, we should also add religious exclusion; a gradual expansion of
the American we in the religious sense brought Catholics and eventually
Jews tenuously into the fold, but the concept of a single Judeo-Christian
tradition is still relatively new, and it is often invoked precisely to mark a
boundary between those who belong and others (Muslims, nonbelievers)
who do not (see Hartmann, Zhang, & Wischstadt, 2005).
Clearly Bellah thought that a renewed commitment to civil religion was
necessary; yet, he remained vague on exactly who could and could not
belong if we were to revive our broken covenant. Gorskis argument is
clearer, mainly because his denition of civil religion itself is more explicit.
But at least in this chapter, it remains vague on just this point. Gorski does
not think that a renewed civil religion will exclude nonbelievers, rather, he
says that it will provide a shared language in which believers and
nonbelievers can potentially speak to, rather than past (Gorski, 2011,
p. 204). I do not think we can have it both ways. If the shared language is the
Christian (or perhaps Judeo-Christian) tradition that most Americans think
it is, then that certainly leaves out Muslims and others. Even if this is
softened to a generally religious belonging, I do not see how nonbelievers
are included (and neither, it must be noted, do most Americans; see Edgell,
Gerteis, & Hartmann, 2006). Finally, if Gorski is calling for the left to
simply return to a stronger understanding of patriotism and national
identity (Gorski, 2011, p. 203) without a religious revival attached to that
belonging, why must it be civil religion and not simply civic
republicanism?
Again, this is not a problem that can be solved by theory alone. Normative
arguments are involved here too, as are claims about the possibilities and limits
imposed by what shared stories are and are not culturally and historically
available to Americans to draw upon. Perhaps the stronger national bond that
comes with a renewed commitment to civil religion (whether explicitly
Christian or not) is worth such exclusions, and perhaps not. Certainly, as
Gorski argues, the civil religion has helped us confront and partially
221
overcome some of our own most brutal exclusions, especially regarding race.
But we should not forget that it comes at a price.
OBAMA AND CIVIL RELIGION

Once again, I should say that many of the questions and objections I have
raised here are beyond the scope of Philip Gorskis chapter. The narrower
issues, such as how we distinguish between fusion and overlap of the
religious and civil spheres, or how to get a better purchase on the different
kinds of invocations of civil religion, will likely be answered or at least
claried with Gorskis forthcoming book and the discussion that will surely
grow up around it. Broader issues, like the dialectic of inclusion and
exclusion, are not ones that can be solved by any one author, but I think
have to be confronted nevertheless. One thing I have tried to point out in
this response is that Gorskis argument weaves together strands of theory
and empirical analysis with explicitly normative conclusions. I agree with
Gorski on many of the analytic and theoretic points, and even some of the
normative ones. However, in the spirit of democratic dialogue, I think it is
important to bring the entanglements between those strands out in the open
as much as possible.
My own commitments are rmly secular, but before Obamas candidacy,
I too felt that Democrats especially needed to nd a way to call for renewed
commitment to a collective American we, and I recall surprising myself
during a late night discussion with a friend by saying that Democrats were
probably too hesitant to express this in terms of religious as well as civic
traditions. My friend remarked that he had been reading Niebuhr and that
he thought that the intellectual as well as the public tradition of civil religion
was ripe for renewal. Both things have to some extent come to pass in the six
or seven years since that conversation, although neither the intellectual nor
the practical issues are settled.
I would like to conclude by bringing the discussion back to Obama and to
the idea of civil religion generally. Has Obama indeed put Humpty
Dumpty back together again? I am not so sure. Certainly Obama has
found a way to talk about the importance of civic commitment more directly
than many Democrats (or indeed Republicans) have done in recent years.
Although he was sometimes derided in the 2008 campaign for it, his
rhetorical calls for a stronger, shared belonging clearly struck a powerful
chord. And to a great extent, he has put this idea of mutual respect and
222
JOSEPH GERTEIS
shared sacrice into practice, often refusing to engage in partisan battles

(often to the frustration of many erstwhile supporters on the left).
It also strikes me that he has been quite hard to pin down on the
boundaries and contents of that belonging. Although he is clearly
comfortable speaking in the many registers of civil religion, he also mixes
that mode freely with civic republicanism and liberal secularism. When he
has insisted that This is not who we are(Gorski, 2011, p. 20) has he been
meant that we have not lived up to our civic ideals, our covenant with God,
or both? It also strikes me that his engagement of civil religion as a way to
build a more unied American we has had only limited success. Obama
himself has been essentially written out of this very we by many on
racial as well as civic and religious grounds. It hardly bears repeating that a
sizable number of Americans believe that he is a socialist, a Muslim, a
foreigner posing as a citizen.
Finally, does civil religion constitute a fully-edged folk theory? Again, I
am not so sure. Certainly it is a powerful tradition, one that is widely shared
and that has provided a platform for confronting injustice as well as
complacency. But it is also slippery. The fact that it has been invoked in
such different ways by different gures does not invalidate it. To me, it does
however suggest that it is less a coherent theory than a broad idiom, akin to
what social movement scholars have termed a master frame. Regardless, it is
a tradition that has not always been invoked in favor of worthy causes
(Bellah, 1967, p. 15) it has been harnessed in service of both internal and
external exclusions (see also Kaufmann, 2004). This seems to me no less true
today than it was then, and given what is at stake, it seems an important
reminder.
NOTES
1. The wording was as follows: In the past, some people have called the United
States a basically Christian nation. Would you characterize the United States as a
Christian nation today?
2. For a discussion of the latter category, see Hout and Fischer (2002).
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Hout, M., & Fischer, C. S. (2002). Why more Americans have no religious preference: Politics
and generations. American Sociological Review, 67, 165190.
Kaufmann, E. P. (2004). The rise and fall of Anglo-America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
CIVIL RELIGION FOR A DIVERSE

POLITY
Andrew R. Murphy
ABSTRACT
Philip S. Gorskis Barack Obama and Civil Religion offers a number of
important contributions to the study of American culture generally, and
American Civil Religion (ACR) more specically. Gorskis appreciation
of the deep diversity in contemporary American society is a welcome
development in ACR analysis. I ask whether the term civil religion
remains most adequate for describing the sort of cultural phenomenon
that Gorski, following Bellah, attempts to capture, and offer some
methodological and interpretive comments on the promise and challenge
of studying ACR in the twenty-rst century United States. I close with
some more particular remarks on Barack Obama and the contours of
ACR as sketched by Gorski.
I am delighted to have been asked to participate in this forum on Professor

Gorskis essay, which offers a tantalizing sketch of an exciting book that all
scholars interested in American religion, culture, politics, and society will
eagerly await. Such essay-length overviews are necessarily truncated
versions of much fuller arguments, so my comments here may raise points
that will be treated in due course, and at greater length, in the book. That said,
the essay stands on its own as well, and I will begin by laying out what I see as
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ANDREW R. MURPHY
its main contributions to the study of American Civil Religion (ACR); discuss
several intriguing questions of terminology, conceptual analysis, methodology, and interpretation that the chapter raises; and conclude with a more
specic consideration of Barack Obamas role in all of this.
THE ESSAYS CONTRIBUTIONS: BRINGING CIVIL

RELIGION INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
As I see it, Gorskis reformulation of ACR enriches our understanding of
American culture, politics, and religion in a number of ways, all of them
stemming from his recognition of the deep diversity that characterizes
contemporary American society. Incorporating Weberian categories that
acknowledge the multiple value spheres extant in modern life is the rst step
in such a recognition, and a move away from Bellahs Durkheimian
approach. As Gorski points out, for Weber, the relation between any two
value spheres is historically and culturally variable and inuenced by material
and ideological factors [A fuller discussion of Webers value spheres might be
augmented by a consideration of Michael Walzers Spheres of Justice (Walzer,
1983), which is not explicitly Weberian in its orientation but which does raise
some relevant questions]. ACR, then, is not an automatic reex, some sort of
deep, almost unconscious cultural impulse; but rather one constellation of
religio-politics among several, a contested position on a matrix of possibilities
and a middle ground between those who would subordinate the political
community to religious considerations and those who would rule religious
elements out of public life. Thus, through the distinction between civil religion
on the one hand and liberal secularism and religious nationalism on the other,
Gorskis version of ACR emphasizes the multiplicity and contestation at the
heart of Americans ongoing efforts to understand the meaning and
signicance of their collective political undertaking.
As such, ACR stands for a space that permits (even encourages) deep
communal self-examination while maintaining a sense of the nations singular
importance as a source of democratic and egalitarian values and, as Bellah
put it in the original article, a light to the nations (Bellah, 2005, p. 55; see
also Jewett & Lawrence, 2003, esp. Chap. 4). Not only does this reformulated
ACR attend to the rhetorical and textual bases of American nationhood (the
broad consensus on general principles of nationhood, transcendence, and so
on, evidenced by political oratory in times of national crisis), but it also
focuses on the tensions that arise from practical questions of how those
Civil Religion for a Diverse Polity
227
general principles are to be interpreted politically, not to mention

geopolitically, in specic situations. None of these elements of Gorskis
ACR are entirely absent from Bellahs classic formulation, of course, but they
are laid out more systematically here.
Furthermore, Gorskis matrix (Figure 1 of the original essay) of possible
congurations between the religious and the political suggests ways that we
might marry the study of ACR with comparative research on religion,
politics, and society. This matrix which will no doubt be elaborated more
fully in the book holds the promise not only of exploring various religiopolitical constellations over the course of American history (e.g., the
intriguing but anomalous gure of John C. Calhoun, or the rise of the Tea
Party), but also allows for dialogue between analyses of American religiopolitical dynamics and those of other nations. The bridge between ACR
scholarship and the literature(s) on nationalism whether it be in A. D.
Smiths (2003) analysis of chosen peoples, Michael Billigs (1995)
attention to the ordinary and everyday manifestations of nationalism, or
more general questions of theorizing the nation that continue to animate
scholarly discourse (see, e.g., Beiner, 1999; A. D. Smith, 2010) is an exciting
prospective line of research growing out of Gorskis essay.
CIVIL RELIGION OR PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY?

