One always has doubts. This book is meant to talk about the rise, fall, and aftermath of multiculturalism through this–cue groans–”post-racial moment” “in the age of Obama”. I can’t remember which scholar I heard 3 years ago talking about how sick she was of every conference presenter adding on the phrase “in the age of Obama” to their title subhead. Zing.

The doubt has of course been conditioned by the weirdness of the topic itself. Like, hip-hop? Then multiculturalism? Um, Jeff, dude, that seems like a step back. Ask Aaron McGruder.

Maybe it is. But I’m a stubborn dude, so here I am now in the 6th year of my obsession with the idea that multiculturalism both succeeded brilliantly and failed horribly and yet most of us don’t know why. Plus the related idea that everyone’s still stuck on either the 60s or the character-content future thing–you know, the “post-racial” America–that’s not coming anytime soon. And the crowning arrogance that if no one knows why and everyone’s avoiding the topic, well then someone oughtta be in your face about it. Then I go and raise my own hand.

I’m getting close now. There’s a bit to go. I may take a beating for it, but now I’m more than ready to bruise anyone who wants to try. Which is not where I was as recently as a month ago.

Nuff solipsism and shit! This is getting embarrassing.

So here’s a new piece–the first in forever– that Sharon Mizota asked me to write. It appears on the fine website the Los Angeles Review of Books, whom you should support.

It’s about Catherine Opie’s new book Inauguration, and so of course, it takes on Obama and the legacy of identity politics, identity art, and multiculturalism. And a couple of other folks whom I probably shouldn’t have taken on.

Believer-style summary: Gratuitous reference to the L Word. Berkeley High slang. Possibly unnecessary nods to Delillo. Begrudging thanks to Klein and Danto. Undoubtedly the first use of the phrase “go ham” on the LARB website.

Anyway. Enjoy!

Stay tuned. More info to come…

I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of the arts in changing society, the role of culture in moving politics, and the spaces where this kind of cultural change and political change happens.

So I started thinking a lot about used record stores.

In the marketplace they play a really interesting role. Where does pop music go to die? Used record stores. Think of all those copies of The Eagles’ Hotel California you can get for 25 cents.

Where does music go to be reborn? Used record stores. It’s where the crate-diggers, hip-hop producers, guitar-slingers are uncovering old sounds that are blowing their minds and causing them to write the music of the future

So used record stores aren’t just used record stores.

They are morgues and landfills of copyright. They are places of cultural recovery and transmission. They are the creative birthing grounds for pop’s second life.

Basically they are libraries.

Because of this, the used record store becomes an interesting place to think about how we place a value our past and how we make something new of it.

There’s a cultural economy of used record stores, it’s born of the process that goes from record release to the cut-out bin to used record market to crate-digging to revival.

It starts from the moment pop dies—the moment that is the opposite of consumption, the moment of deletion, when a record is cut-out of the catalog, the process when the record falls off the market.

When music is determined to hold no more monetary value, it is deleted. That is where most of our recorded history lies. In the cut-out bin. In the Trash file. Locked behind the copyright fence. Lots of it belongs there like the Eagles. But what about when it doesn’t?

Historically, most artists have not retained ownership of their works, which means that record labels and publishers curate musical histories and cultural legacies. These gatekeepers have the legal power to choose what music can circulate, and what stays out of print.

The situation becomes bleaker with the extension of copyright terms, which has created a class of orphaned music that can’t be legally circulated or preserved because the owners can’t be found or they have gone.

At the same time, because of sampling law, copyright litigation has raised the price of keeping musical genres like hip-hop in print, placing even recent, in-demand records behind the fence. The irrational marketplace for sample clearances also gets between artists in ways that the law never intended, disrupting the transmission of cultural memory.

What we are talking about here plain and simple is market failure. It renders important music inaccessible, especially genres devalued by major labels and publishers, such as jazz, blues, folk, and bluegrass. Even if corporations do not deem this music valuable in an economic sense, it doesn’t mean the music is not valuable to us in the cultural sense.

Enter the collectors, the hipsters, and the DJs. Their rediscovery of musical heritage is a cyclical phenomenon made possible by the deletion of massive amounts of culture. A process we seen repeatedly occurring in Black music, for instance, from the blues to free jazz to funk to disco to hip-hop.

