I address you on August 28, 2008, on the same evening as the Democratic nominee Barack Obama speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.
This Presidential Address examines the contrast between American racial politics and the knowledge of it within the discipline of political science.
This is especially appropriate as we assess the dynamics of partisan politics in the 2008 presidential election year in which one of the parties has chosen to nominate a racially marked candidate. Whatever the outcome, and whatever the policy position of the new president, this election offers the opportunity to explore the framework of American racial politics and the challenge the American nation faces in seeking democracy.
I ask of political science—to what extent is there an understanding of the space racial politics inhabits in the American political system? While my address will not be specifically about Senator Obama, his campaign for the Democratic nomination, or for the presidency, I will use examples from this election year to explore our understanding of political life, as we have addressed it in this field of American politics. I will talk about the political dimensions of American public life— and how well political science as practiced in the U.S., has framed and addressed American racial politics. I have struggled with this address, how to frame it, how much, how little, whether to attempt to talk about race at all. But I knew early on that race it would have to be.
As you all know, once I was chosen as president of this Association, my Presidential Address would fall at 8:00 p.m. on this Thursday evening, the 28th of August, 2008. We knew there would be a nominee of the Democratic Party who would address the nation, just as next week there will be a nominee of the Republican Party. As it happens the presumptive Democratic nominee is Illinois Senator Barack Hussein Obama. That I will speak as an African American woman, the first to lead this Association, whose work focuses on race, ethnicity, and gender, interest representation and voting rights, on the same evening as the first African American Democratic nominee is more than I could have ever imagined earlier in my life.
Why is it important to incorporate these personal comments about racial politics, and democracy in the context of Political Science especially in an election year when that Black presumptive nominee has not always been aggressive in doing so? I want to make the case that we, and I do mean we Political Scientists, for all of the work that has been done in recent decades on race, have just begun to study and to understand how it works.
In a sense this shouldn't be surprising since for much of this Association's history, it has not faced the contradictions in American racial politics; those contradictions challenged the very existence of Democracy that is so often idealized in our lecture halls, school buildings, and legislative chambers. In the absence of an examination of racial politics when the nation was in the deepest most difficult years of slavery, of de jure and de facto segregation, we have failed to lay the groundwork for understanding how racial politics operates, the circumstances that give rise to changes in it, the dominant and the subtle that frame its patterns of development and evolution.
I argue we are on the brink of a major shift in American political life and racial politics. Senator Obama's nomination by the Democratic Party, formerly the party of the segregationist Solid South, is a milestone. That is one of the points I have struggled to find and to make. And if you think that is presumptuous of me, consider the following.
I'm a native of Washington, DC, and grew up in the city. I lived in Southeast, in Anacostia that figures so prominently in stories of violence and conflict in the Washington Post and in the national media. My mother, Rosa T. Pinderhughes, like me and her mother before her, were natives of the city. My father, D. James Pinderhughes, migrated south from Providence, Rhode Island. They were very much part of what has now come to be called “the Greatest Generation,” he was in the Army in World War II. She worked and saved while he was away. They are, at 95 and about to be 90, still going. I attended an elementary school, Our Lady of Perpetual HelpFootnote 1 situated at the top of “the hill”—every day I looked down on official post-World War II Washington: the Capitol, the Pentagon, the Washington Monument—at a city that was just beginning to emerge from the formal segregation of the last five to six decades.
On August 28, 1955, fifty-three years ago today, Emmett Till was taken from his uncle's home in Money, Mississippi, and murdered. That act brought the system of racial oppression into clearer focus for many whites in the country; it made especially vivid for Blacks the ways in which southern whites continued to believe it their right to take the lives of Blacks who in any way transgressed the boundaries of racial hierarchy. On August 28, 1963, forty-five years ago today, Martin Luther King and 100,000 people gathered in Washington to call for Civil Rights legislation and for jobs. My parents had decided that we would stay at home, but when my father left for work in the Post Office, my mother, in an impulse for which I am forever grateful, gathered my sister and me together, got us on the bus, and headed downtown to join the rest of the marchers.