Both Bellah and Gorski note the roots of theorizing about civil religion in
Rousseaus Social Contract, which allows us to pinpoint what is so unique
about its role in the interpretation and analysis of American culture.
Rousseau saw civil religion as an overt arm of the state, backed by its
coercive power: violation of its tenets, he wrote, should lead to banishment
or even death. Bellah, on the other hand, pointed to the more informal ways
in which ACR in America relied on extra-governmental cultural resources in
ways that gave meaning to the American experience from the colonial
period down to the present day. As he put it in the original article,
the separation of church and state has not denied the political realm a religious
dimension. Although matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are
considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common
elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share y This
public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am
calling American civil religion. (Bellah, 2005, p. 42)1
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ANDREW R. MURPHY
In his 1980 work with Philip Hammond, Varieties of civil religion, Bellah
emphasized the formality and marginality of ACR: it was formal, he
wrote, in the scarcity and abstraction of its tenets [and] marginal in that it
has no ofcial support in the legal and constitutional order y Belief in the
tenets of the civil religion is legally incumbent on no one and there are no
ofcial interpreters of civil theology (Bellah & Hammond, 1980, p. 12). So
from the very outset, it has been important to differentiate the ACR from
the sort of explicitly coercive, state-centered civil religion such as Rousseau
envisioned (or that was valorized by Machiavelli in his comments on
Romulus and Numa2).
Gorski properly notes that Bellah eventually abandoned the term civil
religion altogether in favor of public philosophy (Bellah, 1986), a term
also used by Bellahs collaborator William L. Sullivan (1982) and later by
Michael Sandel (1996) as well. This terminological move from civil religion
to public philosophy provides an opening for Gorskis robust defense of
the distinctiveness of ACR as both historical-cultural phenomenon and
ongoing contemporary analytic category.
Although I would afrm the continuing conceptual importance of civil
religion, it is certainly worth asking precisely what the term civil religion
buys us that public philosophy does not. What theoretical work is done
by including the term religion that would be lost by replacing it with
philosophy? Does the specically religious imagery and rhetoric of civil
religion offer something that mere philosophy cannot? And if so, what
might it be? Especially as religious studies scholars (Cavanaugh, 2009;
Shedinger, 2009; W. C. Smith, 1962; J. Z. Smith, 2004) are engaging in
searching debates about whether the term religion is itself an analytically
useful category and probing the power dynamics that have always inhered
in the notion of religion per se, let alone comparative religious studies
some attention to denitions seems in order. In other words, what is
religious and what is civil about civil religion?
One possible way to approach this terminological question would be to
claim that in a situation of deep diversity and pluralism where the fastestgrowing response on religious afliation surveys is none public
philosophy has become the functional equivalent of civil religion. Perhaps
we should think of civil religion and public philosophy not as dueling terms
for describing a constant American reality, but as two stages in an unfolding
historical process. Gorski brings in recent and important scholarship that
has appeared in the years since Bellahs pioneering work on civil religion,
emphasizing the particularly American nexus of Christianity and republicanism in the early national period (Noll, 2002; see also Holield, 2003).
229
This Christian background gured prominently in Tocquevilles analyses of

American religion, though by the time of Bellahs original formulation the
Protestant mainstream had expanded to include Will Herbergs (1955) famous
trinity of Protestant, Catholic, Jew. But what conception of religion
civil or otherwise can adequately encompass the deep diversity in
contemporary American society as elaborated in the most recent Pew
Research Center data (see http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/afliations-alltraditions.pdf), where a full 12% of respondents answered nothing in
particular when asked for their religious afliation? (Indeed, as Gorski points
out, Barack Obama was the rst president to explicitly include nonbelievers
in his celebration of American diversity.) Is it perhaps better to imagine the
nations collective cultural foundations as something other than religious?
Or is religion itself capacious enough to somehow take in the enormous
range of American belief and practice?
DATA, METHOD, AND INTERPRETATION: FUTURE

DIRECTIONS IN THE STUDY OF ACR
One of the more exciting questions that Gorskis essay raises involves
methodology and interpretation. If something like an ACR exists (and I
think it does), how ought we to go about identifying and interpreting it?
Where should we expect to nd evidence of its principles? How will we
know if it has changed in signicant ways over time? Gorski builds the case
for ACR (both its existence and its main features) from presidential oratory
and other expressions of elite opinion (Winthrops Christian Charity,3
speeches and writings of Douglass, Dewey, Niebuhr, and King). Bellahs
essay opened with John F. Kennedys Inaugural Address, and both his and
Gorskis casts of characters consist largely of national-level public gures
speaking to issues of signicant public import, often in times of grave crisis.
The ACR literature claims, of course, that these national public gures
reect, in some way, broader cultural, political, and religious aspects of the
American populace. And in a democratic society, there is indeed a prima
facie assumption that leaders reect the sentiments of the electorate. (Of
course, the views of the electorate may or may not, depending on the issue,
mirror the views of the broader public. But I leave this question aside.)
But what are the specic mechanisms and pathways between elite
discourse and mass attitudes, between the views of public gures and those
of ordinary citizens by which these interconnections operate? The link
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ANDREW R. MURPHY
between such macro-level occurrences as presidential Inaugural addresses

