Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics

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 [have] 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. (Nov.)