Not in Our Lifetimes
The Future of Black Politics
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
For all the talk about a new postracial America, the fundamental realities of American racism—and the problems facing black political movements—have not changed. Michael C. Dawson lays out a nuanced analysis of the persistence of racial inequality and structural disadvantages, and the ways that whites and blacks continue to see the same problems—the disastrous response to Katrina being a prime example—through completely different, race-inflected lenses. In fact, argues Dawson, the new era heralded by Barack Obama’s election is more racially complicated, as the widening class gap among African Americans and the hot-button issue of immigration have the potential to create new fissures for conservative and race-based exploitation. Through a thoughtful analysis of the rise of the Tea Party and the largely successful “blackening” of President Obama, Dawson ultimately argues that black politics remains weak—and that achieving the dream of racial and economic equality will require the sort of coalition-building and reaching across racial divides that have always marked successful political movements.
Polemical but astute, passionate but pragmatic, Not in Our Lifetimes forces us to rethink easy assumptions about racial progress—and begin the hard work of creating real, lasting change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Political science professor Dawson anchors his provocative, partisan but perspicacious, book between two events the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the election of Barack Obama, which he believes heralds "a dangerous new chapter in American racial politics." Relying heavily upon public opinion statistics in assessing how "illusory is the idea that we live in a post-racial America," he attends to the "huge difference of opinion in how blacks and whites evaluate the import of Katrina" and the ensuing pattern of white rejection of "mainstream African American opinion." The center of his argument is that the transformation of black electoral politics is simply that "some black middle-class, technocratic, super-credentialed, and safe candidates become now more acceptable to whites." Dawson also considers the impact of immigrants with little shared history of repressive racism and activist struggle, as well as the impact of class divisions. The pessimism implied by Dawson's title, and his analysis, is leavened by his vigorous call to combat "a white-dominated racial order" for the reestablishment of independent black political movements to recreate the progressive coalitions of the 1960s and 1970s. If indeed the " state of black America' in some domains is distinctly bleak and distinctly different from the experience of the great majority of white Americans," as Dawson states, then his diagnosis and remedy warrant serious attention.
