Jay-Z: The Power of Our Voice

BarackObamadotcom 

 

Jay-Z shares why it is important to exercise your right to vote and how President Obama represents the power of our voice.

As Jay-Z shares:

"For so long, there was this voice that was silenced out there as far as exercising your right to vote. I think it was a voice that was silent because people had lost hope. They didn't believe that their voice mattered or counted."

"Now people are exercising their right, and you are starting to see the power of our vote. He made it mean something for the first time for a lot of people. "

Looking for Denzel; Finding Barack: Thoughts on the President as Race Man—A Lecture by Mark Anthony Neal

Looking for Denzel; Finding Barack: Thoughts on the President as Race Man

—A  Lecture by Mark Anthony Neal

Thursday, September 6, 2012 at 4:30pm

Cornell University

Africana Studies and Research Center,

Multipurpose Room

310 Triphammer Rd,

Ithaca, NY 14850, USA

The Africana Studies & Research Center (ASRC) at Cornell University will host a lecture and book signing by Mark Anthony Neal titled 'Looking for Denzel; Finding Barack: Thoughts on the President as Race Man' at 4:30pm on Thursday, September 6th. This event is free and open to the public at the ASRC, 310 Triphammer Road and is part of the fall colloquium titled “Race and the Presidency, Part II” and the ASRC yearlong series theme “Freedom, Democracy, and Citizenship”.

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching. Neal has written and lectured extensively on black popular culture, black masculinity, sexism and homophobia in Black communities, and the history of popular music.

He is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003) and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity(2005). Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2nd Edition (2011) Neal’s next book Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities will be published in 2013 by New York University Press.

Neal hosts the weekly webcast, ‘Left of Black’ in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University (leftofblack.tumblr.com/). A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal contributes to several on-line media outlets, including Huff Post Black Voices, Ebony.com, SeeingBlack.com, and Britain’s New Black Magazine. He has also appeared in several documentaries including Byron Hurt’s acclaimed Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006), John Akomfrah’s Urban Soul (2004) and Jonathan Gayles’s White Scripts and Black Supermen (2012).

Neal is the founder and managing editor of the blog NewBlackMan (in Exile) (newblackman.blogspot.com/). You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.

Bill Cosby on the Death of Trayvon Martin

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Bill Cosby (and George Washington University Professor Bernard Demczuk) talks Trayvon Martin, President Barack Obama, and the legendary Howard Theater on Press Pass with David Gregory.

Some Thoughts on Ivy League Admissions—and Affirmative Action (for Donald Trump)

Some Thoughts on Ivy League Admissions & Affirmative Action
(for Donald Trump)

by Mark Naison | Fordham University

Donald Trump’s comments that Barack Obama didn’t have the grades to get into Ivy League Schools shows a profound ignorance of the admissions policies of those institutions. According to Bowen, Shapiro et all who thoroughly researched the admissions policies of elite universities in the US ( and whose conclusions can be found in their 2002 book The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values) the greatest admissions advantage at those schools goes not to children of alumni, or underrepresented minorities, but to recruited athletes! Not only are there twice as many recruited athletes as underrepresented minorities at these schools, but the admissions advantage accruing to an athlete, whether male or female, is twice as powerful as those given to a minority or a “legacy.”

We are not talking about a small number of students here. At most Ivy League schools, close to 20 percent of the undergraduates are recruited athletes, and at Williams College, they constitute 40 percent of the student population. Given the variety of the sports encompassed, which go from lacrosse, to golf, to tennis to sailing, to soccer, to hockey along with softball, baseball, basketball and football, it turns out that the overwhelming majority of beneficiaries of “sports affirmative action” are white.

Not only are these athletes admitted with significantly lower grades and SAT’s than the university mean, but their grades in college tend to be lower than those of their fellow students. Nevertheless, their incomes after college are no lower than those of their fellow students because a large proportion of them go into careers in the financial sector, which go out of their way to recruit “Ivy league athletes” as key components of their work force.

