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This chapter argues that the center of gravity is shifting because of an intricate interplay between America's color line and its nativity line. It uses the color line concept to ask whether America has the right policy tools to fully erase the line that separated whites and racial minorities throughout America's history. If they merge—if immigrants are racialized—the future sadly repeats America's past. If, instead, America's population becomes so diverse and multiracial that the color line disappears, an altogether different future is in store, perhaps the promised postracial society. However, it is not certain whether this social process will strengthen or weaken a color line inherited from the eighteenth century, strengthened across the next century and a half, and then challenged but not fully erased by the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

Chapter 1 scrutinizes the First Lady’s response to her racist and sexist treatment in mainstream media in the 2008 presidential election campaign. Michelle Obama faced many attacks from the McCain-Palin campaign and the conservative media in the 2007–8 election campaign season, including ridicule over her “fist bump” with Barack Obama at a St. Paul, Minnesota campaign rally and the parody of her as a Black Panther on the cover of TheNew Yorker. But no attack was as brutal and sustained as the one that came after her “pride” comments during a stump speech in early 2008. In this chapter, Joseph analyses Obama’s response: coming out as a postracial, postfeminist glamour goddess on The View. The chapter asks: how did such a strategically ambiguous performance allow Obama to speak back to negative popular media representations without incurring additional racist and sexist wrath? Why did Obama’s reframes, redefinitions, and coded language work so effectively in this particular case?

Chapter 2 analyzes a case study from Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey has always occupied a unique, exceptional, and almost superhuman position in the American cultural imaginary. Winfrey has long since abandoned the status of mere mortal in the eyes of fans and foes alike. In her ubiquity, Winfrey did much to not only shore up her own brand, but also configure the representational space of a particular brand of celebrity African American womanhood. That particular brand was strategic ambiguity. This chapter asks: what happened when the magic trick stopped working, or when Winfrey’s postracial, strategically ambiguous negotiations of race and gender weren’t successful? In this chapter, Joseph analyzes the limits of Winfrey’s so-called racial transcendence, considering a telling moment when she used strategic ambiguity but was still pilloried in the press as a race-baiting, uppity, Angry Black Woman.

Chapter 3 examines showrunner Shonda Rhimes’ twenty-first century Black respectability politics through the form of strategic ambiguity. Joseph traces Rhimes’ performance of strategic ambiguity first in the pre-Obama era when she stuck to a script of colorblindness, and a second in the #BlackLivesMatter moment when she called out racialized sexism and redefined Black female respectability. In the shift from the pre-Obama era to the #BlackLivesMatter era, this chapter asks: how did Rhimes’ careful negotiation of the press demonstrate that, in the former moment, to be a respectable Black woman was to perform strategic ambiguity, or not speak frankly about race, while in the latter, respectable Black women could and must engage in racialized self-expression, and redefine the bounds of respectability?

Chapter 4 begins part two of the book, which analyzes the words of Black women who are behind and speaking back to their screens, and postulates about what happens when postracial resistance and strategic ambiguity are not available as strategies for success. Chapter 4 focuses on how the young women constructed their community through identifying against strategic ambiguity. This chapter begins by defining the contours of this women-of-color, feminist audience study. Joseph introduces the members of the study to the readers, and takes them through some of their critiques including how they identify against televisual images, how they refute tokenism, and how they enact racialized resistance by “hate-watching.”

Chapter 5 is the second of the two audience reception chapters in the books, which continues documenting a group of young women flow of commentary before, during, and after watching a full season of their favorite television program, America’s Next Top Model. These young women claimed agency in the face of what they interpreted to be racist and sexist media representations, and they subsequently produced counter-narratives to strategic ambiguity. This chapter looks at how the young women flouted the corporate notion of the management of difference in their viewing community by flouting respectability politics, calling out colorism, rejecting code-switching, and, overall, rejecting postrace.

Chapter 6 focuses on television production economies and relies upon interview data in order to illustrate how Black female television writers, studios’ in-house legal counsel, and producers skirt and tease notions of postrace in constructing their own brands of resistance. This chapter investigates how a coded, more polite, and postracial form of racialized sexism affects those who work in the industry as much as infiltrates the entertainment products that make their way to audiences. This chapter draws upon interview data with prolific Black women television professionals in Hollywood in order to understand the ways in which twenty-first century representations of African Americans on television are shaped by segregated spaces.

This chapter argues that it is historically significant that droves of whites are willing to embrace a black presidential candidate. Indeed, forty years ago, it would have been impossible for a black politician to become a viable presidential contender as the United States entered the racially turbulent summer of 1967 and the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner disturbed conventional racial norms by portraying a black doctor (played by Sidney Poitier) dating a white woman (Joanna Drayton). Nothing black candidates could have done or said would have prevented them from being excluded on the basis of the color of their skin. The fact that this is no longer true is a sign of some (admittedly slow) racial progress more than fifty years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But this chapter maintains that there are various reasons not to become overly excited about Obama’s cross-racial appeal from a racial justice perspective.

