The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union"
A team of scholars and journalists explore the implications of Barack Obama's speech A More Perfect Union, given in the heat of the 2008 primary campaign, in this volume edited by Sharpley-Whiting (Pimps Up, Hos Down). Written by Obama in response to the media frenzy over statements by his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, A More Perfect Union addressed the enduring legacy of slavery and racism and instantly entered the canon of great American oratory. The contributors use the speech as a starting point to examine the divide between civil rights–era activism (and activists) and the politics of a younger generation that has grown up in its shadow, as well as the development of black oratory, the meaning of a postracial society, the immigrant experience and divisions between the descendants of American slaves and postcolonial immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America. Scholarly without being dry, the book offers a way forward from what has become a stalemate between a color-blind white America that sees racism as a problem solved in the 1960s and a nation of ethnic minorities that experiences daily its structural inequities.(Aug.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.