On August 28, 2005, as we political scientists all gathered in Washington, DC, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
The Obama nomination could not have happened, was literally inconceivable on those earlier August 28ths—in 1955 or in 1963, when I was growing up in Washington. At that time, the city had no right to vote or to select its representatives at any level. I grew up watching young white high school students come to the city from across the country to see their nation's capitol, to visit their representatives, and knew neither I nor anyone in my family in that city had anyone that we could call upon for basic representation. Even today Washington, DC's voting power generates only a nonvoting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.Footnote 2 When Katrina struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, Barack Obama had only served eight months in the U.S. Senate, and it was certainly also impossible to imagine him as a successful nominee of the Democratic party.
So I put on our agenda tonight as political scientists the theoretical and methodological questions of how we can come to understand American racial politics.
Why, for example, does the Obama candidacy takes up so much space—why is every single aspect of his candidacy so volatile, so provocative, so time consuming: Where he worships, and what his wife says, whether he's “Too Black? Too White? Not Black Enough? Not White Enough” as one of my students said of Obama in his paper last spring.Footnote 3 Although no one has quite gotten to the point of playing the dozens by asking Obama about his Mama, it could certainly happen (and probably has) in the alternative universe of the web.
These sound as if they are simple or even simplistic questions. I assert they are not, that we must begin to consider race in a complex way, in the same ways we consider the American founding, international relations, and the way we address the importance of constitutional issues. In fact, I argue that we political scientists who are Americanists find ourselves facing a profound change in American public life without the theoretical tools to explain it. We are the Comparativists and International Relations scholars of the early 1990s who had no evidence for explaining the coming fall of the Soviet Union.Footnote 4
It's important to understand as Cornel West argued in his book of the same name, why Race Matters. It is important that Linda Faye Williams' brilliant and award winning The Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege be fully recognized in the discipline and used to shape our understanding of American politics more broadly than has so far occurred.Footnote 5
How does race affect political institutions; how do candidates use race in campaigns, as Tali Mendelberg's The Race Card discusses.Footnote 6 How is race such a dominant fact in so many areas in American public life, without also being a greater part of our theoretical analysis in political science.
So let me try in the time I have, before Senator Obama begins speaking at 10:00 p.m., and we all rush off to hear him, to describe some of the aspects of American racial politics that I think should be explored, and that should be integrated into the study of Political Science that have not yet been. I discuss three types of racial politics in the next sections.
Not in My Lifetime: Popular Understanding
The Obama Presidential candidacy—is a foil for understanding the rest of American political life. That candidacy is difficult to understand because it taps so many different dimensions simultaneously. In my first exploration of racial politics, I address popular understanding. Even with the gradual transition in recent decades from a highly stable system of racial subordination and racial politics, to a more unstable competitive one, a number of some of the most high achieving, successful African Americans, whether in academic, literary or political life thought it improbable that there would ever be a president of African American ancestry. A number of prominent Americans, African Americans, have uttered the “not in my lifetime” phrase about their surprise about the success of Obama's candidacy. I heard the “not in my lifetime” phrase a number of times before I thought to place it in the context of this, my own Presidential Address. I almost began taking it for granted.
Why then, do I argue that the phrase is so politically significant? Because I believe the phrase reflects a consistent understanding of American politics, and of the status of African Americans in this American political world. Let me give you some examples.
John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History
In a short interview highlighted by the National Public Radio blog, News and Views, John Hope Franklin answers the question, “What does Obama's win mean for America?”
I didn't think it would happen in my lifetime. My mother and I used to have a game we'd play called “Our Public.” She would say, “If anyone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, tell them you want to be the first Negro President of the United States.” And just the words, were so far fetched, so incredible, that we used to really have fun just saying it.Footnote 7
Toni Morrison, Author
Toni Morrison Beloved author, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993) and the Pulitzer Prize (1988), was widely cited for having named William Jefferson Clinton as the “First Black President.”Footnote 8 She eventually endorsed Obama during the primaries, but she had commented about former President Clinton during the impeachment debate that he was “Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime.” Note the way Morrison framed it, with the expectation not just that this would not happen “in her lifetime” but someone who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime.Footnote 9
Lucius Barker, APSA President
Professor Barker, former APSA President Barker shared a number of stories with me as I prepared for this Address, and he joined the masses out there in Denver tonight. Growing up in Louisiana, where he saw racial violence, where his parents' work in the schools was not fully respected even in historical accounts of that work. He felt he could not not go.Footnote 10 He never thought he would see it in his lifetime.