Revivals are what happen at the point where the margin of the marketplace meets the bleeding-edge of hipsterism. It’s lots of fun, but it can also lead to decontextualization and erasure. Where do sagging jeans come from, right? In the cultural economy, in other words, history itself can be deleted.

So on the one hand, you have the market failure that occurs when companies choose to delete records or stop circulating records that have historical or creative importance, music that embodies our human story or music that helps seed new creativity.

Because of market failure, you can’t get De La Soul’s first four albums on iTunes. Nor can you get most of Biz Markie’s albums. You can’t get the complete Def Jam-era Public Enemy boxset Chuck D and the crew put together almost a decade ago.

On the other hand, you have many vital, vibrant and we should note—often legally ambiguous—scenes that pushing further and further the spaces where copyright lapses, the competitive crate-digging subculture, a small galaxy of super-creative musicians, and a bigger galaxy of cool audiences come together to create tomorrow’s mainstream.

Style and the market go hand-in-hand. But there is a larger question, too. One that transcends market value: how do we as a community forge a shared history and how we create a better future for ourselves?

+++++

When I was a teen on a tiny income, I spent as much free time as I possibly could in libraries. In fact, libraries were where I got to form a lot of my musical taste.

On weekends, after spending my McJob money up at Froggies used record store, I’d take the bus down to the library. There was some genius librarian at the Hawai’i State Library who was an uber-hipster. And so that’s where I discovered Robert Johnson, Clyde McPhatter, King Sunny Ade, Gang of Four and Talking Heads.

I’d lug home the cassettes I’d bought along with the vinyl records I’d borrowed from the library, plus crazy books like Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide, wherein he reviewed a million records in riddling prose, and Stephen Davis’s Reggae International, a splashy book that featured album-sized pictures of Big Youth smoking gynormous spliffs. And then I’d spend hours more with them, seeing and hearing and reading the world.

Those are the kinds of things that make an impression on a young person, develop a youth’s love for words and sounds and people.

These days the Oakland library offers more to teens than I ever had. And I’m glad of that too. We live in neighborhoods where virtually every young person we know will be unemployed this summer. Oakland teen programs are helping youths not just to learn and listen to the world, but to learn to lead, to actively engage in and make the world that they live in together.

And that is the way the world changes—the world changes through the culture first. Cultural change always precedes political change.

People who work in this building behind us might think otherwise, but in reality we are the ones who make it move—those of us who are artists, those of us who are community builders, those of us who support artists and community builders. We change the culture, and politics follows.

The folks who are against us, who are against a vibrant vital public core, know this. The budget cuts inflicted we face here and all around the country are about laying waste to the public space and fencing it off. And they are about stopping cultural change right where it begins.

We are now in an era where they are pushing privatization towards its last frontier: the collective imagination. And we cannot allow that. We have to stop them right here in their tracks.

All used record stores are libraries, but libraries are not used record stores.

When I go into a library, I don’t have to worry about who is holding whose copyrights, why this book didn’t sell enough to continue to be available in any marketplace, how many other stories there are out there that I am missing because the storytellers don’t have the money or the property rights to tell them.

In the library, I am in a space beyond the marketplace, beyond consumption, beyond the money censors, beyond the noise. I am in a place where librarians have accumulated the knowledge and the stories important to me and my community.

The library is the embodiment and the refuge of our collective imagination. In the library, we learn just how big and full of possibility the world is and we build the kindling to fuel our creative fires and to change our culture.

Those two transformative acts are too important just to leave to the playgrounds and the graveyards of the marketplace.

For more information on the plan to close most of the Oakland public libraries and how the community is mobilizing to stop this, please visit Save Oakland Libraries. Special thanks to Amy Sonnie and Ted McCoy.

The Official DJ Kool Herc website is now live. Visit here to donate and learn the latest.

Here is a roundup some of the best stories:

+ ABC News
+ New York Times
+ MTV News

And these editorials:

+ Angus Batey in The Guardian
+ Davey D

He is without health insurance and facing enormous hospital bills.

Hip-hop has to take care of its pioneers.

If you love this movement, do what you can.

Donations are being accepted now at:

Kool Herc Productions
PO Box 20472
Huntington Station, NY 11746

Paypal: cindycampbell1@aol.com

More information coming soon.

From Alto Arizona and NDLON

Because Loughner’s motives are not really the point.

