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This chapter sketches the main points derived from the overall structure of American racial politics and why it matters. It looks into the policy challenges that racial inequalities pose in modern America, and considers a few clues about the political guidance needed to move further toward their resolution. The chapter then elaborates this volume's core concept of rival racial policy alliances. Finally, it explains how the subsequent chapters use the idea of alliances to analyze the evolution of American racial politics historically, and the ways today's racial alliances shape and often distort decision making across a wide range of modern policy arenas.

This chapter reflects on how Americans can achieve further progress in their long national struggle to reduce enduring material race inequalities. It first returns to the structure of American racial politics as analyzed in previous chapters, before discussing its present state. The chapter then suggests that the effects of the clash of the modern racial alliances have been debilitating on many fronts, illustrating through charts and graphs the effects of these racial alliances, and offers projections on how Americans can tackle current incarnations of racial inequalities, and why progress in that regard seems so slow. Finally, this chapter makes some recommendations for breaking out of the “stalemate” on race that Barack Obama perceived in 2008.

This introductory chapter talks about America's journey toward electing its first non-white president in its history—a time period that spans more than two centuries. It delves into the problematic, anxious, and determined questionings of the nature, meaning, and authenticity of Obama's blackness; in addition to the multiracial electorate's responses to the narratives of national triumph, racial redemption, and post-racialism during Obama's campaign. The main issue here is how Barack Obama's presidential candidacy served to reflect and create the dynamics of race in the contemporary United States. Obama's election will have a long-term influence on race relations in this country, and it is perceived to have ushered in a “new age” in American racial politics, one that is likely to set the parameters for teaching, activism, and scholarship about race for the coming decades.

This chapter follows The World Tomorrow editor Kirby Page from his early career as an aspiring YMCA missionary world traveler with Sherwood Eddy to his vocation as an independent foreign policy publicist in the mid-1920s. It explores how Page's interests expanded from mere personal pacifism in 1917 to encompass a wider concern with American imperialism, immigration, and racial politics by the mid-1920s, a matrix of concerns he took to his editorial role at the journal. Page sought to correlate recent research into the historical Jesus with the problems of nationalism and imperialism in the American twentieth century, a project in which he was not alone, but of which he was arguably the major proponent of his time.