and popular attitudes is often difcult to pin down with precision. Lincoln
at Gettysburg, for example, certainly gave voice to key elements of the
ACR. And yet although the war was popular in the North when framed as a
defense of the Union, it was much less so when viewed as a struggle for the
freedom of blacks (witness the New York draft riots, which took place while
bodies still were piled on the Gettysburg battleeld). Lincoln received not a
single Southern electoral vote in the election of 1860, and remained an
intensely controversial president well into his presidency. Frederick
Douglasss eventual praise for the sixteenth president, accurately noted by
Gorski, was very slow in coming: Douglass expressed deep and bitter
disappointment with Lincoln throughout the early years of his presidency,
and even supported a Radical Republican effort to replace Lincoln with
John C. Fremont as the Republican presidential candidate in 1864. The
apotheosis of Lincoln after his assassination (Peterson, 1994) should not
blind us to his intensely controversial four years as president. If Lincoln at
Gettysburg gave voice to the ACR, what do we then make of the millions of
Americans and their elite leaders who were in active rebellion against
those principles, let alone those who saw the Civil War merely as a defense
of Union and not as a crusade against slavery? Were they simply choosing a
different box in Gorskis matrix? Or is the ACR capacious enough to
encompass both Lincoln and John C. Calhoun? (And if so, does it still have
conceptual or analytical bite?)
So we need to further clarify and interrogate the parallelism between
incidents in American politics and broader realities of American society.
In political science, this has led to a literature on critical and realigning
elections, where the collapse of party systems both responds to and yields
new issues, candidates, and political and cultural constellations (examples
generally include the elections of 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932; see
Burnham, 1970; Key, 1955; Sundquist, 1983). Even here, though, making a
convincing claim that an electoral return (which represents the will of a
certain portion of the people, at one particular time, who cast their votes
for a wide variety of often idiosyncratic reasons) is tricky; it is perhaps
necessary in order to talk broadly about American politics, but also invites a
healthy skepticism about grand claims based on imperfect data (see Dahl,
1990). Lincoln, after all, was elected with roughly 40% of the popular vote
in 1860.
My point here is not to criticize Gorskis approach, which he accurately
compares to a high altitude overview. We continue to need such
231
overviews. Rather, I am calling for renewed attention to both the macro and
the micro level, for the building of a new literature on the ACR that
encompasses both the view from high altitudes and more localized and
contested ground-level picture. The micro-level of such a renewed literature
could take several forms:
case studies of the ACR in specic political episodes or crises across American history
(e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the War of 1812).
analyses of specic rhetorical aspects of the ACR over time (e.g., Chosen Nation,
Manifest Destiny, New World Order). [I attempted to do something along these lines
with my analysis of the American jeremiad (Murphy, 2009a).]
biographical studies that highlight the connections between personal and political in
past and present American leaders (e.g., the spate of works on Lincoln during the 150th
anniversary of his birth, in 2009).
Such a new literature of the ACR would also ask about the relations
between speakers who articulate the ACR in American politics and the
many audiences to which they appeal. How might we go about assessing the
inuence of thinkers like Niebuhr and Dewey who sought legitimacy in
ways other than elected ofce in the lives of ordinary citizens?
Complicating all this is one of the great challenges of writing about
political rhetoric and especially about politicians who are or were also
political thinkers, like Jefferson, Lincoln, Obama, and so on. How should
we best approach political speeches, Inaugural and State of the Union
addresses, campaign rhetoric, and the like, as objects of scholarly inquiry?
To what extent is the language used in them reective of a deep personal
commitment of principle, and to what extent is it appealing to certain
constituencies for political support? (And to what extent, if any, does such a
distinction matter?) I do not mean to suggest duplicity, though no doubt
there is plenty in American politics. My point is just that scholars of civil
religion need always to keep in mind that the texts we use to provide insight
into these larger, macro-level historical phenomena are voiced, by their
speakers, in highly particular contexts and contests, and represent crafted
narratives intended to make certain points to certain constituencies, often
with very narrow political aims in mind. When we say that Obamas
speeches since 2004 represent an effort to revive and regure th[e] tradition
[of American civil religion], do we mean that Obama is intentionally taking
on such a task; that his rhetoric has, intentionally or not, had such an effect
(for some Americans, to be sure, though hardly for all); or that, in order to
be elected president, certain themes simply must be sounded?
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ANDREW R. MURPHY
ENTER OBAMA
These methodological or interpretive caveats are in evidence when we
arrive at Barack Obama. Here we see the great potential of ACR analysis
to shed light on contemporary American society, as well as the challenges
of studying a gure so much a part and so polarizing a part! of our
contemporary discourse. Gorski rightly suggests a biographical component
to Obamas syncretic political thinking, echoing James Kloppenbergs
account in Reading Obama (Kloppenberg, 2010). No doubt a full-edged
biographical treatment of Obama, along the lines suggested in the previous
section (third bullet point), will trace these connections and the ways that
the feed into Obamas role in the tradition of ACR; we await such a work.
But with Obama, we also see some of the difculties of attempting
scholarly analyses of our contemporaries. For example, did then-Senator
Obama, during his 2008 campaign for the presidency, really provide a
jeremiad against the Bush administration? A gentle Jeremiah, to be
sure y but a Jeremiah nonetheless. Or did he rather, in the midst of a
hard-fought political campaign, simply offer a critique of the incumbent
administration? If ACR rightly claims that somehow American political
rhetoric is more than mere rhetoric, is it also sometimes just rhetoric?
As candidate and president, Obama has exhorted the nation to rise above
partisanship, denounced the shrill tone of American politics, and sought a
way between polarized extremes: but hasnt every president spoken in such a
way (even while actually behaving in highly partisan ways, see Skinner,
2006)? A continuing engagement with Obama such as is promised in
Gorskis book holds the key to bridging the historical study of ACR and
its ongoing role in shaping and reecting American cultural politics into the
twenty-rst century.
I also want to draw special attention to footnote 3 on p. 208, on the issue
of political scriptures and the clash between rival hermeneutics for disclosing
their meaning. Obama, on this account, is the most recent, and surely one of
the most compelling, exemplars of what I have called the progressive
jeremiad: a way of looking to the American past for insight into the crises
of the present, without expecting those answers to be found ready-made in
the concrete specics of our predecessors; and understanding that past
insights will need to be rethought for new times and new challenges
(Murphy, 2009a, 2009b). One might also look at Vincent Crapanzanos
intriguing book Serving the Word (Crapanzano, 1999) for further insight
along these lines. I suspect that there is an entire article, if not a book of its
233
own, to be written on Obamas hermeneutic of the nations civil religious

scriptures (for a start on these issues, see Kloppenberg, 2010, Chap. 3).
A FEW CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

I am less convinced than Gorski of the utility of drawing a sharp distinction
between liberalism and republicanism, at least insofar as such a distinction is
presented as descriptive of early Americans. He is surely right to point out
the divergent tendencies of these two schools of thought in twentieth- or
twenty-rst-century America, and my own home eld of political theory was
consumed with the liberalism-communitarianism-republicanism debate for
much of the 1980s and 1990s. Having said that, though, thinkers like Locke
and Jefferson show how an emphasis on individual rights need not come at
the expense of a concern for the health of communities, and it is unclear
whether early modern thinkers understood these traditions to be distinct, let
alone competing. Nor should we assume, either, that contemporary
liberalism entirely eschews moral talk (Berkowitz, 1999; Dagger, 1997;
Galston, 1991; Kloppenberg, 2000).
The important challenge going forward, I think, is to nd a way to bridge
the theoretical analysis of ACR and the concrete details of American politics
and society. It may be true, theoretically speaking, that opposition to y a
hubristic and exclusivistic nationalism is one of the negative dogmas of the
ACR. But what does this statement about ACR tell us about American
electoral politics? We are, after all, just three years out from the Bush
administration, where hubristic and exclusive nationalism from Bring
em on! to Mission Accomplished! ruled the day. Barack Obama may
indeed have put Humpty Dumpty together again, in terms of providing
sound arguments against religious nationalism and liberal secularism and
synthesizing the various elements of the ACR; but politically speaking, such
a reconstruction seems fragile at best, given the deep cleavages that his
administration has brought to light.
So we are left with the difcult relationship between past, present, and
future, and the question of how to make sense of the present moment: is the
conservative Republican resurgence (from the Tea Party to the legal
challenges to the health care legislation; Gorskis political alliance between
business-oriented and family values fractions of the present-day GOP)
evidence of a protracted standoff between civil religion and religious
nationalism? Bellah wrote that the civil religion has not always been
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ANDREW R. MURPHY
invoked in favor of worthy causes (2005, p. 51), but as I understand the

account presented in this essay, Gorski would deny that such unworthy
causes (John Birchers, Know-Nothings, and the like) were in fact
employing the ACR, but rather represent religious nationalism masquerading as ACR. Are we left then with standoff? Or are there elements of the
ACR which Gorski rightly characterizes as a multistranded social theory
with profound critical potentials that often go unrecognized that might
encompass aspects of liberal secularism, or religious nationalism? Does the
ACR represent some sort of Rawlsian overlapping consensus? If so,
where might those points of intersection or overlap be, and how might we
build on them toward a common American future?
In sum, then, I found myself repeatedly challenged and intrigued by
Professor Gorskis essay and anticipate reading the argument in its fuller
form. By offering a more complex account of civil religion, as well as its
chief competitors, Gorski has laid the foundation for a searching analysis of
American culture in the book-length study to come.
NOTES
1. And, in The Broken Covenant, as Gorski points out, Bellah dened civil religion
as that religious dimension y through which [a people] interprets its historical
experience in the light of transcendent reality (1975, p. 2).
2. Despite Romuluss singular importance in founding Rome, Machiavelli argued
that the real author of the citys glory was not its famous founder but rather his
successor Numa, who wanted to train [the Romans] to live a sociable life and to
practice the arts of peace. So he turned to religion because it is essential for the
maintenance of a civilized way of life, and he founded a religion such that for many
centuries there was more fear of God in Rome than there has ever been anywhere
else (Discourses, I, Chap. 11).
3. Winthrops Model is at once vital to any account of the ACR and elusive as a
primary source. It is unclear when, in what circumstances, by whom, and even
whether it was delivered; its existence was largely unknown well into the nineteenth
century; its provenance remains dubious in many ways; and the rst transcription,
published in 1838, was pronounced very inaccurate by the venerable scholar
Samuel Eliot Morison. And yet it does clearly articulate much of what we know
about the aspirations of the Puritan leadership of early New England. For a
fascinating account of these issues, see Dawson (1991).
I have only one objection to Gorskis use of Winthrop, and I think it actually
reinforces his argument about the centrality of ACR. Gorski states that, in
Winthrops view, if we succeed y then we shall be as a city upon a hill [and] the
eyes of all people are upon us. In fact, Winthrops point was that, regardless of
whether they succeeded or not, they would be that city on a hill, visible to all around.
Thus faithfulness was important, not only because of its consequences for New
235
Englanders own spiritual and civic health, but also because faithlessness would bring
New England and their God into disrepute. The full passage is instructive:
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are
upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God y and so cause Him to withdraw
His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We
shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for
Gods sake. We shall shame the faces of many of Gods worthy servants, and cause their
prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land
whither we are going.
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(Ed.), Civil religion and political theology. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
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Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage.
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Murphy, A. R. (2009a). Prodigal nation: Moral decline and divine punishment from New England
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THE UNFINISHED COVENANT