Angela Davis, Activist
I came upon one of the more surprising examples when I was in Brazil in July of this year to attend the Brazilian Political Science Association meetings at the University of Campinas.Footnote 11 Afterwards I traveled to Salvador, Bahia in the predominantly black Northeastern region of the country. The Factory of Ideas holds an annual seminar and this year's guest was Angela Davis who delivered a series of addresses about “From the Plantation to the Prison System.” In the question period Davis was asked about her views on Obama. She responded that she had never expected it and uttered the “Not in my lifetime” phrase. Although she has usually worked for other political organizations, she explained that she would be working for the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party in this election.Footnote 12
The success of Obama's candidacy for the Democratic nomination reflects a change in national politics. It is our challenge at this time to begin to explore what this candidacy, successful or not, means in terms of the American political system that we study as individual political scientists, and that our discipline has examined for over a century.
Theoretical Issues: Multiple Dimensions of Race
The next section of my address introduces a second type of racial politics, a theoretical basis for understanding American racial politics.
American notions of citizenship and interest representation are incompatible with the African American political experience. Marguerite Ross Barnett argued that the American political context exalts values of individualism and egalitarianism as evidence of democracy.Footnote 13 For most of the nation's history, acting upon those values was legally forbidden to African Americans. African American inequalities arise from a number of sources. I argue tonight that racial conundrums exist within American politics and it is by looking for and at these politically convoluted or philosophically complicated spaces that we come to understand something of how inequality exists within a putatively democratic system, and understand also the continuing challenges facing the achievement of American democracy and political equality.Footnote 14
The first of these conundrums bears on the concept of inner and outer spaces to describe the political dimensions in which African Americans exist in relationship to the larger polity. This idea has been used with some frequency in the political and social science literature to detail how Blacks and their lives and politics have been roughly separated from and subordinated to the white population for most of the nation's history. These external and internal domains are spaces between which different sets of values and patterns can be distinguished. The external domain corresponds to the American polity at large, the space in which the society's racially hierarchical values have been fully operative and in which the dominant views prevail. The internal domain is a liminal one that has been cultivated by African Americans as an alternative, communal, and democraticFootnote 15 arena of thought and action.'Footnote 16
By the twentieth century, Blacks began to use values formulated in this Internal Domain to export political values and organizations “outside” to the External Domain. And this is a conundrum without a smooth or clear transition, but is rather a puzzle which incorporates some inconsistencies and contradictions in moving from one domain to the other.
Characterization of these external and internal domains appears with some frequency in the Political and Social Science literature. James Q. Wilson alluded to external and internal dimensions in Negro Politics (Reference Wilson1960, 7). Sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois named this “double consciousness which simultaneously reflected the differences between Black Americans” own views of themselves and the larger society's views of them. Matthew Holden divided the American political terrain into distinctly different politics in his separate volumes on the different politics of America's Black and White Nations. Huey Perry, Joseph McCormick and Charles Jones, and others' discussion of racial crossover politics or deracialization suggested a clear boundary between the populations. Dona and Charles Hamilton tracked the efforts of racial interest groups to shape the national social welfare and civil rights policy agenda over a number of decades in the 20th century.Footnote 17
An especially vivid public example of the conjunction of these two domains occurred in 1995. The Million Man March witnessed many Black men on the politically significant space of the National Mall, but Minister Louis Farrakhan directed his audience and followers to commune with each other, rather than to contact the public officials so close at hand, just over his shoulder. As the day went on, the size of the event, organized by religious and political groups oriented toward “Black nationalists,” visibly drew out from the Capitol larger and larger numbers of Black Congressmen (Charles Rangel of NYC; Bobby Scott of Virginia, etc.), who clearly didn't want to miss being seen before such a large crowd.
