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The chapter length introduction, “The Post Era,” historicizes both popular cultural (i.e. colorblindness and post-racialism) and scholarly attempts to periodize contemporary African American culture and literary aesthetics (i.e. post-soul, post-black, and postrace). It connects these conceptualizations with the revision of Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness. The introduction locates these shifts in the new millennium in the context of Black politics and the rise of Barack Obama. It also addresses the relationship of the current moment in African American literature with past movements, focusing especially on the post era’s repudiation of the Black Arts Movement.

This chapter examines contrasting depictions of the Black Power movement in Hollywood film and television that either confirmed or resisted what Herman Gray refers to as the “civil rights subject.” The first half of the chapter explains how nineties-era movies Malcolm X and Panther presented affirmative images of radical black protest but anchored these images to traumatic counter-memories of black victimhood. The second half of this chapter critically reviews a variety of negative portrayals of the Black Panthers in media products between 1994 and 2013 including the movies Forrest Gump, Barbershop 2, and The Butler, the miniseries ‘The 60s, and an episode of the television program Law & Order to argue that Hollywood has routinely depicted black rage, not structural racism or white violence as the central problem requiring tough-on-crime solutions. The chapter interprets these portrayals in the context of the political backlash against civil rights gains and racial inequities within the criminal justice system.

The introduction discusses how racial reconciliation has been thought about from Brown’s integrationist vision to imaginings of post-racialism that accompanied the election of Barack Obama. We ask what we can learn about the conditions of racial reconciliation by examining that history. This chapter also provides an overview of the subsequent chapters in this book, showing how each helps illuminate the conditions that impede racial reconciliation and those that might facilitate it in the future.

In the United States, the racialized social structure is White supremacy (as White is the dominant race), and the reigning racial ideologies are color blindness and post-racialism. This chapter uses this framework to think through multiraciality and its perils and promises in contemporary United States society and to answer the following questions: Will multiraciality create a positive window for racial reconciliation and bridge building? Will multiraciality serve to reproduce or strengthen Whiten dominance? We consider these and several other questions in order to assess the role of multiraciality in the United States racial order. It closes with some policy suggestions to help steer multiraciality in a positive direction.

Edwin Rosskam worked during the New Deal as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) before working in a variety of capacities for the Puerto Rican government throughout the 1940s and 1950s. In 1964 Rosskam published The Alien, a novel about his time in Puerto Rico. A liberal like Preece, Rosskam depicted Puerto Rico as a place where American progressives could comfortably settle without having to be burdened by all the cultural and political baggage of U.S. race relations. This chapter illustrates how Rosskam used Puerto Rican racial insularity and other sociological tropes in order to rationalize the connections he hoped to make between the continental United States and the island. While Rosskam’s novel explored the productive possibilities of class-based color–blind politics, its emphasis on insularity simultaneously reinforced whiteness and characterized the Puerto Rican diaspora as a contaminated and racialized class of outsiders to the nation.

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 concluding chapter presents a meditation on race, media, and memory and suggests that a vigorous re-examination of how people tell stories of their racial past is necessary both to demystify post-racialism and to learn strategies for promoting racial justice. It highlights the significance of collective memories which are part of the “social imaginary,” and commemorative practices. Together, these two provide a field within which people recognize the “deep meanings” that circulate in culture. Commemorations are part of the periodic renewal of democratic society. At these times, people transmit core values, reinvigorate associations, and engage in public advocacy. The chapter concludes by excavating and deconstructing the ways in which dominant collective memories of racial “anniversaries,” so to speak, are anchored to problematic deep meanings of race, individualism, innocence, government, and responsibility.

Beyond portraying race relations as a zero-sum economic game, GOP contenders courted southern white voters by championing “colorblindness.” The color-blind message gave white Americans and, particularly, white southerners a way to move past race, while rendering federal programs to counteract institutional racism unnecessary. Replacing race-baiting with race-burying, the Long Southern Strategy catalyzed a political muteness on race that endured and gave rise to a myth of post-racialism. This myth, while attractive to white southern voters, not only misconstrues the degree and nature of racial animus still present in the hearts and minds of many white Americans, but it also fuels Racial Resentment at continued efforts to protect minority civil rights, at politically correct speech, or at efforts to address structural racial inequities.