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The focus of media depictions of Barack Obama as a "post-racial," "post-black" or "postethnic" candidate is usually limited to two aspects of his presidential campaign. First is his self-presentation with minimal references to his color. Unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, whose presidential candidacies were more directed at the significance of the color line, Obama has never offered himself as the candidate of a particular ethnoracial group. Second, the press calls attention to the willingness of millions of white voters to respond to Obama. Some of his greatest margins in primary elections and caucuses were in heavily white states like Idaho and Montana. He even won huge numbers of white voters in some states of the old Confederacy, and in the November election carried Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.
But there is much more to it.
The Obama candidacy was a far-reaching challenge to identity politics, and that challenge will only deepen now that Obama will be President. At the center of that challenge is a gradually spreading uncertainty about the significance of color lines, especially the significance of blackness itself. Blackness is the pivotal concept in the intellectual and administrative apparatus used in the United States for dealing with ethnoracial distinctions. Doubts about its basic meaning, boundaries, and social role affected ideas about whiteness, and all other color-coded identities. These uncertainties make it easier to contemplate a possible future in which the ethnoracial categories central to identity politics would be more matters of choice than ascription; in which mobilization by ethnoracial groups would be more a strategic option than a presumed destiny attendant upon mere membership in a group; and in which economic inequalities would be confronted head-on, instead of through the medium of ethnorace.
To denote that possible future, I prefer the term "postethnic" to "post-racial." The former recognizes that at issue is all identity by natal community, including as experienced by, or ascribed to, population groups to whom the problematic term "race" is rarely applied. The reconceptualization affects the status of Latinos and other immigrant-based populations not generally counted as "races." A postethnic social order would encourage individuals to devote as much-or as little-of their energies as they wished to their community of descent, and would discourage public and private agencies from...