The populist resentment of allegedly “undeserving” minorities who push hardworking white students out of top college- which Trump is exploiting with his rhetoric- turns out to be misplaced. To put the matter bluntly, there are a lot more white hockey and football players who get into Ivy League schools with SAT’s below the school norm than there are Black and Latino students from the inner city. As someone who spent more than 15 years coaching athletes from diverse racial and class backgrounds in Brooklyn in the 1980’s and 1990’s, I know this from personal experience as well as research.

One young woman I worked with, a nationally ranked tennis player who was highly recruited by every Ivy League college, actually got a letter from Harvard telling her that her target SAT score for admission was 1100! Another young man from our community, a highly recruited left handed pitcher, was told that his admission target for Princeton was 1200, with an expected verbal score of 600 because “Princeton has a lot of reading.” Needless to say, both of those young people were white!

So much for “undeserving minorities” pushing white kids out of top colleges! To put this in perspective, I have taught African American Studies at Fordham for more than 40 years and talked to hundreds of Black and Latino students about their college recruitment experiences. Not one of them has mentioned being given SAT targets that low for admission to Harvard, Yale or Princeton!

Donald Trump needs to find a new subject for his demagoguery. If Barack Obama got into Columbia with lower grades and SAT’s scores than the college mean, he was only one of many students--the vast majority of whom were white--who fell into that category. And his success, along with so many others so admitted, should be a warning that traits measurable on standardized tests are not the only indicators of talent and potential that should be considered for university admission. When Ivy League schools admit students, irrespective of the scores they register on standardized tests, they almost never drop out, and usually achieve professional success after graduation. Whether these schools should have as much power as they do in American society is another question, but none of the students they bring in are programmed to “fail.”

Columbia University chose wisely in admitting Barack Obama. His admission was only one small part of a broad policy for creating a student body diverse in talent as well as cultural background from which far more whites than ethnic and racial minorities were beneficiaries.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham's Urban Studies Program. He is the author of three books and over 100 articles on African-American History, urban history, and the history of sports. His most recent book is White Boy: A Memoir.

Obama Carefully Courts Black Votes with Sharpton

Obama Carefully Courts Black Votes with Sharpton
Jesse Washington, AP National Writer

He avoids race, so the story goes. He can't afford to alienate white voters, black people will vote for him again anyway, so he has little to gain by approaching such a volatile subject.

Yet on Wednesday, President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a foray into racial territory by speaking in New York at the Rev. Al Sharpton's national convention — an early step on the tricky path that Obama must navigate in order to engage black voters who are crucial to his re-election.

On the one hand, there's nothing unusual about a president fulfilling a campaign promise made to a staunch political ally whose radio show is broadcast in 40 cities each weekday. Nor is it odd for Obama, who has spoken to other civil rights groups, to connect with Sharpton, a frequent White House visitor whose fame flows from his aggressive brand of black advocacy.

Aside from the timing of Obama's speech — two days after his re-election bid was made official — Wednesday's events at the National Action Network gathering are heavily political. Obama's top campaign aide, David Axelrod, is to address a special plenary, followed by the secretaries of education and housing, the attorney general and the EPA administrator.

Obama remains highly popular among blacks. In 2008, 95 percent of blacks who voted chose Obama. In a Gallup poll last week, 84 percent of blacks approved of Obama's overall performance, about the same percentage as six months ago.

So why all the attention now?

It's actually harder for Obama to reach out to black voters than it would be for a white president, said Mark Anthony Neal, an African-American studies professor at Duke University, "because there's a narrative that he's catering to a black constituency."

"Obama needs Al Sharpton as a certain kind of surrogate for black voters," Neal said. "Symbolically, his willingness to speak at the convention is a subtle message to black voters that he is paying attention to their concerns.

"Because that's the other side of the narrative ... there is a heavy critique of Obama among black voters for not being cognizant and attentive enough to issues affecting the black community."

A factor in this dilemma is the view among some whites that the president gives blacks favorable treatment. Carol Swain, a Vanderbilt University political science professor and Obama critic, called that view a misperception, but said it was fed by cases like the New Black Panther voter intimidation lawsuit and the Justice Department asking Dayton, Ohio, to lower its police exam passing score because too few black applicants passed.

This dynamic may have made Obama "overly defensive" about race, said Bill Anderson, a host on the Philadelphia black talk radio station WURD.

