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It
is particularly fitting for a book on Barack Obama to invoke the
legacy of William Faulkner and in so doing seek to tap into the
reservoirs of interracial memory the Southerner explored with such
unparalleled single-mindedness. The study under review ventures into
the minefield of recent culture and political history to examine the
dynamics of race in the post-civil rights era and Obama’s pivotal
role in it. While premised on the thesis that the 2008 elections
ushered in a new multi-hued racial order, the book raises questions
as to whether Obama’s ascent to the White House marks the end of
race in the US, indeed the end of blackness as a marker of
difference. Sugrue, who is David Boies Professor of History and
Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, resists
‘epochalist’ thinking and the temptation of viewing Obama’s
presidency in any easy dualistic terms. A leading civil right
historian, Sugrue follows Obama on his journey to the White House in
pursuit of an answer to the question whether racial injustice and
prejudices have been overcome. What interests him primarily is not so
much Obama the politician and policymaker, as the intellectual and
the visionary. Sugrue thus capitalises on Obama’s learned profile,
and the formative aspects of his political education that helped
shape his conception of race. Obama’s own evocation of Faulkner in
“A More Perfect Union,” the speech he delivered at the National
Constitution Center in the race for the 2008 democratic party
presidential nomination, points to a vision of race as a condition
that needs full internalization if one is to effect significant
change. Not the direct consequence of
Obama’s racial politics, the epochal change in racial dynamics that
Obama instantiates is seen as the result of his sophisticated,
nuanced understanding of racial memory and its embeddedness in the
American collective unconscious. Momentous though it may be, Obama’s
rise to power, Sugrue indicates, cannot in itself counter America’s
deep-seated racial divisions. In the long run, the president’s
profound insight into the political economy of race on the other
hand, his background as a civil rights attorney, and teleological
view of America, may prove of higher consequence than his racial
allegiance. By virtue of being the first African American President
in US history, Obama merely fulfilled a precondition ensuring the
prospects for a post-racial America.
In
a provocative study titled, A
Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United
States (2005),
postcolonialism theorist Ali Behdad, foregrounds ”historical
amnesia” as a dominant national American trait, responsible for the
collective dream of the formation of the US, or else for the
construction of America as an imagined community. Importing the
Freudian notion of denial, Behdad makes a strong case for the
mechanism of a willed, convenient forgetfulness at play in the making
of the American nation. Key to the reading of Obama’s politics of
unity that Sugrue articulates is Obama’s keen awareness of the
imperative of cultural anamnesis. A sound appropriation of the
cultural genealogy of race, it follows from the study, is inseparable
from political vision. Like Faulkner, Obama is animated by a sense of
the presentness of the past together with a lucid recognition of the
underpinnings of racial identity. In an insightful presentation of
the new patterns of racial discrimination in contemporary America,
Sugrue’s study posits African Americans as subject to the most
persistent racial inequality in the US. Methodical and explanatory,
Not Even Past combines
the descriptive and the analytical in a balanced, impassionate
approach that reveals the limitations of Obama’s leadership
avoiding the mores and excesses of cultural/ist critiques. Unlike
many presidential scholars, Sugrue relies mainly on historical
analysis and description, as well as on close readings of Obama’s
seminal speeches, to call attention to the continuing relevance of
ambiguity and paradox in America’s contemporary racial history:
Obama
represents the paradox of race in early twenty first century America:
he embodies the fluidity and opportunity of racial identity in a time
of transition. He also captures the ambiguities of a racial order
that denies racism, yet is rife with racial inequality; that
celebrates progress when celebration is not always warranted. He
contains within his own thought contradictory positions that remain
in tension with each other. And he brings to the table an openness to
grapple with the still unresolved history of race and rights, and the
constraints of an elected official averse to controversy. His
awareness of history and its burdens provides the rest of us with a
challenge and an opportunity. (Sugrue 136)
The
crucial albeit indirect statement the book makes on America’s
divisive identity politics is that Obama’s stance in intellectual
history, his indelible mark on what has been termed post-racial
America, owe as much to his scholarship as to his mixed ancestry.
ADRIANA
NEAGU
Babeş-Bolyai University,
Cluj-Napoca
Works
Cited
Behdad,
Ali. A Forgetful
Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States.
Durham & London: Duke University Press,
2005.
Sugrue,
Thomas, J. Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the
Burden of Race. Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2010.
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