The New Race Politics?
January 28th, 2008 by R. L’Heureux Lewis
“Did you go see Obama in Harlem?”
“What do you think about Barack?”
“Can’t you just feel the difference?”
As a young Black man in New York City a day seldom goes by that someone doesn’t ask me one of the above questions. While I consider myself to be political, I have tried to take a step back from the Presidential race and its million candidates… particularly Barack Obama. Now that the fray is sorting itself out, I recently have been engaging these conversations, albeit a bit cautiously, especially among my friends who tend to be like minded. By like minded I mean, decently far left, of color, and cynical. Surprisingly, these conversations have all ended with my colleagues discussing Barack Obama as transforming the racial landscape and me vehemently fighting this claim. Sure editorials and articles point to Obama accomplishing the “impossible” in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina but delegate victories are improbable, not impossible. Shifting the way race is understood in America is a much larger task, one that I think even Obama cannot do.
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