"But think about it," Anderson said. "If the president speaks to an entire room of white people, nobody says he's alienating society. But if you go to an organization that's dealing with (issues) important to society but from an African-American perspective, all of a sudden, you're a separatist."

That's how some view Sharpton.

As his National Action Network celebrates 20 years of fighting for social change and justice, Sharpton's methods and image have evolved. President George W. Bush publicly praised him for leadership on education, and Sharpton joined arch-conservative Newt Gingrich on a 2009 national tour advocating for better schools.

Six Democratic presidential candidates came to Sharpton's convention in 2007, and Sharpton remembers Obama promising that win or lose, he would return. Now Obama will be the first sitting president to attend.

Yet some still consider Sharpton to be the rabble-rousing, pompadoured agitator of the 1980s who spread Tawana Brawley's unproven claim about being sexually assaulted by white men and, in a separate case, exhorted protests that ended with eight dead at a Jewish-owned store in Harlem.

Sharpton is used to the criticism, even when it comes from black people. "It's a burden you bear gladly," he said in an interview. "I'm doing a job people would rather not see done."

The National Action Network website lists 42 chapters nationwide and claims 200,000 members. In addition to his 40-city radio reach, Sharpton is on satellite radio and leads a weekly Harlem rally.

"I'm probably talking to more people than most activists have ever done," Sharpton said. "I know what's on people's minds, and I'm able to mobilize them."

He also has a strong connection to what Obama adviser and Harvard University law professor Charles Ogletree once called "the streets ... the people who are voiceless, faceless and powerless."

These are the people bearing the brunt of the 15.5 percent black unemployment rate reported in March, up from 15.3 percent in February. The overall national rate in March was 8.8 percent, a two-year low.

The president "is going with Sharpton to show us some support some kind of way," Ilsa Lilly Fields, a black woman, said as she left a West Philadelphia drugstore Tuesday.

Fields made a face when Sharpton's name was mentioned: "He's just loud and always in everyone's business. He's not a helpful person."

But she said Obama was doing the best he could to help blacks: "We're a patient people. We know what Obama has to do. We're just waiting for him to do it."

Swain, the political scientist, said even though Obama has not addressed black issues, blacks remain protective of him — "almost like a member of the family."

"Black people are in many ways worse off today than they have been in decades," she said. "They're worse off than if there was a white president, because a white president has to do something for the black community. Obama doesn't have to do anything."

Across the street from the drugstore, inside Yock's Sandwich-Ville USA, out-of-work plumber Benjamin Ryan said many whites in his union complain that Obama is favoring blacks.

"It's just the way they're raised," said Ryan, who is white. "It's far from the truth, but it's what they're exposed to."

Ryan's wife, Sharletta, who is black, said Obama visiting Sharpton's conference is just "playing a typical game of politics." She approves of his performance as president, but called Sharpton a "race pimp."

Ryan predicted Obama would not get as many white votes in 2012 as he did in 2008, "so getting out the black vote is going to be huge."

Anderson, the talk show host, said Obama's visit sends a message: "This is something I need to do, and (critics) are just going to have to deal with it."

___

Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press. He is reachable at jwashington(at)ap.org or www.twitter.com/jessewashington.

Jeff Chang: It’s Bigger Than Politics, the Real Shift is Cultural

Jeff Chang: It’s Bigger Than Politics, the Real Shift is Cultural
by Jamilah King

In the wake of this week’s election, we talked to scholar and ColorLines co-founder Jeff Chang about what to make of the country’s big shifts and shakedowns. The author of “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation” and “Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop”, Chang’s used to looking at the bigger picture. He’s got two new books due out next year, one of which, “Who We Be: The Colorization of America” takes a look at how culture impacts, and often precedes, political change. Here, he sheds some much needed light on what’s happening politically, and where we’re headed in the future.

First, let’s get some historical context. What makes this political moment so potentially galvanizing for young voters of color? Aren’t we supposed to be “post-racial”?

The culture wars are back, and they have targeted a new generation. To me, Sharron Angle’s “you look Asian to me” moment was a perfect example. Pundits and bloggers focused on the stupidity of her comment, but the discussion was prompted by a Chicano student who was calling her out on her anti-immigration commercials that featured criminalized brown youths. Angle’s defense—I’m so colorblind, I can’t even tell what race you are—was not just hilarious, it was brutal in its dishonesty. The ads that the students objected to were far from colorblind.