A second conundrum is that of the relationship between the individual and the collective, symbolizing the consequences associated with populations not fully recognized by the state. Because of the distinctly different patterns racial discrimination has imposed on African Americans, the latter exhibit less predictable postures toward individual and collective values. Where the polity elevates and honors individualism,Footnote 18 the dynamics of racial hierarchy reversed those patterns among African Americans. In the liminal internal domain, the collective takes on positive value. Nineteenth and twentieth century racial policies denied Blacks the same degrees of freedom and individuality whites exercised. Black economic independence and competition generated legal, political, or violent repercussions, even death by lynching and white mob violence.Footnote 19
The capacity for Blacks and other racial groups to act as individuals is vastly different from the white population whose political status was neither legally or politically unstable. Strategies that arise from a political space occupied by inhabitants unrecognized by the larger society are therefore also distinct from those available to the fully recognized citizen. In such cases, the power of the individual is dwarfed by the requirement for collective action in order to address the status of the group. Pluralist literatures on interest groups and collective action which explored specialized economic interests without examining the status of blacks, often misjudged the resources available to and the significance of the barriers addressed by Blacks and other racial and ethnic groups seeking political participation and representation.Footnote 20
Consider collective goods as a conception of rights relative to others, as a set of rules which all members of the polity, regardless of race, are bound to respect, and the boundaries of which define one's status, i.e., as citizenship. Collective goods as citizenship rights have never been fully formed in the American context with regard either to African American or to other racial and ethnic groups. African Americans have literally invented and cultivated their own political interests within the internal domain of the Black community, have had to introduce them into the broader external domain conceptually, and have invented new strategies for political mobilization to get them affirmed within the larger polity. Native Americans and Asian Americans, using similar strategies in the early twentieth century, have also organized collective political organizations, legal defense funds, and have shaped other kinds of protest efforts that address the challenges they faced in the west and in Alaska. The size of their populations in the case of Asians and Latinos (and Latinos in the past—obviously not in the present), their geographic locations in the southwest and the west, limited their impact and their ability to shape broad national policy, and dominate the political agenda. Native Americans were in the way.Footnote 21
As Collective Goods are not limited to those who invent them, rights created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by and for Blacks, the largest of the racial groups, the one able to mobilize support for national legislation, have not been restricted to them.Footnote 22 National legislation passed originally for African Americans, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, has been rapidly extended to others such as Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and others subject to language and other types of group-based discrimination. Organizational interest group structures and strategies crafted to address discrimination directed against Blacks have also been quickly adapted by other collective rights groups including those representing race, sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and disability.Footnote 23
This analysis has described a “classic American racial framework” in which racial hierarchy was stable over a very long period of time, and across large portions of the nation. I have begun to reexamine my argument, influenced by the wisdom of years, and also by the work of other scholars in the U.S. and scholars of other comparative political settings. These patterns, described as stable, can undergo important changes in form and substance. In the U.S., in my lifetime, we've seen the shift from de jure to de facto systems of discrimination, and to the increasing protection and recognition of civil and voting rights. And even within these periods of discrimination, the patterns are not precisely the same across regions and within states. A very brief discussion of geographic variations follows.
Geographical Dimensions of Racial Politics in the American States
I argue it is important to recognize the variations in the American system, even within the framework I've outlined. In my third example, race shapes the ground on which we stand. Even with this stability, there were and remain important distinctions in the character of racial policies and practices in the American political environment.
I briefly touch on a few of these different spaces, some of them hidden from view historically, or hidden by their physical location outside of the southern context where the implications of slavery and segregation, and the size of the African American population, made them clearest. These range wildly and I address them as examples of some of these differences, from New England's Freedom Trail to Providence, Rhode Island, to Chicago and the Southwest.
