Abstract

During the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, idealistic talk that America was on the verge of entering a post-racial age was at its apogee. A set of demographic changes was apparent in America and the nation was poised to elect its first African American president. The feeling that the United States was back on the trajectory of the arc of justice was electric, and faith in individualism, with its ties to the distant ideal of color-blindness, felt vindicated. Andrew Delbanco put it this way: “there was suddenly a sense that one could believe in a ‘post-racial’ future without being a dupe or a chump” (Delbanco 2008).