Thursday, August 19, 2004

• Obama vs. Keyes: not black-on-black
  CVK
  Writing for Africana.com, Siddartha Mitter argues that the race between Barack Obama and Alan Keyes for the Illinois senate seat is not one of black against black (as many have charged), but of the future against the past:

  "Keyes can't push Obama's buttons because he doesn't know where they are. Obama represents an emerging politics that threatens to dissolve Keyes' bombast like garlic to a vampire: a post-black, post-identity politics that refuses to get bogged down in sterile "who can speak for whom" debates, refuses to be divided-and-conquered, yet also refuses to make believe that race no longer exists. In the post-identity politics that Obama's rise hints at, race is everywhere — and so is class, and gender, and all the other factors that sometimes drive us apart and sometimes bring us together. Post-identity politics is a work in progress, still figuring out its agenda and methods. But its emergence on the national scene is long overdue."

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