Barack Obama's Community Organizing as New Black Politics

Tamara K. Nopper

doi:10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022009

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Political Power and Social Theory

ISSN: 0198-8719
Series editor(s): Professor Julian Go

Subject Area: Sociology and Public Policy

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Barack Obama's Community Organizing as New Black Politics

Document Information:
Title:	Barack Obama's Community Organizing as New Black Politics
Author(s):	Tamara K. Nopper
Volume:	22 Editor(s): Julian Go ISBN: 978-0-85724-911-1 eISBN: 978-0-85724-912-8
Citation:	Tamara K. Nopper (2011), Barack Obama's Community Organizing as New Black Politics, in Julian Go (ed.) Rethinking Obama (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 22), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.51-73
DOI:	10.1108/S0198-8719(2011)0000022009 (Permanent URL)
Publisher:	Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Article type:	Chapter Item
Abstract:	This chapter explores how discourse about Barack Obama's community organizing background underscores his new Black politics. Whereas new Black politics is associated with a minimization of race, centrist and neoliberal policies, and an unwillingness to “speak truth to power,” Obama has been characterized as “different” due to his community organizing experience. As I show, Obama's community organizing background is invoked by him and others in ways that amplify an opposition to Black racial solidarity associated with the tradition of old Black politics. The first section examines how Obama's community organizing is depicted as a quest for racial acceptance from old guard Black activists but translates into a story of his political maturation. The second section considers how Obama's relationship with his (now) former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright is symbolized as a struggle between old and new Black politics and thus serves as a commentary on the presumed ineffectiveness of racial solidarity for addressing the plight of working-class Blacks.