Children Joining Hands: Obama and the Generational Struggle over King's Dream

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

Abstract

Barack Obama's ascendency to the Presidency of United States was a first. The uniqueness of his election disrupted the ideological scripts told about race in America and call for mythical revision. Temporal relations between Obama and MLK encourage their narrative articulation. Each story about how Obama fits with King's Dream restructures the rhetorically constitutive conditions for American racial identity. This paper positions King's I have a Dream speech as a constitutive narrativity, analyzes recent accounts in the mass media over questions of its fulfillment in Obama versus beyond Obama, and argues that these fragments represent an ideological struggle between dreams of past generations and dreams for future generations.

Author

• David Deifell, Drake University