For the right, this election proved—from Rand Paul to Jan Brewer—that racialized appeals to older white voters still mobilize, that the culture wars still work. The upside is that in Nevada, Chicano and Latino voters and young voters flipped the race for Reid, who had been several points down in the days leading up to the election.

Young voters, particularly those of color, really rallied behind Obama in 2008. There’s been a lot of talk of how that support is quickly eroding. What needs to be done to once again strengthen that electoral base?

Obama did fairly well by youth. He passed an outstanding student loan overhaul package that will immediately help access to higher education, especially in this era of skyrocketing public school tuition. Perhaps he could have sold it better. But his communications failure was a sign of a larger failure. Going on MTV was good. Barnstorming college campuses was good. Sending a message of “Vote or die” in 2010 was not good. What Obama failed to do for young people was what he failed to do for his base, because youths are now definitively seen as his base: offer a positive progressive vision for the next 2 years.

Read the Full Essay @ Colorlines

Commentary: Michael Eric Dyson to President Obama, "You've got to be more like George W. Bush"

Has Obama Earned the Youth Vote?

from the Huffington Post

Has Obama Earned the Youth Vote?
by Bakari Kitwana

As the 2010 midterm election season winds down, electoral politics experts agree that 18-29 year-old voters have a pivotal role to play on November 2nd. Anxiety among Democrats and Republicans concerning the way the political winds will blow the youth vote is crystallizing around the idea that over the last two years President Barack Obama did not fulfill his campaign commitments to the 14 million plus young voters so crucial to his 2008 victory.

Last week, the Houston, Texas local Fox affiliate framed the question like this: "Youth Vote: Obama Boost or Backlash?" or as reporter Greg Googan put it, "Twenty-four recession-racked months later, the question now looms: Is it still 'change' young Americans can believe in?"

When it comes to young voters, has the Obama Administration gone far enough?

University of Chicago Political Science Professor Cathy Cohen suggests in her new book Democracy Remixed, which should be required reading for any politician serious about the future of our democracy, that this sentiment taps into the reality staring young voters in the face everyday: failing schools, a cost of living out of sync with limited job options, an unforgiving criminal justice system, and an escalating war in Afghanistan with 20 and 30-somethings disproportionately on the frontlines, to name a few.

Several weeks before the 2008 presidential election, a rapsessions.org survey asked 18-29 year-old young voters: "What are the most important issues that you want the next president to address?" Among the top three were ending the war in Iraq and creating living wage jobs. Making college education affordable and universal healthcare also topped the list. The survey had a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points, included young Americans equal parts white, black and Latino, male and female and cut across diverse income brackets and regions of the country.

Although Obama's handling of the race question, unemployment and the partisan divide have come to dominate the mid-term elections climate, the real challenge for young voters is to consider the distance between Obama's campaign promises and what he actually delivered since young voters sent him to Washington with a mandate for change.

The economic stimulus bill was signed by Obama into law last fall (and some economists argue it has helped keep the US economy out of a depression). After a year-long protracted struggle, healthcare reform passed in the spring. And as this past summer came to a close, Obama ended the war in Iraq with an August 30 deadline for withdrawal of combat troops. Additionally, during the Obama years, we've seen historic student loan and credit card reform, as well as the extension of unemployment insurance.

Even if young voters need him to go further, and even as the public perception of Obama as a do-nothing president persists, these are pretty solid results not far from young voter's top concerns going into the 2008 Election--not to mention Obama's appointment of two Supreme Court justices (Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) who will inevitably counterbalance the previous conservative and male bent of the court.

Rather than getting drawn into misinformation-filled partisan bickering, such an assessment is going to take an honest eye on what voters asked for in 2008.

Without spin or hyperbole, scores of these voters began to do just that when they gathered in Atlanta a little more than a week ago for Ignite 2010: From the Blogs to the Blocks, a non-partisan half-day convention hosted by the League of Young Voters Education Fund. The outcome of the gathering may offer a more substantive glimpse of things to come.