Because incivility past the threshold of dehumanization IS the point.

Brian Komar of the Center For American Progress and I teamed up for this new piece in The American Prospect, making the case that progressives need to build the infrastructure to support cultural strategy and cultural organizing.

Here’s an excerpt:

On Nov. 3, progressives awoke to find that they had returned to 2004. Despite important legislative victories, Democrats had been outflanked. Republicans had successfully sold themselves as the party of economic growth, the party of the angry out-of-work American, and, most dissonantly, the party of change. They owned the narrative and won big.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In the dark days following George W. Bush’s re-election, frustrated progressives set out to build an enduring movement that would effectively advance and communicate their ideas, policies, and values. Funders and strategists created new institutions and scaled up existing ones, including think tanks, civic-engagement organizations, and media-watchdog groups. These institutions played a key role in the 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress, the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, and the passage of parts of the Obama platform in 2009 and 2010.

Yet as progressives watched Democrats suffer the worst election loss since the Republican collapse of 1948, they seemed to be back where they started. Just as in 2004, many have blamed the losses on ineffective Democratic campaign messaging.

The problem, however, runs much deeper. Electoral and Beltway politics are episodic, short-term, and transactional. Movements, however, are long-term. “Public sentiment is everything,” Abraham Lincoln once said. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” In other words, movements must change hearts and minds in an enduring way. They must change the culture.

Culture is the space in our national consciousness filled by music, books, sports, movies, theater, visual arts, and media. It is the realm of ideas, images, and stories — the narrative in which we are immersed every day. It is where people make sense of the world, where ideas are introduced, values are inculcated, and emotions are attached to concrete change.

Cultural change is often the dress rehearsal for political change. Or put in another way, political change is the final manifestation of cultural shifts that have already occurred.

Jackie Robinson’s 1947 Major League Baseball debut preceded Brown v. Board of Education by seven years. Ellen DeGeneres’ coming-out on her TV sitcom preceded the first favorable court ruling on same-sex marriage by eight years. Until progressives make culture an integral and intentional part of their theory of change, they will not be able to compete effectively against conservatives…

Read the entire piece here.

Here’s a teaser:

First, let’s get some historical context. What makes this political moment so potentially galvanizing for young voters of color? Aren’t we supposed to be “post-racial”?

The culture wars are back, and they have targeted a new generation. To me, Sharron Angle’s “you look Asian to me” moment was a perfect example. Pundits and bloggers focused on the stupidity of her comment, but the discussion was prompted by a Chicano student who was calling her out on her anti-immigration commercials that featured criminalized brown youths. Angle’s defense—I’m so colorblind, I can’t even tell what race you are—was not just hilarious, it was brutal in its dishonesty. The ads that the students objected to were far from colorblind.

For the right, this election proved—from Rand Paul to Jan Brewer—that racialized appeals to older white voters still mobilize, that the culture wars still work. The upside is that in Nevada, Chicano and Latino voters and young voters flipped the race for (Harry) Reid, who had been several points down in the days leading up to the election.

Young voters, particularly those of color, really rallied behind Obama in 2008. There’s been a lot of talk of how that support is quickly eroding. What needs to be done to once again strengthen that electoral base?

Obama did fairly well by youth. He passed an outstanding student loan overhaul package that will immediately help access to higher education, especially in this era of skyrocketing public school tuition. Perhaps he could have sold it better. But his communications failure was a sign of a larger failure. Going on MTV was good. Barnstorming college campuses was good. Sending a message of “Vote or Die” in 2010 was not good. What Obama failed to do for young people was what he failed to do for his base, because youths are now definitively seen as his base: offer a positive progressive vision for the next 2 years.

You’ve written about the cultural and demographic shifts that are currently changing the country’s electorate. Those shifts have already been exploited in, say, marketing. Why hasn’t that shift really been seen in politics yet?

This is what I mean about the larger failure. Obama’s 2008 election marked the culmination of a cultural shift—the arrival of a new cultural majority—that he does not yet seem to grasp.

Culture always moves before politics. Think of how Jackie Robinson’s Major League debut preceded Brown vs. Board of Education, or how Ellen Degeneres’ coming-out preceded court rulings on same-sex marriage and “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” Cultural change is often the dress-rehearsal for political change. Or put in another way, political change is the final manifestation of cultural shifts that have already occurred.