Michael P. Young and Christopher Pieper
We should begin with making clear our limitations in responding to
Gorskis article. We are not experts in the debates about American civil
religion. Like most sociologists of religion we are familiar with Bellahs
(1967) Daedalus article and its great inuence. We have not followed closely
the empirical work that sought to test whether a civil religion actually exists
in America or elsewhere, and only casually followed the more theoretical
debates surrounding the concept itself. We are actually better versed in
Gorskis work and from that perspective we think his article on Obama and
civil religion can be usefully read as a continuation of a line of reasoning he
launched more than 10 years ago with his American Sociological Review
article on historicizing secularization. In that article he claimed that it was
probable that Western society has become more secular without becoming
less religious and explained why (Gorski, 2000, p. 138). Barack Obamas
invocation of an American civil religion and its popular reception by liberal
Americans ts well with this line of reasoning. In the heady days of 2008,
many liberal Americans seemed to have found (civil) religion with Obama
a surprising turn of events in need of explanation.
Before exploring this line of reasoning let us take a step back and ask why
even attempt to reformulate and rehabilitate the notion of American civil
religion (ACR)? After all, seven years after introducing the concept, Bellah
(1975, p. 142) announced it was an empty and broken shell. He then
walked away from the term altogether, if not the conception. After a urry
of work by social scientists in the 1970s and into the 1980s on the concept,
general academic interest in ACR also waned (Mathisen, 1989), and many
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sociologists of religion thought ACR should be put to rest. Demerath and

Williams (1985, p. 166), for example, said the more basic question was not
whether there is any longer a civil religion but whether the United States
is any longer a civil society. In anticipation of the culture war debates,
Demerath and Williams thought the cultural center on which an American
civil religion would have to rest was dissolving and so thoroughly
fragmented that the tradition Bellah so lovingly and anxiously described
should be pronounced dead. Wuthnow (1988), at roughly the same time,
surveying American society and faith since World War II identied at least
two civil religions in America and found them to be seriously at odds. The
attempt to rehabilitate ACR now more than 40 years after the Daedalus
article therefore is a surprising move by Gorski, but his reformulation of the
concept may hold the key to explaining another surprise: the election of
Barack Obama as president of the United States.
At the heart of the conception of ACR is what Bellah described in the
introduction to a volume he wrote with Hammond on cross-national
comparisons of civil religions as the ubiquitous religio-political problem.
In no society can religion and politics ignore each other. Faith and power must always,
however, uneasily, take a stance toward one another. The polity, more than most realms
of human action, deals obviously with ultimate things y. Religion, on the other hand,
claims to derive from an authority that transcends earthly powers. The possibility of
conict between these potentially conicting claims is always present, yet collisions are
not necessarily constant. At various times and places politics may be little more than the
pragmatic art of getting things done and religion may conne itself to spiritual
matters. Or religion and politics may be two different pragmatics concerned with distinct
spheres of existence.
One area of overlap and potential conict is what sociologists call the problem of
legitimacy, which includes among other things the question whether existing political
authority is moral and right or whether it violates higher religious duties. Most societies
have institutionalized ways of dealing with this potential tension. Whether we wish to
call all such forms of institutionalization civil religions or conne that term to only some
of such forms, it is here that we must locate the problem of civil religion. (Bellah &
Hammond, 1980, pp viiviii, emphasis added)
We reproduce this long passage because we think it aptly describes the

problem Gorski successfully tackles in his article. Drawing on a neo-Weberian
approach, Gorski has provided a framework to think through these
potential conicts (tensions in Gorskis language) and overlaps between
religion and politics in modern societies, the particular kind of articulation of
them that ACR promises, and how Obama tapped that promise and furthered
it. The quote also shows Bellah sounding rather more Weberian than
The Unnished Covenant
239
Durkhiemian, and if we relieve ACR of some of its Durkheimian and

Parsonian burden of providing a sacred canopy of symbols under which all
Americans can unite to think about the transcendent meaning of their nation,
as Gorski does, civil religion may remain an important concept in thinking
about the ubiquitous religio-political problem, the American experience with
that problem, and a possible new turn for the political and spiritual inuence
of liberals in America.
In Gorskis (2000) ASR article, he forcefully argued that theories of
secularization remain important to understanding and explaining religious
phenomena in modern Western societies. In that article, he made an
important intervention in a debate that was drawing a lot of heat but little
light. The debate pitted advocates of a new rational-choice paradigm in the
study of religion and defenders of secularization theories. The new paradigm
supporters argued that since they could nd little evidence for the historical
decline of religion the term secularization ought be dropped from the
current debate and replaced with theories of religious change (see e.g.,
Stark & Iannaccone, 1994). Gorski (2000) was right to point out that their
equation of theories of secularization with theories of religious decline was
not entirely correct. Only some secularization theorists argue for the
historical decline of religion. What most secularization theories do hold in
common is a thesis of differentiation (Gorski, 2000; Smith, 2003;
Tschannen, 1991). The central question or puzzle addressed by this family
of secularization theories is the impact of social differentiation on religious
and nonreligious spheres. The religio-political problem as described above
by Bellah is part of this same puzzle. It was in the social space between
church and state that Americans articulated and re-articulated their civil
religion from the late-eighteenth through the twentieth century. Gorskis
recovery of the strands of discourse brought together in this articulation and
re-articulation civic republicanism and covenant theology accord with
much of the historical narrative Bellah (1975) set down in The Broken
Covenant. Gorski makes clear, however, why this tradition steeped in civic
republicanism need not exclude nonbelievers. Moreover, his inclusion of
liberal secularism and religious nationalism as competing solutions to the
religio-political problem avoids the functionalism of Bellahs earliest
Durkheimian formulation and helps explain how American civil religion
might survive even as the cultural cohesion of civil society show signs of
fragmentation and even polarization. Gorskis neo-Weberian alternative
helps makes sense of this possibility.
In his 2000 call to theorize and historicize secularization anew, Gorski
argued that Webers analysis of the rationalization and differentiation of
240
value spheres in the essay Religious Rejections of the World and Their
Directions should be the taking-off point for a new theory of the processes of
secularization one that could explain how society could become more
secular but not necessarily less religious. Gorski uses this same take-off point
for his reformulation of ACR. In the terms of Webers historical sociology of
religion, the rst momentous differentiation of value spheres comes from the
salvation religions with their distinction of the worldly and other-worldly.
Across these salvation religions, a distinction of meaning domains comes in
the form of rejecting the world in favor of a transcendent realm. Weber
attributed to the Calvinist and sectarian forms of Protestantism a decisive
push in the rationalization of this distinction between the worldly and the
other-worldly. In particular, Puritanism with its inner-worldly asceticism
prosecuted a relentless criticism of magic and ritualism and a rational
organization of ethical life in an effort to transform the world.
Rationalization within the differentiated spheres, Weber argues, gives rise
to increased tension among spheres. This tension emerges not simply
because of an incompatibility, although certainly this is involved, but also
because of competing forms of salvation or ultimate value offered by the
rationalization of each sphere. As Gorski emphasizes, tension does not
mean repulsion and tension can lead to creative interactions or overlaps.
One effect of the rationalization of the political sphere can simply be
disenchantment triggering a search for deeper meaning in other life orders
or value spheres. According to Weber (1946),
[b]y virtue of its depersonalization, the bureaucratic state, in important points, is less
accessible to substantive moralization than were the patriarchal orders of the past y . In
the nal analysis, in spite of all social welfare policies, the whole course of the states
inner political functions, of justice and administration, is repeatedly and unavoidably
regulated by the objective pragmatism of reasons of state. The states absolute end is to
safeguard (or to change) the external and internal distribution of power; ultimately, this
end must seem meaningless to any universalist religion of salvation. (p. 334)
As both Bellah and Gorski argue, politics needs legitimacy that eludes
this disenchanted realm and politicians often draw this needed legitimacy
from religion. In a religious country like America that politicians would
look to religion to nd deeper meanings for reasons of state is not
surprising but also not the only possible source for legitimacy. There are
secular sources for legitimacy. Gorskis inclusion of liberal secularism is an
important addition to the discussion here. In his recent book on
secularization, Charles Taylor (2007) argues that a crucial aspect of
secularization, linked to but not identical with the separation of political
structures from religion, is the changing conditions for religious belief and
241
unbelief, conditions that go beyond the institutional differentiations of

