many a symbol of reconciliation and national unity. Yet, just as Douglass had done in his own time, the multiracial movement exaggerates the extent to which the post-civil rights increase of interracial marriages and their mixed-race offspring constitutes a solution to the problem of racism. As critics of multiracial ideology have noted, positive perceptions of mixed-race people as less threatening are often rooted in pejorative assumptions about blacks as angry or inferior. In other words, this idealised view of 'bi-racial' people reinforces, rather than challenges, prevailing notions of racial difference, of white superiority and black inferiority. The fascination with Obama as a seemingly 'raceless' mediator, once praised by a news presenter who gushed after a major presidential speech, "For an hour, I forgot he was black," is a far cry from the resentful perception in some quarters of his wife, Michelle, as an "angry black woman." The belief that a mixed race president heralds an era of racial harmony seems not just nave, but misguided. Historically, black social advances have often elicited white resistance and backlash, as was the case when public school districts throughout the white South refused to comply with the unanimous US Supreme Court decision desegregating public education in 1954. Undeniably, Obama's election is a source of hope for many Americans and people the world over. But to others, militant white nationalists who imagine themselves as the true representatives of the American people, Obama remains a lightning rod for age-old fears and hatreds. A quick survey of