anything about it. Let's be one country. Let's be one country. Let's get the job done." Jones's conciliatory posture toward the polarising figure of Beck represents a new pragmatism, an awareness among younger activists that even those whites who espouse racist views can be disabused of them through respectful engagement. On the one hand, there are advocates of multiracial ideology who strangely believe that white racism has been vanquished by interracial intimacy in the boudoir. By extension, the multiracialists imagine that the only racists left are those African Americans who question their attempts to distance themselves politically and socially from blacks. On the other hand, Jones and other young activists insist on the necessity of actively opposing white racism, as a means of building coalitions based on a public vision of the common good. Jones and others view anti-racist work as a means to embrace the humanity and better angels of their political adversaries. This strategy is not simply an outgrowth of the age of Obama. It hearkens back to the vision of nonviolent social change and redemptive Christian love, espoused during the US civil rights movement by the likes of Martin Luther King and James Baldwin, and recognises the profound difference between amalgamation and reconciliation. Kevin Gaines is the Director of the Centre for Afroamerican and African Studies and Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century and American Africans in Ghana: