Abstract
At This Defining Moment is crucial reading for those concerned with the future of race in the 21st century. Enid Logan, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, provides a text that takes its rightful place alongside a powerful body of sociological work that interrogates people’s meaning-making of the first nonwhite president of the USA. Her work covers similar ground to Tim Wise’s Between Barack and a Hard Place (2009), Desmond King and Rogers Smith’s Still a House Divided (2011), and my own (with Gregory Parks), The Obamas and a (Post)Racial America? (2011). And while the text rehearses similar moves, it breaks step by focusing on how media framings of race both transcended a black/white binary to encompass Latino and Asian subjectivities, as well as how debates over Obama and race were inextricably tied to concerns over class distinctions, gender inequality, national identity, and sexual politics.
Based on an analysis of over 1500 newspaper articles, blog postings, and other forms of public speech between 2006 and 2009, Logan deconstructs the hollow claims that Obama’s win proved the USA a ‘postracial’ nation. Logan demonstrates how Obama did not win the election in spite of his race but, rather, because he (and the Democratic Party) delivered a meticulously managed version of blackness thought palatable to most white Americans. And it was because Obama positioned himself in the midst of rhetoric that absolved, redeemed, and reconciled a turbulent racial past (not to mention a racially unequal present) that many whites saw Obama as the antithesis of (or exception to) a criminal, angry, or race-conscious black masculinity (recall commentator Chris Matthew’s comment: ‘I was trying to think about who he was tonight. It’s interesting: he is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour’).
The book is organized into eight concise chapters. Chapter one presents an overview of the text, while chapters two and three dive into the post-election media scramble to make meaning of Obama’s race and election. Chapters four and five interrogate the role of gender and nationalism, respectively, while chapter six (my favorite) charters new territory by taking into account the myopic portrayals of Latino American and Asian American voters in the election. Chapter seven examines the racial politics mobilized by the neo-conservative right against Obama (often built on claims that Obama was not a ‘real’ American), while the last chapter takes into account the Birther and Tea Party movements and what these political engagements signal for the future of race in America.
Given Logan’s concern with Obama’s ‘new politics of race’ (contrasted with past ‘identity politics’ that supposedly tethered nonwhite candidates’ interests to their racial communities), I wish the text had more directly confronted the ‘Obamania’ that many among the political and cultural left exhibited before the 2008 election. Logan does argue that Obama’s new ‘post-black’ politics simultaneously elevated him to the presidency while constraining his ability to directly address issues of racial inequality or enact policies necessary for black, brown, or yellow equity with whites. Yet her discussion seemingly begs for a more explicit analysis of the left’s obsession with Obama’s moderate (if not right-leaning) political persuasions. Liberal white America’s fetishization of a ‘Magical Negro’ character (a label often attributed to Obama) stands as a defining cultural dynamic that enabled both his candidacy and first term (Logan does touch on some of these issues in chapter five). And while such a thesis is not Logan’s direct concern, the text certainly gestures toward the implicit question: Can Obama and his constituency break the spell of ‘post-black’ politics or is modern black political success and support now tied to minstrel-like performances as the blackface of white empire?
Despite the aforementioned caveat, Logan’s analysis is meticulous and convincing. Her sociological imagination shines brightly and she illuminates an array of media framings that many would overshadow with either romanticized or reactionary views of the election. At This Defining Moment affords a convincing cultural sociological treatment for readers new to debates over (post) racial politics today, while it serves as a whetstone on which already acquainted scholars can sharpen their intellectual weaponry in defense of those on the underside of the US racial order. The text establishes Logan as a critical voice within narratives about race, politics, and social equality; a discourse in which Obama has ‘helped to create a space for new conceptions of national identity and a new kind of racial politics. But we must continue to push that space open much further’ (p. 128).