David Ikard

Barack Obama and the politics of race: The myth of postracism in America

Many scholars across racial lines argue that the historic election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States marks the dawning of a “postracial era” in our country. Despite this claim and unprecedented enthusiasm that abounds within African American circles about the direction of race relations in this country, there seems to be a glaring ideological disconnect between the desire and reality of a race-free society. Focusing attention on this disconnect and the symbolic capital of “hope” that Obama’s presidency constitutes for the Black community, this article exposes the potential pitfalls of wholesale investment in postracial thinking, particularly for the most economically vulnerable African American populations. Chief among the questions that the authors ask is how African Americans can productively address the continuing challenges of race-centric oppression under an Obama administration that is itself an embodiment of this postrace thinking.

White Supremacy under Fire: The Unrewarded Perspective in Edward P. Jones's The Known World

The sexually charged relationship that Clara Martin, a white widow, has with her lone slave Ralph in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003) will strike most readers as schizophrenic. Though she is intensely attracted to Ralph, she goes to mental and social extremes to resist acknowledging her feelings even as she continues to actively pursue him. The event that throws her into this chaotic state of resistance occurs on the fi rst night of a three-day-long storm when, after struggling to comb her wet thick unruly hair, she consents to Ralph’s compliment-laced offer to do it for her. Finding the experience both emotionally comforting and intensely erotic, Clara allows him to groom her hair again over the next two nights. When the storm ends she discontinues the grooming without explanation. Shortly thereafter, she conjures up the notion that Ralph is secretly plotting to rape and murder her. At one point, after reading a local newspaper account of a slave, out of spite, putting fi nely ground glass in her master’s food, Clara becomes so suspicious of Ralph, who has been her cook for twenty-four years, that she abruptly stops eating the food he prepares and loses weight in the process. In addition to declining to eat his food, she has Ralph interrogated, albeit with pointed directives not to “hurt his feelings” or “say anything mean” (153), by fi rst the slave patrollers and then John Skiffi ngton, the sheriff of Manchester County, neither of whom fi nds evidence of wrongdoing. Eclipsing the unfounded need to investigate Ralph’s behavior, Clara begins a nightly ritual of nailing shut her bedroom door and sleeping with two knives—one by her bedside and the other under her pillow “as close as a lover” (162). Despite her expressed fears about Ralph’s motives, Clara collapses into an emotional state of panic after slavery is abolished and Ralph announces that he plans to leave Virginia and go live with his extended family in Washington, DC. The narrator reports that Clara “cried and cried” when Ralph informed her of his plans to move, entreating him like a desperate lover to remain with her in Virginia (163).

Who speaks for Precious? A black feminist analysis

Abstract The intraracial debate about the gender, class, and sexuality politics in the movie “Precious” has received little critical attention beyond popular media outlets. This essay focuses on the black patriarchal perspectives within this debate through a black feminist critical lens and considers why such perspectives continue to have political capital in black spaces. Under scrutiny also are the ways in which some black feminist-identified women scholars reproduce similar patriarchal perspectives even as they repudiate the white male hegemonic institutions that stigmatize and scapegoat black women in poverty. My contention is that “Precious” has a black feminist agenda that, although flawed in many ways, exposes the social erasure of poor black womens humanity and plight. As this phenomenon of erasure relies, in part, upon black mens intraracial gender blindness, I call upon black feminist-identified men to take the lead in supporting the film and opening up discussions about black mens roles in perpetuating black womens suffering.