church and state and delve into personal and societal-level changes in
ultimate values. Religious belief now appears in many societies as an option,
and in some places as an embattled option. A purely self-sufcient
humanism which accepts no ultimate value beyond human ourishing is
an increasingly plausible and in some places taken-for-granted world view.
Believers and nonbelievers alike confront this secular reality when making
sense of their own ultimate political values (Taylor, 2007, p. 18).
As Casanova (1994) has convincingly argued, institutional differentiation
of temporal authority and religion has in many western societies led to the
marginalization of religion. (America may be exceptional in this regard.)
Marginalization or more precisely privatization of religion does not,
however, necessarily mean diminishment. The privatization of religion
often deepens and disperses religious meanings in ways that are
indispensable for understanding religions current political resurgence in
many countries, not just America. In these contexts of secular transvaluation, religious political resurgence has come largely in the form of life
politics, to use Giddens term, or new religious social movements defending
the lifeworld from secularizing systems rationalization in Habermas
terms (Giddens, 1991; Habermas, 1987). In this sense, secularization has
brought a degree of reexivity to religious belief. Na ve acknowledgement
of the transcendent, or of goals or claims which go beyond human
ourishing is now unavailable to anyone, believer or unbeliever alike
(Taylor, 2007, p. 21). A radical shift in the background, in the framework of
the taken-for-granted, effects religious believers was well as nonbelievers.
This radical shift marks the political resurgence of religion in characteristic
ways. It can be seen in Obamas creative and reective reformulation of
ACR and possibly the voting behavior of so-called religious nones.
Weber (1946) also argues that politics may at decisive points come into
direct competition with religion. For example, he claims that war creates
pathos and a sentiment of community so deep and meaningful that only
those who perish in their callings are in the same situation as the soldier
who faces death on a battleeld (Weber, 1946, p. 335). Massive economic
dislocations and populist millennial political responses to them present
another example of competition where a political-economic ethic of
brotherly love may rival the pathos of religious community. Bellah (1975)
argued, and we think Gorski would agree, that in America, the creative
tension between party and church, the fact that neither can monopolize
the meaning of ultimate values, has saved the country from the often ugly
consequences of a polity sanctifying itself in a sacricial nationalism. It may
242
also, as a consequence, help make socialism taboo in America (Bellah

1975, Chap. V). When the Civil War came, Lincoln spoke to the national
conscience about the transcendent meaning of the massive deaths on the
battleeld in a way to heal both sides and not to sanctify the victor. And
during the Great Depression, Dewey and Niebuhr were spiritual and
political guides holding the center with democratic promise and introspective guilt.
Of course parity and overlap between religion and politics have not
always been the American course and it may not be the future course.
Gorski argues that liberals ought to celebrate Obamas rehabilitation of this
tradition. In the wake of a resurgent religious right that at times steers
dangerously close to a religious nationalism that would scuttle parity and
overlap, liberals seem to have found in Obamas civil theology a more
popular alternative to liberal secularism. Obama is undoubtedly an adept of
the ACR tradition however deep the tradition it runs in the everyday lives
of Americans (and we think that remains an open question). But liberals
should not be too giddy. The common faith Obama brings to life follows a
Deweyian idea: the experience of unication in times of trial can never be
fully realized, but the hope of it remains a real and powerful guiding
experience so long as it leads to creative and collective adjustments to the
trial. In Obamas own words from Philadelphia in March of 2008:
In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the
worlds great religions demand-that we do unto others as we would have them do unto
us. Let us be our brothers keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sisters keeper. Let us
nd that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reect that spirit
as well y This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown
that it can always be perfected.
Will this generation inspired by Obama continue that run and show that it
can always be perfected?
America is facing a very serious trial: economic strength, inuence
abroad, and integration at home are all under pressure. Social and cultural
experiences of fragmentation among the American people may actually
strengthen the spiritual and political communitarian-pull of Obamas
reformulated American civil theology. In Bellahs historical narrative, the
American civil religion developed through times of trial. The trials were met
with conversion and new covenants. In the past when the civil religion was
not an empty shell, Americans under trial were collectively convicted by sin
and converted. Coming out of the trial always required a new obligation, a
new covenant. In Deweys terms, it demanded a collective adjustment.
243
Bellah cautions that if a new covenant is to be formed, if we are to renew

ourselves as a covenant people, conversion alone will not do it. If we are to
transcend the limitations of American culture and society it can only be on
the basis of an imaginative vision that can generate an experience of inner
conversion and lead to a new form of covenant. Liberation without any
sense of constitution will surely be self-defeating (pp. 8586). Obamas
rhetoric acknowledges this. As Gorski notes, his civil theology mixes the
hope of Deweys collective intelligence with the cautious understanding of
Niebuhrs original sin. In 2008, Obama provided an imaginative vision
that bound millions of Americans together in the hope for change. He did so
through a brilliant reformulation of the American civil religion, but has it
led to a renewed moral commitment of a convenant people willing to reorder its life? Of course, the application of the vision must fall short of the
aspiration, but from the vantage point of 2011 the application appears very
weak. So much hangs in the balance with the outcome of Obamas
presidency. Americans are facing a trial. Obamas soaring rhetoric provided
the imaginative vision generating a feeling of change for many Americans,
but what of the new covenant? Has a new obligation to reorder our national
life to the highest standards has followed? National crimes against our
economy have occurred that deserve national punishment or at least
atonement but none has come. Thousands of families of children born on
American soil who live the American civil religion in their everyday lives
have been ripped apart by Immigration and Customs Enforcement because
of a failure to reform immigration a failure to apply the reformulated
vision of a more perfect union Obama offered. And Americans continue to
die on foreign battleelds without an exalted purpose to make these deaths
meaningful. We are not asking about a national covenant beyond all the
parties, but much more modestly about a moral discipline within one party.
The promised but unfullled change articulated in Obamas civil theology
could leave liberal Americans with hardened hearts. If so, the full-throated
embrace of liberal secularism by the intellectual allies of the Democratic
party bemoaned by Gorski will once again drown out the civil theologians
of liberalism.
REFERENCES
Bellah, R. N. (1975). The broken covenant: American civil religion in time of trial. New York:
The Seabury Press.
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Bellah, R. N., & Hammond, P. E. (1980). Varieties of civil religion. San Francisco: Harper and
Row, Publishers.
Casanova, J. (1994). Public religions in the modern world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Demerath, N. J., III., & Williams, R. H. (1985). Civil religion in an uncivil society. Annals of the
American Academy, 480, 154165.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gorski, P. (2000). Historicizing the secularization debate: Church, state and society in late
medieval and early modern Europe, ca. 13001700. American Sociological Review, 65,
138167.
Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action, vol. 2. Translated by T. McCarthy.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Mathisen, J. A. (1989). Twenty years after Bellah: Whatever happened to American civil
religion? Sociological Analysis, 50, 129146.
Smith, C. (Ed.) (2003). The secular revolution: Power, interests, and conict in the secularization
of American public life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Stark, R., & Iannaccone, L. R. (1994). A supply-side reinterpretation of the secularization of
Europe. Journal for the Scientic Study of Religion, 33, 230252.
Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tschannen, O. (1991). The secularization paradigm: A systematization. Journal for the Scientic
Study of Religion, 30, 395415.
Weber, M. (1946). Religious rejections of the world and their directions. In: H. H. Gerth & C.
W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 323359). New York: Oxford
University Press.
Wuthnow, R. (1988). The restructuring of American religion: Society and faith since world war II.
Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press.
REJOINDER: WHY CIVIL

RELIGION?
Philip S. Gorski
ABSTRACT
This essay is a response to comments made by Gerteis, Murphy, Young,
and Pieper. The question of why civil religion? is further claried. Also
discussed are the conceptual and normative challenges of civil religion and
the potentialities, limitations, and pitfalls of civil religion.
As I write these words, both houses of the United States Congress are
preparing to vote on the 10-year $2.5 trillion austerity program which the
Republican House extracted from the Obama Administration as the
political price for lifting the debt ceiling until 2012. The driving forces
behind this political showdown are well known: the large cohort of Tea
Party freshmen swept into ofce during the 2010 mid-term elections, the
grass roots movement of tri-corn sporting small government activists who
door-knocked for them, and, last but not least, the nancial backing of wellheeled, anti-tax libertarians such as the infamous Koch brothers via
Freedom Works and other astro-turng front groups. For better or for
worse, most observers concur, the nal legislation would not have been
tilted nearly so far to the right to the right even of what many GOP voters
would have preferred, the surveys tell us had it not been for the ideological
intransigence of the Tea Party, whose willingness to engage in a perilous
Rethinking Obama
ISSN: 0198-8719/doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022017
245
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
game of legislative chicken seriously threatened to drive the American

economy over the proverbial cliff. Although a suicidal crack-up has been
averted, at least for now, the left is still feeling steamrolled. The liberal
commentariat, from the New York Times to Daily Kos has focused much
of its ire on President Obama, who stands accused of being a closet
moderate and a weak negotiator. In short, we are now a very long way from
the heady days of the 2008 campaign which originally inspired me to revisit
the civil religion concept in the rst place, so far, in fact, that some may
wonder whether it is still worth revisiting at all. I will return to this question
in the conclusion to my rejoinder. Before doing so, however, I will rst try to
address the insightful questions raised by the three commentators. As I
understand them, these questions fall into three categories: conceptual,
ethical, and political. Specically, they call concern conceptual clarication,
moral justication and practical feasibility.
WHAT IS CIVIL RELIGION? FURTHER