This chapter argues that Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech was an appropriate and successful response to a political-personal crisis. He negotiated the controversy surrounding his personal relationship with Reverend Wright by acknowledging racial disparities in the United States without placing blame for those disparities. Accordingly, Obama successfully maintained a post-racial rhetorical stance that appealed to extremely diverse audiences. Yet the speech failed to accurately represent a racially differentiated United States of America. By sanitizing the country’s histories of chattel slavery and racism, Obama’s speech reified many harmful racial tropes. Our essay exposes the potentially damaging strategies Obama employed to resolve his political-personal crisis and considers the rhetorical implications of a post-racial discourse.

This chapter argues that within the context of the operation of race in the US, the conceptual space inhabited by the “post” in post-race is only understandable through white privilege and that white privilege necessarily requires an explication of white fear, which is also evident in this post-racial moment.

This chapter interrogates the reality of racism and white supremacy in what some today refer to as “The Obama Era” and what others regard as evidence of a “Post-Racist America.” By utilizing an African-centered conceptual framework, centering on culture and worldview, this discourse constitutes a critical examination of the impossibilities of a post-racist America by investigating the lived experiences of African descended people and other communities of color. Through this analysis, it will be evident that while we may be in “The Obama Era,” we are far from a post-racist society. Thus, discussions of post-racism are assessed as conceptual masks used to conceal the philosophical and structural realities of global white supremacy as exemplified through continuous racist practices.

This chapter examines Obama’s candidacy as a significant challenge to identity politics, a challenge that will only deepen with his Presidency. At the center of that challenge is a growing uncertainty about the significance of color lines. It has special significance for blackness given its pivotal role in the US intellectual and administrative apparatus 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.

This introduction defines neo-passing by contextualizing the term not only in relation to classic passing narratives and scholarship on passing but also in relation to broad notions of performance, pretending, and identifying. The editors also connect their effort to delineate a genre of neo-passing narratives to recent scholarly efforts to define neo-slave narratives and neo-segregation narratives. Like those genres, neo-passing narratives mediate between historical and contemporary notions of racial and intersectional injustice. Using several recent case studies, the introduction explores the ways in which neo-passing narratives speak directly to the contradictions within contemporary debates about colorblindness and color-consciousness, or what one contributor calls the debate between postracialism and most-racialism. Finally, the introduction briefly describes each essay in the volume, emphasizing its engagement in a vigorous debate about the specific ways in which neo-passing narratives alternatively shore up, deconstruct, or complicate our understanding of performance and identity production after Jim Crow.

Some scholars argue that racial passing began in the mid- to late nineteenth century, reached its pinnacle in the early twentieth century, and then abated by the 1930s. This chapter substantiates, however, that as a word and a behavior, passing has a longer and more extensive chronology. By providing a broad historical overview of racial-passing texts, the chapter argues that the most radical ones play on the multivalent possibilities of this behavior, using passing as a mirror, as a sort of “dirty” glass that is held up to the reader. Instead of clarifying the meaning of whiteness or blackness, some of these texts ultimately confuse a stable reading of the meaning of race, revealing dialectical tensions that exist at the heart of identity categories themselves.

This chapter argues that contemporary neo-passing narratives offer some of the sharpest rebuttals—both formally and tropologically—to contemporary colorblind reading practices, particularly those that are proliferating in the law. The recent proliferation of neo-passing narratives and, in particular, their insistence that we must interrogate the ways in which race might still matter in our ostensibly postracial moment, resist the racial formalism ascendant in legal jurisprudence and hermeneutic logics, more generally. Edward Jones’s novel The Known World critiques this colorblindness, insisting instead that we attend to the ways in which the refusal to see race, in fact, delimits our ways of knowing the world.

This chapter considers how Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, the star of MTV’s reality television show Jersey Shore crafted a bankable celebrity persona by “passing for tan.” Emboldened by postracial discourse and a late-capital moment, Snooki’s neo-passing is an exaggerated performance of Italian American identity based on stereotypes about ethnicity and familial belonging, the generic demands of reality television, and the affect of ethnicity. Snooki’s story is a deeply American one staged against the unique physical and cultural geography of New Jersey.

“The Good Old Days” catches up with the four African-American members of Our Gang and their sometimes-tortured relationship with the past. It analyzes Eddie Murphy’s Buckwheat caricature on Saturday Night Live, the slipperiness of racial parody, and the 1994 and 2014 Little Rascals remakes. Concludes with the recent wave of race riots and the fantasy of a “postracial” America.