In Boston, nineteenth-century slave catchers were received with considerable hostility and driven away when they attempted to capture and transport African Americans into slavery. David Walker's famous “The Appeal” was written and sent from here. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and many other members of the Anti-Slavery Society developed their political arguments here, but there were considerable racial constraints as well. Simultaneously there was only one school for Black children in the 1830s.Footnote 24
Nearby in Providence in 2003, Brown University President Ruth Simmons charged the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice with exploring the role of the University and some of its founders, the Brown family, in the operation of the slave trade. The Committee, whose members included political scientists Marion Orr and Neta Crawford, provided the University with a complex analysis of the University's, the city's, and the state's—as well as its founders'—relationship to slavery and its development. “By the middle of the 18th century, about 10% of Rhode Islanders were enslaved.” Slavery was active in the state from 1638 until the 1830s.Footnote 25
Chicago and Southwestern Michigan
Chicago is home to the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee and Illinois Senator, Barack Obama. The city has also been the base for Bronzeville,Footnote 26 Black Chicago, that represented, at least in the twentieth century, a particular kind of racial politics developed out of the height of the era of early twentieth-century racial discrimination, admittedly de facto in Chicago, but highly discriminatory nonetheless. My earlier work concluded that this was characterized by intense residential segregation, homogeneous concentrated political districts, consistent representation of Blacks by Blacks, with barriers to their representation in at large contests or heterogeneous areas in the city or state. Drake and Cayton, APSA Presidents Ralph Bunche and James Q. Wilson, my own study Race and Ethnicity in Chicago Politics, and many others explored these politics.Footnote 27
Only 100 miles to the east, in southwestern Michigan, a very different kind of racial politics zone has existed for more than 150 years. Cass County was a “terminal point of the Indiana and Ohio operations … of the Underground Railroad.” Significant numbers of Quakers lived in the area and often settled Black former slaves in the county rather than facilitating their move further north into Canada. In 1968, George Hesslink reported the county was 10% Black, with the towns of Cassopolis, Vandalia, and Calvin Township having populations as large as 70% Black. By 2006, the county was 6% black, while Cassopolis was 32.6% and Vandalia 47.6%.Footnote 28
This area exists without being widely known or studied in Political Science; although George Hesslink at first noted an absence of the traditional patterns of racial—read racist—discrimination found in most rural areas of the country. He eventually nevertheless concluded that the status of this group, though of a different form from what was the case in the rest of the country, still reflected subtle patterns of discrimination.
The West and the Southwest have been treated in recent years as if Latinos were recent arrivals, but of course as many have said, the U.S. migrated to them, they didn't migrate to the U.S. In these locations, the racial character of the base population and its previous recognition of citizenship for Blacks posed a political and legal problem for the U.S. as Arizona, New Mexico, and California were added to the union. The U.S. failed to honor the agreements it had made in recognizing citizenship for the grass roots Native American, Spanish, and mixed black and white populations when it signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.Footnote 29
How Political Science Has Dealt with Race
Finally, I turn briefly to an examination of how Political Science has dealt with race using several measures. Walton, McCormick, and Miller reviewed the journals and research comparing work by political scientists on race; they divided that work into two areas: Race Relations Politics and African American Politics. Race relations politics addresses “how any new African-American political initiative…will affect white political leaders and institutions.”Footnote 30 Work on African American politics examines the empowerment of African Americans. “Ultimately, while both traditions focus on the issue of race, they suggest different power configurations between the two races.”Footnote 31 They also reviewed the publications on race in the Political Science Quarterly (105 years) and the American Political Science Review (in 85 years) and found each journal had published 27 articles, or 2 % of the total published. Most of these fit their race relations category, and were unrelated to the political empowerment of African Americans.
A second measure I chose was to look at what the intellectual leaders of the discipline thought important. Walton, McCormick, and Miller also looked at this measure and found that only three APSA Presidents even “mention[ed] the word Negro, Black or African American.”Footnote 32 In my own review of APSA Presidential Addresses, I began by using the broadest possible definition of race in which slavery, abolition, or race was mentioned, but only in passing by 27.6% of former presidents. Narrowing it to more detailed or complex discussions, approximately 5% of the total 103 addresses have complex and deep discussions of race while 21% were much less complex. Ironically most of the discussions that address race, mention Blacks; only two also addressed Latinos, one Native Americans, none mentioned Asians.Footnote 33 Clearly these have tended upward in recent decades but taken as a whole, the pattern has not changed dramatically.
Obama as Presidential Candidate—Does His Candidacy Have Any Meaning?
Most of us who study American Politics, voting patterns, the performance of Black candidates, and their competition in heterogeneous electoral settings, Voting Rights politics, were wrong. We did not predict Obama would do well, would survive, would win the Democratic nomination, let alone live long and prosper in the Democratic and political competition.
