Discourses of Stability and Change in the Post-racial Rhetoric Surrounding the Election of President Barack Obama

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel addresses public and political discourses that have folded the Obama Presidency into broader national narratives of the civil rights struggle. Considered in the context of historic antiracist struggles, attention to the rhetorics of racial politics surrounding Obama’s election affords new opportunity for deliberation about the state of race relations, as well as to the ways in which discourses of change might obscure the stability of structural racism in the United States.

Sub Unit

• Public Address Division

Individual Presentations

• Are we there yet? President Obama and Discourses of Culture and Civil Rights - Carolyn Calloway-Thomas, Indiana University

• Cosmopolitan Love or Black Nationalist Hatred: America’s Memory of the Civil Rights Movement - Kirt Wilson, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Rhetorical Amnesia in Time Magazine’s Retrospective on Civil Rights and Barak Obama - Kristen Hoerl, Auburn University

• Children Joining Hands: Obama and the Generational Struggle over King's Dream - David Deifell, Drake University

Respondent

• Victoria Gallagher, North Carolina State University

Session Organizer

• Kristen Hoerl, Auburn University