The election of Barack Obama has had surprisingly little impact on a nation fixated with race. By Kevin Gaines In 1886, the African American abolitionist and spokesman Frederick Douglass published "The Future of the Coloured Race," an essay which held that the biological assimilation of black Americans was inevitable. The Negro, in the parlance of the time, would neither be annihilated nor expatriated, nor would he "survive and flourish" as a distinct and separate group. Instead, "he will be absorbed, assimilated" into the white majority, visible "in the features of a blended race." For Douglass, this amalgamation was a fait accompli, despite white protestations against interracial intimacy. Writing amid the codification of a new system of racial segregation in the south of the US, and soon after his marriage to a white woman, Helen Pitts, had angered many. Douglass's vision of racial comity through the biological absorption of blacks and whites was edgy, even transgressive. Still, it proved no match for the white south's concerted assault on the political and social rights of black people, which persisted until the mid-1960s reforms of the civil rights movement. In a manner reminiscent of Douglass, since the 1990s advocates of the multiracial movement have looked to the growing population of mixed race Americans, neither black nor white, as evidence of racial progress. First Tiger Woods, and now Barack Obama, have embodied for many Americans the solution to the nation's historical racial conflicts. Our black or, as some prefer, biracial president has become for