There, scores of influential young activists, entertainers, and organizers came together from across the country to talk about ways of keeping their constituents engaged next month and beyond. These are the far too often nameless, faceless young leaders behind the incredible youth voter increases in 2004, 2006 and 2008.

Nearly the exact opposite of what mainstream media has been projecting about a youth vote in crisis, the dominant atmosphere at Ignite 2010 was of young voters still heavily committed to the change they voted for two years ago. Without a doubt, in most of the discussions, it was clear that young voters needed much more from Washington. But on the oft-repeated refrain of whether or not Obama has done enough, the sentiment seemed mixed.

At the end of the day, most can discern that the questions of overall youth satisfaction with their plight and Obama's productivity aren't exactly the same thing.

If this distinction, along with their track record since 2004, is any indication, then the take-away message is that young voters are not sitting out the mid-terms. Instead, they seem more interested in mastering the art of pushing the president and lawmakers even closer to their expectations. Ironically, they may be taking their cues from a small minority of voters who have shown resolve at pushing a liberal president and Democratic majority Congress further to the right.

***

Bakari Kitwana is senior media fellow at the Harvard Law based think tank The Jamestown Project and the author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2010).

Where's Young Jeezy's Anthem for the Mid-Term Elections?

Young Voters Must Transition into an Engaged Electorate

Where’s Young Jeezy’s Anthem for the Midterm Elections?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

Back in the fall of 2008, to be young and voting age in America, meant that you were on the verge of something extraordinary. To vote for Barack Obama was the epitome of cutting edge cool. No one wanted to be on the wrong-side of history. Obama wasn’t simply going to be the first Black president, he was the first President branded for a generation for which branding (and perhaps hip-hop) was their lingua franca—their shared language across race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality.

And everybody got in the act from Will.I.Am to crack rapper Young Jeezy, whose “My President is Black” had everyone—from Big Mama to Pookie and ‘dem—singing and rapping for change. Two years later there are no more anthem, Barack Obama is fighting for his political life and there’s little guarantee that those same young voters that energized the electorate will find their way to the voting booth next month.

It is perhaps easy to suggest that young voters—and quite few others—were caught up in the allure of a candidate, who in comparison to the forty-three men who held the office before him really did look like change. No doubt Barack Obama the campaigner was an open signifier able to look like everything that the electorate desired whether they were independents, the fringe Left or first time voters.

Obama’s chameleon ways have been so successful that even his political enemies believe that he’s Leftist radical; Forbes Magazine publisher and failed Presidential candidate Steve Forbes manages to describe Obama’s economic policies as “soft Socialism” in every other paragraph of the magazine.

Many times throughout the last 18 months there were more than enough opportunities for young voters to provide political pressure on President Obama—the proverbial phone calls, emails, letters to House Representatives, Senators, committee heads, and even the White House—to weigh in on every thing from the environmental crisis in the Gulf region, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, his choice for Secretary of Treasury, his tepid Healthcare legislation, to the (un)forced resignation of Green Jobs Guru Van Jones and the sad and embarrassing dismissal of Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. Yet young voters seemed content to stay on the sidelines and let Obama, stand in as proxy for their concerns relieving them of rightful responsibility to hold elected officials accountable for their decisions.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

The Religion (and Race) of the President:Obama as National Scapegoat

from the Huffington Post

The Religion (and Race) of the President:
Obama as National Scapegoat
by Eddie Glaude, Jr.

"There is much in religion, when misused, that does lead to a fascist state....And it is the corruptors of religion who are a major menace to the world today, in giving the profound patterns of religious thought a crude and sinister distortion." -- Kenneth Burke

I have not been able, until now, to understand fully the debate about President Obama's religious commitments. How some Americans move seamlessly from questioning Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright to accusations that he is Muslim genuinely baffles me. The fact that he is our first black president offers a bit of an explanation. But something deeper is going on here -- and something quite familiar.

President Obama has become our national scapegoat. He leads the nation in a moment in which economic and political upheavals threaten our social order -- where the very myth of American progress has fallen on bad times. Many Americans have selected him to represent all that is wrong and irresolvable about our current malaise and to transfer their iniquities onto his body and into his policies. In doing so, Obama as scapegoat becomes the occasion to give voice to an alternative vision of social life. Glenn Beck happily offered his version. Other Republicans will do so as we approach November.