So, how did Senator Obama's Democratic nomination and presidential campaign happen? I argue that it has to do with the tension associated with the presence of a Black candidate in the External Domain, a space previously forbidden to any Black in presidential races. Obama is the product of the first generation of American (legal) political-racial integration.Footnote 34 One could argue that some of Obama's critics from any side may be right. While his early years raised by a white Kansan mother and grandparents, Hawaii and Indonesia are clearly outside of the Internal Domain of the average Black citizen, Obama is also not stably part of the External Domain. His mother chose non-European husbands, she, most subversive of all, earned a Ph.D., in Anthropology, and became a Ford Foundation Program officer, working in Southeast Asia.Footnote 35
This type of analysis is at the individual level—but it is of an individual who functioned largely outside of the Internal Domain I've characterized as so important in African American Politics for his early years. Senator Obama was socialized outside of the Internal Domain I've described, but the first volume of his autobiography makes clear that he felt the need to come to terms with it in high school, in college; to be elected from the south side of Chicago, he had at least to explore the black communities there, to understand the city's black citizens, its institutions, to marry into it, to enter its churches, and as we all know by now, to join one as he did for so many years at Trinity United Church of Christ when it was headed by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.Footnote 36
Senator Obama has, I would argue bridged the boundaries of the Internal and External Domains. He is not alone in this as there are increasing numbers of people of two or more races (2% of the 2006 Census), but not necessarily large numbers who are also politicians.
Conclusion
So am I saying political science hasn't studied race? It has, to a degree. I would say that the study hasn't been consistent enough, broad enough, more routinized as a part of American Politics that should be understood and incorporated into graduate programs, that appears in the journals, and in scholarly activities.
Counterposing the political science questions with the political questions, does Obama become the savior, the really smart political leader who has risen above all the rest of Black Politicians? I say no; he's the leader who claims “change,” and who bridges these domains and dimensions I described in my earlier discussion of the theoretical aspects of racial politics.
Partly as a result of his distinctive socialization experiences outside of the traditional American Political Domains—Barack Obama is not from the External Domain—but not entirely foreign to it or unaware of it either; he is also not directly from the Internal Domain, but he has come to know and understand it. The politics and tensions that have arisen in his campaign come from his efforts to navigate between these distinctly different domains, and between the individual and collective values that have been held by clearly identifiable racial sectors in American politics.
These “domains,” the internal and external, are no longer as stable as they once were. The External Domain is challenged by the demographic changes that the Census Bureau recently announced as just over the horizon. Within a decade or so, the population of U.S. children will be majority non-white, fueled by the rapid expansion in the Latino, and the greater growth in Asian immigration, and the relative decline in Black natural increase.Footnote 37 And the External Domain has been challenged by the Obama candidacy.
The Internal Domain of African Americans has been reshaped by a mix of factors—outmigration from the early twentieth-century Black urban areas, slower population growth, considerably more integration via education and career experience, easier access and movement into higher status roles, immigration from Continental Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe, as well as changes in the operation of traditional African American social and religious institutions.
There are also many politicians I'll call “Obamas with different names” who are becoming part of the American political system. Those include Governor Richardson of New Mexico, Mayor Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, State Representative Carol Liu of the California State Assembly, Congressman Jackson of Illinois, Congressman Gutierrez of Illinois, Congressman Wu of Oregon, Congresswoman Hilda Solis of California, Congresswoman Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, and Congresswoman Nydia Valezquez of New York. None of them has precisely the same political socialization as Obama, nor do they have the classic African American internal/external conception of American Politics. Jewel Prestage and Marrianne Githens introduced important early work on the intersection of race and gender; and this campaign has demonstrated how volatile these variables can be as Senators Obama and Clinton competed in the primaries, and as Senator McCain chose Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.Footnote 38
I would predict that we face a volatile and dynamic period in American political life. Understanding how these communities, and political leaders will shape American Politics is an important intellectual and democratic (small d) challenge facing us.Footnote 39
Conclusion
I conclude by joining the personal and the professional. When I began first grade at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School, and walked up the hill every day to school, I had no knowledge of the American Political Science Association, or of Ralph J. Bunche who was then President of the Association. I conclude this Presidential Address during my year as leader of the American Political Science Association. I have analyzed the patterns of racial politics shaping our past and that may shape our future. In those early years, I would never have expected this nomination of a Barack Obama “in my lifetime.” As APSA president, I charge you, the older and the coming generations of political scientists, to consider how to recognize and to understand what this ‘change’ means.
It will be a challenge for us to face, and an intellectual journey to undertake. But tonight as your president, I say “Yes We Can.”