You can check the whole thing here.

+ A recent piece I did on Obama and race in the U.S. at the mid-point of his first term for the Brazilian weekly magazine, Ilustríssima. The piece also captures some of the themes and topics of my new book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America.

+ An extensive transcript of an interview Mike Nardone and I did for Rap Pages with Rodger “Uncle Jamm” Clayton, Egyptian Lover, and Iceberg of Uncle Jamm’s Army in 1994. Plus you can download a copy of the original article with design by Brent Rollins! We repost it now in tribute to one of the most important figures in West Coast rap. RIP Uncle Jamm.

+ Download the PDF (in Portuguese)

This piece was commissioned by Folha De São Paulo‘s Sunday magazine, Ilustríssima at the midpoint of Obama’s first term. It meant to capture the racial moment in the U.S. for Brazilian audiences, but it also reveals some of the themes and topics of Who We Be: The Colorization of America, due out on St. Martin’s Press in late 2011.

For most of 2008, the most arresting image in America was a screen print by the street artist Shepard Fairey that appeared on posters, stickers, and clothing from sea to shining sea. The image was of a Black and white man rendered in red, white, and blue. The man was named Barack Obama and the four-letter word below his image was HOPE.

Obama was, of course, the presidential candidate who had come from the far geographic and cultural edge of the United States, its Pacific border in Hawai’i, to secure the Democratic Party nomination. He ran on a platform of mending a divided country. In a speech in March called “A More Perfect Union”, he offered his own biracial heritage—the unity of Black and white histories in his own body—as a symbol of reconciliation.

That address, now popularly known as “the race speech”, was in some ways as historic as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial almost 45 years earlier. “The complexities of race that we’ve never really worked through”, Obama said, remained “a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.” If Americans could move forward on race, he seemed to say, they could move forward on anything.

From the height of the civil rights movement through the Cold War into a new era of globalization, the United States has trumpeted the value of inclusion as central to its version of democracy. Yet any student of U.S. history knows that the reality of race has belied the nation’s image of itself. Race has driven four hundred years of civil and cultural schisms, and has brought the nation to the brink of dissolution. Race, another four-letter word, is still the most troubled national divide.

So when Barack Obama’s candidacy began to gather steam in 2008, some pundits wrote that it was a sign the rancor over race in America was finally dissipating. Obama dismissed the notion in his “race speech”, saying, “I have never been so naive as to believe we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy.” Yet his triumph was epochal. In the glow of the historic victory of a Black biracial president, many declared that the U.S. had entered a “post-racial” era.

But in the summer of 2009, when, in a press conference, Obama said white police who had harassed the famous African American scholar Henry Louis Gates in a local incident had “acted stupidly”, he caused a national uproar. Conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck called Obama a “racist” who had a “deep seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” More recently the Obama administration fired African American official Shirley Sherrod after a conservative white blogger accused her of being anti-white in a speech to the NAACP. Sherrod—whose father had been killed by white racists—was in fact speaking candidly of how she had overcome her own prejudices against whites, and the administration hastily tried to rehire her.

During the hot summer months, opposition to Obama’s proposals have been mobilized by thinly veiled racial images. Last year some far-right Tea Party members protested the president’s health care reform package with picket signs depicting him as a witch doctor. Others circulated lies that he was Muslim or that he was not born an American citizen, stories that crystallized their beliefs in Obama’s inextricable foreignness. This year Beck drew thousands of Tea Party supporters to the Lincoln Memorial on the 47th anniversary of King’s “I Have A Dream Speech” to celebrate “the end of darkness.” Halfway through Obama’s first term, flare-ups over race have reached a velocity and pitch unseen since the so-called “culture wars” of the 1980s and early 1990s.

But at the same time, there has never been a time in history when non-white people have been more visible. With Obama and his beautiful young family as the apotheosis, images in the U.S. media appear more loudly and proudly multiracial than ever. Our visual culture has become colorized, to coin a phrase.

One example is the notoriously exclusive high art-world. In the late 1960s artists of color mounted protests against the museums and galleries who refused to show their works. During the 1990s some artists of color began to break into the closed art-world, but not without great controversy. The 1993 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art featured the most diverse representation of women artists and artists of color up to that time. Many, but not all, of the artists revealed concerns over race, gender, and sexuality. The Biennial became a major ideological battleground of the culture wars, and remains one of the most critically despised shows of the last half-century.