CLARIFICATIONS
In my chapter, I dened civil religion in both formal and substantive terms:
formally, as a situation of parity and overlap between the religious and
political value spheres and substantively as the weaving together of covenant
theology and civic republicanism. Young and Pieper rightly intuited that the
formal aspect of my denition grew directly out of my earlier work on the
secularization debate. But my views about secularization have changed
signicantly over the last decade. Although it will involve a brief historical
detour, explaining how they have changed will enable me to further clarify
what I do, and do not mean, by the term civil religion, and what is, and is
not distinctive, about American civil religion, as I understand it.
In Historicizing the Secularization Debate, I sought a via media between
the orthodox paradigm of secularization and the supply-side critique (Gorski,
2000). In most versions of the orthodox theory, it is argued that the Protestant
Reformation and the Wars of Religion had powerful secularizing effects.1
They are variously said to have resulted in a separation of church and state,
the privatization of religious practice, or even in a decline in religious belief
(Berger, 1969; Bruce, 1996; Philpott, 2001). The supply-side critique focuses
on the third claim, ignoring the other two. Far from undermining
belief, argued Rodney Stark and his collaborators, the fragmentation of
Latin Christendom had the inverse effect: it actually Christianized Europe
for the rst time; before this period, they suggest, Europe was still pagan
Rejoinder: Why Civil Religion?
247
(Stark, 1999; Stark & Iannaccone, 1994). In contrast, I argued that the
early modern era witnessed a de-differentiation of religion and politics, and
a rationalization of religious life. A re-differentiation of church and state,
I concluded, would not occur until the modern era.
Over the past decade, the literature on secularization has grown exponentially (Asad, 2003; Casanova, 2006; Taylor, 2007) . And today, I would
only defend my concluding claim. In retrospect, the plotline of that article
differentiation, de-differentiation, re-differentiation appears misleading
and crude. Misleading, insofar as it implied a golden age of religio-political
unity, when church and state were as yet undifferentiated. Crude, insofar as it
tacitly conceptualized differentiation in purely quantitative terms. This is not
to deny that there have been periods of close cooperation between the
Christian church(es) and temporal power(s); one thinks, for instance, of the
closing centuries of the Roman Empire, post-Constantine (MacMullen,
1984), or the era of confessional states in Western Europe, following the
Reformation, which I explored in The Disciplinary Revolution (Gorski, 2003).
But there have also been periods of greater autonomy, as in the heady days of
the Jesus movement, when the Christian communities took root in the
interstices of the Roman Empire (Meeks, 2003), the heyday of Latin
Christendom, after the Papal Revolution had largely freed the Roman
Church from lay control (Berman, 1983), and, of course, our own Secular
Age, with its constitutional separation of church and state. Alas, it is
difcult to t these historical oscillations into a linear narrative of everincreasing differentiation. Nor can we adequately describe them in simply
quantitative terms, as oscillations in the degree of differentiation.
This is not to say that we should abandon the concept of differentiation
altogether; I doubt we can do without it. Rather, it is to insist on the need
for a more sophisticated theory of differentiation. One possible starting
point is Niklas Luhmanns social systems theory, which sensitizes us to
qualitative shifts in the underlying principle governing religio-political
relations (Luhmann, 1989, 1997; Luhmann & Kieserling, 2000). Functional
differentiation, as Luhmann understands it, organizes society into heterogeneous systems, economic, political, religious, and so on. A social system,
in his framework, is a system of communication, that produces and
reproduces itself and its environment via a binary code. The modern
religious system, for example, employs an immanent/transcendent binary.
Luhmann argues, rightly in my view, that functional forms of social
differentiation do not really become fully dominant until the modern era,
even if they are foreshadowed much earlier in Martin Luthers doctrine of
the two kingdoms (Bornkamm, 2005), for example, or Marsilius of
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
Paduas theory of the two swords (Marsilius & Nederman, 1993). In the
Middle Ages, argues Luhmann, the dominant principle of social differentiation was stratication. The stratication principle structured relations
both within and between the religious and political systems. Both had their
own aristocracies, priests in the one case, warriors in the other. And the
authority of the Church generally trumped the authority of the princes, not
only in principle, but often enough, in practice as well.
In the early modern era, I would argue, the dominant principle governing
religio-politics was segmentation. Latin Christendom was divided up into
three competing and homologous confessions: Catholic, Lutheran and
Calvinist (Klueting, 1989; Schilling, 1988; Zeeden, 1985). Now, however, it
was generally the princes who claimed nal authority over the churches,
inverting the Medieval situation. In early modern legalese, appropriately
enough, secularization referred to the seizure of church properties or
prerogatives by the worldly authorities, not to differentiation or
privatization (of which, in fact, there was precious little) (1984).
Against this backdrop, we can now distinguish three different historical
forms of civil religion within Western political discourse: (1) a classical form,
exemplied by Ancient Rome and Greece, in which there was as yet no clear
differentiation between state and church or between temporal and
sacerdotal power and participation in the civic cult was obligatory for all
citizens (Scheid, 2003). (2) an early modern form, inspired by the Roman
example and championed by Machivelli and Hobbes, in which the state
would have nal authority over church teachings, which would be
instrumentalized by sovereign rulers for political purposes (Beiner, 2011);
and (3) a modern form, premised on a partial separation of the religious and
political, with principled parity between them. When I speak of civil
religion, I am referring only to the modern form.
In the United States, as Bellah rightly recognizes, partial separation has
meant separation of church and state but not separation of religion and
politics. Church/state separation involves organizational autonomy and
role differentiation. The church is not a department within the state, as it
still is in many European countries, and it never has been, not even in the
New England theocracies of the 17th century. Likewise, clerics are not
state ofcials qua clerics, as they often were in the state churches of Western
Europe. But religion and politics have always been connected through civil
and political society, and continue to be so today via social movements,
nonprot groups, parachurch organizations, political parties, and so on.
In practice, principled parity has meant an ongoing effort not always
successful, to be sure to balance the sometimes conicting goods of religious
249
freedom and civic equality. Many of the most vexed and controversial judicial
decisions of the last half century involve efforts to square this circle. In
Employment Division v. Smith, for instance, the Supreme Court considered the
question of whether a Native American citizen could be denied unemployment
benets for using peyote in a religious ritual; it answered in the afrmative. In
Warner vs. Boca Raton, a Florida court had to decide whether a local
cemeterys regulations requiring discreet grave markings violated the
religious freedoms of grieving relatives who erected special memorials to their
loved ones (Sullivan, 2005). Not surprisingly, given the conicting goods that
are at issue namely, religious freedom and civic equality the courts have had
great difculty in establishing a consistent and unied set of standards for
deciding such cases. Many observers feel that they have failed. And a few have
even gone so far as to propose that the civil religion concept itself might
provide a better starting point! (Davis, 1997; Mirsky, 1986).
For all these reasons, I believe that civil religion is more consistent with
the social organization and cultural traditions of the United States than are
either liberal secularism or religious nationalism. Liberal secularists rightly
insist that the United States was premised on a separation of church and
state, but they wrongly understand this to mean a separation of religion
and politics, such that religious actors and arguments would be banished
from the public square (Audi & Wolterstorff, 1997; Rawls, 1971; Rorty,
1999).2 Religious nationalists, meanwhile, are right to insist that the United
States was once a Christian nation if we understand nation in terms
of demographic and political dominance but they are wrong to claim that
it was founded as such in terms of its ideals or laws. The drily deistic
rhetoric of the Declaration and the fully godless language of the Constitution
provide no scriptural warrants for this assertion.
What do I mean, though, when I refer to civil religion as a tradition?
First, let me be clear about what I do not mean. I do not mean political
incrementalism in the Burkean or De Maistrean sense. Tradition, as I
understand it, can also be radical in the sense of critical, even revolutionary,
in its implications. Nor do I mean a lifestyle traditionalism of the sort that
many religious conservatives champion. Tradition, as I understand it, is not
rm and xed but open-ended and subject to revision. Finally, by tradition,
I do not mean a social consensus, nor even a majority opinion. Tradition, in
my view, involves argument. Rather, the American civil religion is more like
a tradition of moral enquiry in MacIntyres sense (MacIntyre, 1981;
MacIntyre, 1990). It is an ongoing argument about how we should order our
lives in common whose parameters are set by the language and authority of
certain sacred texts and certain canonical interpreters but subject to revision in
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PHILIP S. GORSKI
light of experiment and experience. Among other texts, Americas Old

Testament includes Winthrops Arbella sermon, its Gospels are the
Declaration and the Constitution, its Book of Acts the writings of the
Founders, its Epistles include the Gettysburg Address, the I Have a
Dream speech, and, perhaps one day, Obamas race speech as well. And its
leading theologians include, not only the authors of these texts and the
various other gures treated in my chapter but other politicians, pastors,
philosophers and activists as well.3
But is it still a tradition worth defending? It is to this question, that I now
turn.
WHY CIVIL RELIGION? CONCEPTUAL

