OPENING RESPONSE

In some ways Obama’s candidacy captures the heady days of the late 1980s and the early 1990s when black Americans were first really experiencing their electoral power on a national level via Jesse Jackson’s two presidential runs. And though Jackson was never in position to become the democratic nominee, the surge in black registered voters helped swell the ranks of the congressional black caucus and concretize their influence on national issues.

___On the ground, folk like Public Enemy with Chuck D’s call for 5,000 new leaders, the sun-shiny nationalism of Soul II Soul (“Keep On Movin’”), Heavy D even (“We Got Our Own Thing”), and of course the work of Spike Lee gave a generation of twenty-somethings a vision of political possibilities. And these are the same folk, now in their late thirties and forties that embody the Obama generation. I think this is a generation that most folk don’t think of as hip-hop, but represents the possibilities of hip-hop when allowed to mature.

___I think this generation has always been invested with a sort of black-on-black candor (think about the critiques of Rosa Parks and Jesse Jackson in the Barbershop movies), but I think Obama’s candidacy places many black folk in the uncomfortable position of needing to hold Obama accountable in very public ways. I don’t subscribe to this idea of Obama being the cutting edge of some post-racial reality, but he certainly is ushering in a different politics of race—one that demands that even a prominent black politician is fair game in mainstream politics.