But now a reassessment of that moment of multiculturalism is underway. The curator Thelma Golden and the artist Glenn Ligon half-jokingly coined the term “post-black” in the mid-1990s as a way to describe a new generation of post-multiculturalist artists of color. “Post-black is the new black,” Golden famously wrote. Both have become art-world superstars, as have others of their generation, including Kara Walker, Julie Mehretu, Mark Bradford, and Gary Simmons.

The most successful ad campaign this year starred Isaiah Mustafa, a strikingly handsome Black man, in a set of commercials for Old Spice shower body wash called “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” Studies had shown that women made 70% of all body wash purchases, so Mustafa, acting as “The Old Spice Guy”, began his ads with a hearty “Hello ladies!” He pattered humorously in the deep baritone of a Shakespearean actor about how attractive he was. He began the ad wearing only a towel and—through set changes that took him quickly from the bathroom to a yacht to a white horse—he remained half-naked.

The ad went stupendously viral. Its runaway internet popularity caused the corporate giant Proctor & Gamble to commission 185 more video clips featuring The Old Spice Guy responding directly to tweets, posts, and emails from fans. The videos garnered literally hundreds of milllions of YouTube views. In all of them Mustafa was shirtless.

Katie Abrahamson, a spokesperson for Wieden+Kennedy, the agency that produced the ads, denied that Mustafa was cast based on his race. “The truth of the matter is, Isaiah was one of hundreds who auditioned for the spot in a standard casting-call and was simply the best performance and overall best fit for the creative idea—it had nothing to do with the color of his skin,” she said. “The challenge was finding someone who would appeal to both genders.”

But could an attractive white man standing half-naked in a bathroom blessed with equal comic gifts have conjured as much attention? The witty, de-Ebonicized, confident (but far from threateningly confident) Old Spice Guy recalled no one so much as Obama himself, who once when the paparazzi captured him on a beach in Hawai’i, appeared shirtless on a news tabloid cover above the headline: “FIT FOR OFFICE: Buff Bam is Hawaii hunk.”

Advertising met politics when, in one of the follow-up videos, the Old Spice Guy answered a question from the television host and former Democratic advisor George Stephanopoulos. How, Stephanopoulos wondered, could President Obama stop losing women voters? The Old Spice Guy advised Obama to “henceforth only be seen in a towel” and to begin his State of the Union addresses with “Hello ladies!” If the going got tough, just remind them of “his presidential ab-boards.”

One of American history’s most unforgettable images is the mutilated body of Emmett Till, a Black boy brutally tortured and murdered in 1955 by two white men in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white girl. Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral—”I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby”, she said—and the photographs of Till shocked the country and sparked the nascent civil rights movement. Back then an image of a shirtless Black man might have caused race riots.

Twenty-five years ago, Robert Mapplethorpe’s stylized photographs of nude Black men scandalized the art world and catalyzed a conservative backlash against government funding of the arts. (Ligon actually explored the questions raised by Mapplethorpe’s photos in his work for the 1993 Whitney Biennial.) Subsequent debates and political fights over multiculturalism dominated the era of “the culture wars.”

But then the hip-hop movement—with its images of defiant Black and Latino youths—redefined multicultural cool, helping remake the American culture industry for a young browning world. Hip-hop helped to colorize the culture from bottom to top. Now the image of a smart, confident, handsome Black man epitomizes sexy, the cutting-edge of the cultural mainstream.

These changes have created unprecedented opportunities for some people of color. “The reality is, I guess as the reality of hip-hop is now, that most of the people that purchase my work are not African American,” admits Ligon, with a barely perceptible hint of ambivalence. The history of U.S. visual culture, like the history of American music, can be written as a history of desegregation. So why is the U.S. also seeing a renewed rancor over race?

The U.S. population is undergoing a paradigm shift. Because of immigration, non-whites now outnumber whites in 4 of the 50 states. Americans under the age of 18 will become majority non-white in about a decade, and the entire country will follow by the mid-century. Given their cultural influence it longer makes sense to refer to non-whites as “minorities.” Yet the most politically influential American demographic, the post-World War II generation known as the Baby Boom, is over 75% white. Demographer William Frey calls this phenomenon “the cultural generation gap.”