AND NORMATIVE CHALLENGES
Let us assume, for the moment, that this tradition of moral enquiry actually
exists. Why call it civil religion? Why not call it public philosophy as
Murphy and others propose (Bellah, 1986)? Or just plain civic republicanism as Gerteis would prefer? There are other possibilities as well, such as
public theology (Stackhouse, Hainsworth, & Paeth, 2010; Thiemann,
1991) and public religion (Casanova, 1994). Would not one of these
conceptualizations be preferable? After all, the civil religion concept does
tend to make a lot of people feel a little queasy. Nonbelievers are apt to
recoil at the word religion. Believers may shrink from the adjective
civil. The underlying worry is that politics will be contaminated by
religion, or vice versa.
I think there are good reasons for sticking with civil religion. One is
interpretive adequacy. If Bellah and I are right in arguing that the substance
of the civil religion tradition consists in a tight synthesis of covenant theology
and civic republicanism, then public philosophy and civic republicanism
obscure or leave out the religious strand of the tradition. Public theology is
equally problematic. Civil religion, after all, is not just a theology, it is also a
liturgy. Its ritual calendar includes saints days (Presidents Day, MLK Day),
birth days (July 4th) and death days (Memorial Day), and its history includes
a long series of great awakenings, national revival movements that
mobilized a signicant portion of the citizenry. Public or civil theology,
in other words, is only one component of civil religion. As for public
religion, Jose Casanova has already given it a very specic meaning. For
him, public religion refers to the political engagement of religious
251
communities, usually on behalf of a particular goal. This is not the same as a

tradition of moral enquiry. Of the various concepts on offer, then, civil
religion still seems to me the most accurate.
Is it also the most politic? It is true that civil religion is an irksome term. But
that can be an advantage if it irks people to reect (Connolly, 1999, 2005).
Perhaps it will remind nonbelievers that they, too, may have certain kinds of
transcendent commitments, that go beyond the individual rights and
material interests that comprise the liberal creed. It might even help some
die-hard liberals to see that their worldview is not neutral as to the human
good (Asad, 2003; MacIntyre, 1988; Sandel, 1982Sandel, 1996), as some clearthinking liberals have already acknowledged (Beiner, 2011; Holmes, 1993),
insofar as it tacitly presumes human ourishing consists (solely) in personal
autonomy and maximal utility. The civil religion concept also contains a
reminder for the many religious believers who do not believe in incivility and
intolerance, and recognize that they are contingent and fragile accomplishments which must be protected. It might even compel some unrepentant
Christian nationalists to face up to the deep pluralism of American society.
Let us now set aside terminological questions and focus on normative
ones. Gerteis comments raise a common objection to the civil religion
tradition, namely, that it is potentially exclusive and in two senses, one
generic, the other specic. The generic concern is that all strong forms of
solidarity produce and indeed require social or cultural others. A stronger
we leads to an othered them. He therefore wonders whether a weaker
and more universalistic form of we-ness such as secular liberal
cosmopolitanism might not be preferable. The specic concern is that the
American civil religion is just too religious and, in particular, just too
Christian to accommodate secularists such as himself. So, if we really do
want a stronger form of solidarity than liberal secularism can provide,
perhaps we should ground it in civil republicanism instead as is the case in
contemporary France, for example.
Let me address these two objections in turn. Gerteis is of course correct
that there is a potential trade-off between solidarity and inclusiveness, that
more solidaristic worldviews such as Christian nationalism often lead to
stronger exclusions, whereas more inclusive worldviews such as liberal
secularism often lead to weaker solidarity. I would simply counter that the
civil religious tradition seeks to balance the competing goods of solidarity
and inclusion while guarding against their corresponding vices of anomie
and othering. It is able to do so, because its DNA is composed of
intertwining theological and philosophical strands that mirror one another
in positing a genetic connection between individual ourishing and
252
PHILIP S. GORSKI
republican self-government. It therefore aims for a via media between the

radical moral subjectivism and political individualism that characterizes
strong forms of secular liberalism,4 on one hand, and the extreme moral
absolutism and political collectivism that typies religious nationalism, on
the other. I would further add that the civil religious tradition, as it has
developed, avoids the worst forms of exclusivity. Insofar as it is premised on
a civic understanding of national identity and a prophetic form of Christian
theology, it does not employ (explicitly) racial or cultural markers of
exclusion and inclusion, but political and ethical ones, and can evolve into
the sort of integrative multiculturalism that Gerteis advocates indeed has
already evolved in this direction in Obamas rendering. Of course, civil
religion does still exclude certain ethico-political orientations, but it does so
on prescriptive rather than ascriptive grounds. In other words, nobody is
excluded from the tradition ex ante by their (ir)religious orientation or birth.
Is civic republicanism nonetheless more inclusive? There is good reason to
doubt it. Consider again the case of France, where an antitheistic form of
civic republicanism inherited from the Revolution serves to legitimate the
complete exclusion of religious symbols from public life and creates a huge
stumbling block for the integration of French Muslims. In the United
States, by contrast, where public expressions of religion in civil society are
widely accepted, there has been no headscarf affair. Anti-Sharia
demagoguery notwithstanding, American Muslims have achieved a much
greater degree of social integration and cultural acceptance than their
French counterparts. Far from increasing divisions, I would argue the
theistic thread of our civil religion facilitates inclusion. Following Patrick
Deneen, I would further argue that the Augustinian coloration of that
thread helps to temper the hubristic propensities of republican politics, while
the civic focus of republicanism tempers the sectarian propensities of
Augustinian realism.
That said, Gerteis is surely also correct that most Americans will
apprehend the civil religion through a Christian lens, whether out of a
personal commitment to the Christian faith or because they are unfamiliar
with civic republicanism. Does this mean that the tradition excludes avowed
secularists such as him? I do not see why this should be the case. As Murphy
rightly observes, the American civil religion as I interpret it is a bit like an
overlapping consensus a` la Rawls. In Political Liberalism, to recall, Rawls
argues that democratic citizens can reach agreement about basic principles
of political justice even if they do not share the same comprehensive
worldview (Rawls, 2005). Their ethics thus overlap without being fully
coterminous. So, an avowedly secular civic republican could agree with a
253
social justice Christian about a great many things about the world
historical signicance of the American project, about the centrality of
religious freedom and representative government to that project, about the
admirable virtues of John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln and Martin King,
and so on, and so on, without thereby agreeing about the existence of God or
a human telos. As these examples indicate, however, the sort of overlapping consensus I have in mind here is also somewhat different from
Rawls, in that it extends beyond abstract principles, to include political
scriptures, civic saints, national parables, and so on. It provides a focal point
for an ongoing debate, not foundational principles of political justice, which
is why I refer to it as a tradition of moral enquiry rather than, say, a
tradition of public reason.
WHITHER CIVIL RELIGION? POTENTIALITIES,

LIMITATIONS, AND PITFALLS
If there were ever any doubts about the political potentials of civil religion
in the United States, then surely they were laid to rest during the 2008
Presidential campaign. Obamas success in capturing the Democratic
nomination and then the White House itself was obviously due to many
factors: his fty-state strategy with its focus on party caucuses, for
example, and McCains choice of a running mate, not to mention the
propitious timing of the nancial crisis. But one of these factors was
certainly the soaring rhetoric of Obamas campaign, a rhetoric, I have
argued, that seized up the central stands of the civil religion tradition and
rewove them into a multicultural tapestry. Another was the collective
emotions unleashed by the campaign itself, which had many of the
characteristics of a modern-day religious revival: sports stadiums lled with
fainting, cheering, and weeping Americans, joyfully unburdening themselves, in this case, of the national sins of the Bush Administration. For a
time, it appeared that the culture wars and political polarization that had
riven America since the late 1960s might nally be over.
But only for a time. Within one short year, the soaring rhetoric had given
way to sausage making, and another year later, to divided government and
political gridlock. Once again, there were numerous factors at work: the
unanticipated depth of the great recession, the precipitous rise of the Tea
Party, Obamas decision to expend most of his political capital on healthcare reform, and so on. Historians and social scientists will no doubt be busy
254
PHILIP S. GORSKI
dissecting these events for many years to come. But part of the problem was
surely Obamas failure to effectively connect his campaign rhetoric to his
governing strategy. Was this a personal failure on Obamas part? Or is it a
genetic defect in the civil religion itself? Did Obama simply fail to translate
the poetry of his campaign into the prose of policy? Or is the civil religion
itself untranslatable?
Some liberal commentators seem to incline towards the latter view. For
example, a recent blog by Paul Krugman never a great fan of Obamas
was entitled Hope is Not a Plan (NYT, 08/03/11). The implication of the
title (if not the point of the article) is that the shibboleths of the campaign do
not translate into a plan for governing. Other observers are more apt to nd
fault with Obama himself. At a forum on James Kloppenburgs recent book,
Reading Obama, one audience member astutely suggested that Obamas
greatest weakness as a politician was that he lacked a middle register in
between the high register of the civil religion and the low register of the
policy wonk. As a result, he is able to articulate general principles and
outline specic policies, but unable to give principled defenses of these
policies. In my view, both criticisms contain some truth. Translating the
overarching ideals of the civil religion into actual proposals for social reform
and defending them against partisan opponents requires a kind of political
casuistry and verbal jiujutsu that Obama, for all his talents, has clearly not
(yet) fully mastered.
Should we expect him to? Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh
frequently (half) jokes that he has been proven to be right 99.6% of the
time. Although some might argue that these numbers are upside down,
Limbaughs charge that many Democrats viewed Obama as the messiah
is not entirely wrong. After eight years in the wilderness, many progressives
were indeed hoping for a political savior. In his Inaugural Address, Obama
tried to tamp down the expectations he himself had helped create, but
without success. The moral of this tale, as I read it, is that prophecy and
pragmatism are hard to square. Even Moses eventually needed an Aaron.
Perhaps Obama needs a (new) Jeremiah.
One of the great ironies of American politics today is that most Liberal
Democrats are actually civic republicans at heart, while an increasing
number of Conservative Republicans are actually radical libertarians. If
workaday Liberal Democrats spent as much time reading and talking about
Aristotle, Tocqueville and Sandel as Republican foot-soldiers spend on
Smith, Hayek and Rand, they would probably be better able to articulate a
genuinely republican vision of the United States. There, they would nd
powerful arguments for socio-economic equality as a precondition of
255
healthy self-government, and powerful critiques of the moral and political