Of course, Obama isn't alone in this regard. As Linton Weeks noted "hating on the president is a great American pastime." We need only recall the Bush and Clinton years. But the response to Obama is different. The fact of his blackness, whether we acknowledge it or not, links this ritual to the complex histories of race that shadow our democratic form of life. And the rites of renunciation that have characterized so much of our politics today -- by the "Republican party of no" and by the Tea Party, an ironic iteration of the mask of American beginnings (after all, they did dress up as "Indians" in Boston) -- make possible a new sense of unity, a new social order among some "white folks."

Threats, real or imagined, to the social order in the US have occasioned historically ritual acts to consolidate "white identity" and the idea of community that gives it life. For example, during the era of Jim Crow, lynchings became an important tool not only to defend segregation but, through the ritual act itself, enabled a collective disavowal of the obvious ways segregation contradicted our professed democratic commitments. Christianity often played a key role.

In June of 1903, a mob gathered in Wilmington, Delaware, determined to sacrifice George White, a black man accused of rape and murder. Speaking to the angry crowd was Reverend Robert Elwood of Olivet Presbyterian Church. He took his text from Corinthians 5:13, "to expel the wicked man from among you," and he urged the courts to determine White's guilt immediately so that justice could be administered. Here the language of religion sacralized the violence that would offer the community an exit from their guilt.

George White was transfigured into that symbol which contained all of the anxieties of a group. Like most black victims of lynching, he was the rapist and murderer. The realities of their lives, lives haunted by violence, were emptied as they were transformed into a dangerous threat to the social order. And the endless repetition of the stereotype came to stand in for the actual human beings; black folk would become the anti-social deviants who threatened the social order and were in need of vigilant policing.

African-American participation in the public domain would require, and still does, constant negotiation of the stereotype. Either we have to become Bigger Thomas or Biggie Smalls, or we have to become, as James Baldwin noted, blank -- raceless.

Black scapegoats then trade in stereotypes, and Obama has not been able to escape their scandalous work. It began with the unsettling idea that Obama was not who he claimed to be -- that he was of foreign birth, that lurking beneath his cool exterior was an angry black man waiting, as Thomas Jefferson had predicted, to exact revenge. Subsequently, Obama has been transposed as a militant black Christian, as a sympathizer with the New Black Panther Party, or believed to be a Muslim, the latest standard representation of threat to social order.

His ritual sacrifice enables those who have robbed the national coffers in the name of security and who have lined the pockets of the rich at the expense of everyone else to collectively disavow the contradiction of their practices with our stated democratic ideals.

I want to be clear. I am not referring here to intentional acts of racism or expressions of racial hatred. That's too easy. Moreover, such accusations too often downplay the real and deeply-felt sense among many Americans that they are losing ground. What I am noting is a ritual practice that reproduces certain meanings about race, undermine our democratic commitments, and block the path to a new imagining of the nation. Americans are really good at exorcising demons, especially our racial ones, in order to affirm our inherent goodness, but we find it terribly difficult to look directly at ourselves in the mirror.

Obama's role in this scapegoat ritual only deepens our evasion of the reality of American life. Many refuse to see him. They rather deal with endlessly repeated lies of who he is; and religious talk like Beck's that shade too easily into troublesome patriotic calls can sanctify these ideas. But Obama also engages in what can be called self-scapegoating. In his evasion of the issues of race, in his insistence on occupying a version of the stereotype (a "blank man" of sorts), he has enabled the ritual to tighten its grip on our national psyches. What other options does he have?

Much more is required of us all. But, first, and it is a necessity upon which our destiny depends, we must look ourselves squarely in the face and confront who we truly are if we are to be release into a new future.

***

Eddie Glaude is a founding member and Senior Fellow of the Jamestown Project. Dr. Glaude is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University. Hes is the author of Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and the editor of Is it Nation Time?: Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and, with Cornel West, of African American Religious Studies: An Anthology (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003). Follow Eddie Glaude, Jr., Ph.D. on Twitter.