In the 2008 presidential election, race and generation came together as never before. Obama actually lost the white vote and voters over the age of 65 and split the Baby Boomer vote, but won the presidency by forging a new cultural majority. More than two-thirds of voters under 30, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, and an astounding 96% of African Americans voted for him. He also won a decisive margin among voters between 30 and 44, gay voters, and women voters.

To his credit, Obama’s opponent, John McCain, disdained the kind of racialized attacks that have become standard in American politics. But the U.S. has hardly escaped its long history of exploiting race to amplify white anxieties. Since the civil rights consensus of the 1960s, race has been the recurring “wedge issue” that overwhelms reasoned discussion.

In 1968 Richard Nixon’s presidential victory gave birth to the infamous “Southern strategy”—playing on racial fears to realign white Democrats as Republicans. Ronald Reagan summoned images of non-white welfare cheats and youth gangsters to win support for the gutting of social programs and the expansion of prisons. Even Bill Clinton had his “Sister Souljah” moment, excoriating the rapper for her allegedly anti-white comments.

This election season has seen the vicious return of the race wedge, and the triumph of myths over facts. In Arizona, the governor built support for a drastic anti-immigration bill with the fictional image of bodies of beheaded innocents left in the desert by criminals of Latino descent. In New York City, conservatives attacked a proposed moderate Muslim cultural center by disingenuously linking it to the 9/11 attacks and Arab extremism. In Texas, the State Board of Education voted to change the history textbooks for its 5 million students, downplaying the nation’s history of slavery and emphasizing a “biblical worldview”, in one board member’s words, of the U.S. “as a nation chosen by God to be a light set on a hill to serve as a beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying world.”

In many ways, four decades of civil rights rollbacks have left a nation more divided along racial lines. A prison boom tripled the number of incarcerated over the past quarter century to 2 million, the largest population behind bars in the world. Nearly 70% of prisoners are non-white. In the current economic recession, poverty rates for Latinos and Asians have soared. Less examined, but most troubling to many experts, are the rising rates of resegregation in housing and schooling. John A. Powell of the Kirwan Institute For The Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University warns that these if these trends are not stopped, they could rip apart the social fabric in the coming decades.

Here is the paradox of the “post-racial era”: while our images show an optimistic nation moving toward cultural desegregation and racial equality, our politics reflect deep pessimism and our social indexes reveal increasing social resegregation and racial inequality. The hip-hop band The Roots call our time the “post-hope era.”

“We know this is a country that’s increasingly becoming more diverse,” says Cornell Belcher, a political pollster for Obama. “Marketers get it. People selling sneakers get it. People selling Coca-Cola get it. But from a political standpoint, we haven’t really got it.”

Belcher notes that Americans of all backgrounds tend to share certain nationally defining values: freedom, fairness, opportunity, equality. “However, this is the problem with equality,” he says. “In certain groups, it triggers a conversation that goes like this: ‘They’re trying to get equality, which means I’m losing something. You have to be very careful about triggering this fear of ‘us vs. them.’”

When Obama filled out the decennial census form for this year and checked his racial background for “Black or African American”, he was criticized for ignoring his white ancestry. But some believe his resistance to speaking as openly about race as he did when he was a candidate have resulted in “colorblind” policies that are leaving communities of color further disenfranchised.

“What the Obama administration has learned is if you talk about race you lose. But what is the positive agenda for a multiracial future?” asks Powell. “Is it Arizona? Is it Texas?”

In 2011 another image—one unlikely to turn as viral as the HOPE poster or the Old Spice commercials, but just as intriguing—may find its way into the center of a national discussion. Glenn Ligon’s mid-career retrospective, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art next year, will likely feature his neon light sculpture of the word AMERICA. He has painted the front surfaces of the letters black so that the light—which fluctuates slowly in intensity—can only be thrown backward. Now that Obama is president, Ligon jokes that critics will probably read this last piece too literally. “Black America,” he groans, “blah blah blah.”

But Ligon says he created these works before Obama was elected, when he read of a child in Afghanistan standing amidst the ruins of his home calling on America to live up to its democratic ideals. The other inspiration, he says, was Charles Dickens’s famous opening line to “A Tale Of Two Cities”, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”