corruption that currently infects American democracy. I would add that
secular activists would do well to familiarize themselves with the prophetic
style of the Old Testament, the way that their African American counterparts do.
Of course, civil religion is not without its pitfalls. As Gerteis warns, and
Murphy has shown at length, there are certain variants of civil religion that
are close cousins of religious nationalism. Claims concerning the historical
signicance of American ideals can readily devolve into boasts concerning the
exceptional character of the American nation. Winthrops urgings that
America be a city upon a hill and a light to the nations too often mutate
into empty boasting that America is the greatest country in history and
therefore has a right to impose its will on other nations. Thus, it is important to
know just where the boundary lies. Rhetorically, it is clearly marked with
blood: the blood of racial belonging and the blood of the ultimate sacrice.
And however inuential liberal secularism may be amongst the scribbling
chattering classes, the mass appeal of religious nationalism is undoubtedly
far greater.
CONCLUSION: STRONG TEA, WEAK TEA

Liberals love to scoff, and the Tea Party Movement certainly provides a
target rich environment. Teabags dangling from ball caps, knee-socks
with white sneakers, misspelled placards and misdirected slogans who can
resist a chuckle or two in the end? Not me certainly. And yet perhaps we can
also learn a thing or two from the Tea Party. Its libertarian and Christianist
version of American history may be wildly partisan. Its reading of the
Constitution may be highly selective. Its political demands may run counter
to the material interests of its followers. But it does have a highly focused
political agenda rooted in a particular reading of American history that has
a considerable degree of popular resonance.
Compared to this, I think contemporary liberalism is pretty weak tea. For
one thing, it lacks narrative depth. The Great Society and the New Deal are
its primary historical reference points. Its connection to the national
foundings is tenuous at best. For another, it eschews ritual expressions. In
this regard, it merely brings the anti-sacramentalism of liberal Protestantism
to its logical conclusion. It is weak tea, in short, because it is not steeped
enough in national history, and not sweetened enough with civic ritual.
256
PHILIP S. GORSKI
It need not be that way. It is possible to construct a narrative of American

history that reconnects the New Deal and the Great Society with earlier
episodes of social reform, such as Reconstruction and, of course, the
Revolution itself, particularly when they are viewed as successive efforts to
achieve the ideals of civic equality and brotherly affection set forth during
the foundings. There is, for example, a persistent concern about the
corrupting potentialities of the money power that now seems remarkably
prescient. There was, as well, a deep awareness that excessive inequality
would undermine civic virtue and distort self-government, this too, a
contemporary concern. Having bought into the consumerist materialism and
moral relativism that dene the liberal-utilitarian worldview, many Americans, including sadly, Obama himself at times, often nd it hard to articulate
a full-throated critique of these ills that will resonate beyond the seminar
rooms of elite universities and the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times.
And so we carp instead. But you cannot undermine a powerful narrative
of collective purpose simply by poking holes in it through factual criticisms.
Rather, you have to set forth a different and better story. Liberal secularism is
not that story. It is a story of individual liberation, not collective purpose. I
think civil religion is the counter-story, a story that weds human ourishing
with collective purpose.
Drink up.
NOTES
1. For an absolutely devastating critique of this argument, see Chapter 2 of
Cavanaugh (2009).
2. Interestingly, Rawls and Rorty substantially revised their positions in Rawls
(1997). Rorty (1999).
3. Of course, liberal secularism and religious nationalism are also traditions in this
sense, even if they deny it. The universal rallying cry of American secularists is Jeffersons bon
mot a wall of separation. Religious nationalists originally imagined the U.S. as a Protestant nation, then a Christian nation, and now, increasingly, as a Judeo-Christian nation.
4. I would further note that many self-identied liberal secularists are not really
serious liberals, if by liberalism, we mean the Anglo-American tradition running
from Locke through Bentham to Hayek and on to Friedman. Most liberal secularists
are actually the descendants of liberal Protestantism or Reformed Judaism. They are
liberal in the sense that this term acquired among American social reformers
during the early 20th century: they believe that the power of big government is the
only counter-balance to the power of big business, and that the transition from an
agrarian society of yeomen small-holders to an industrial society of urban wageearners requires the creation of a social safety net and the institution of market
regulations so as to (re)create a secure and independent citizenry.
257
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EDITORS INTRODUCTION

I am honored to present Volume 22 of Political Power and Social Theory

POLITICAL POWER AND

POLITICAL POWER AND SOCIAL THEORY VOLUME 22

United Kingdom North America Japan

SENIOR EDITORIAL BOARD

STUDENT EDITORIAL BOARD

Department of Political Science, University

Department of Sociology, Duke University,

Department of Political Science, University

Department of Sociology, University of

Department of Political Science, University

Department of Sociology, Yale University,

Department of Sociology, Providence

Department of Political Science, Rutgers

Department of Sociology, University of

Department of Political Science, University

Department of Sociology, Baylor

Department of Ethnic Studies, University

Department of Sociology, Duke University,

Department of Political Science, University

Department of Sociology, University of

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Emerald Group Publishing

LOUISE SEAMSTER AND EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA

Introduction: Examining, Debating, and Ranting about the Obama Phenomenon

AMERICAN RACIAL POLITICS FOR REAL SINCE

LOUISE SEAMSTER AND EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA

racism, President Obama called for a national discussion of race issues

Introduction: Examining, Debating, and Ranting about the Obama Phenomenon

LOUISE SEAMSTER AND EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA

Introduction: Examining, Debating, and Ranting about the Obama Phenomenon

THE CONTRIBUTIONS IN THIS SECTION

LOUISE SEAMSTER AND EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA

Introduction: Examining, Debating, and Ranting about the Obama Phenomenon

by anti-immigrant, anti-black, and anti-gay sentiment. They examine this

STEPPING UP TO THE TABLE: WHERE DO WE GO

LOUISE SEAMSTER AND EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA

present moment, and the always-pressing political question of what is to be

Introduction: Examining, Debating, and Ranting about the Obama Phenomenon

LOUISE SEAMSTER AND EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA

Introduction: Examining, Debating, and Ranting about the Obama Phenomenon

THE BLACK PRESIDENTIAL

chattel institution must be theorized in its present tense articulations

INTRODUCTION: RETELLING THE RACIAL

The Black Presidential Non-Slave

compartmentalized and temporally isolated into a discrete past, because

physiological suffering, and generational loss) and challenge discrete temporal

The Black Presidential Non-Slave

ASSESSING THE RACIAL STORY: BLACK

brought unprecedented popular legitimacy to a 21st century vision of

Following the logic of this biblical rhetoric, to enslave is tantamount to

The Black Presidential Non-Slave

be y determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including

Slaverys lasting legacies of social, economic, and cultural violence thus

Borrowing an ideological line from the Black neoconservative litany,

The Black Presidential Non-Slave

If we follow Wynters mapping of Western liberal humanisms irreducible

United States (Swarns, 2007). Another Obama representative posited that

I address these genealogical matters not to attribute a vulgar essentialist

The Black Presidential Non-Slave

admit: while acknowledging the idiosyncrasies of his own family tree,

THE TIME-LAPSING LOGICS OF (ANTIBLACK)

Elaborating Trask, we might ask how the institutional, cultural, and