The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America - Couverture rigide

American Book Award, 2007 (Come Hell or High Water)  NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction, 2006 (Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?)  Notable Books of 1994, New York Times Book Review  50 Most Inspiring African Americans (Essence magazine)   “Michael Eric Dyson...[is] a world-class scholar, and the most brilliant interpreter of hip hop culture we have...How many folk out there can talk about pimping in terms laid out by Hegel? Or use Kant to explain the way that prison fashion moved from the cellblock to the city block? Dyson drops the names of philosophers and scholar as easily as he does the names of artists on the latest mixtape moving dance floors in the clubs.” —Jay Z   “It’s very hard to both tell the truth and do it with care, but Dyson has proved himself master of this high-wire act. He’s an electrifying man of words – this is clear to anyone who has read him or heard him or seen him speak. Although he is entirely unafraid to walk into a rhetorical firefight, he is careful, he is considered, and he always seeks peaceful resolution to any debate, no matter how fraught.” —Dave Eggers   “Dyson is not only the most talented rhetorical acrobat in the academy—he is also one of the most courageous and engaged intellectuals in America.” —Cornel West   “Michael Eric Dyson embodies the ideal public intellectual for our time: translator, boundary-breaker, and healer of a war torn culture.” —Naomi Wolf    “Michael Eric Dyson combines cutting-edge theoretical acuity with the passionate, engaged, and accessible stance of a public intellectual” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.    “Dyson’s distinctive eloquence...As always, Dyson is fiercely honest, controversial, engaging, funny, and brimming with arguments and ideas.” —Ann Coulter    “Michael Eric Dyson offers a radical reinterpretation of Martin Luther King, Jr.: radical in its politics, radical in its style, and radical in implication.” —George Stephanopoulos   “My man Mike Dyson is not only a serious intellectual, but a hip brother who can identify with everyday people.” —Nas   “Effortlessly and with conviction, he weaves together a range of themes from gangsta rap to graduate seminars, deepening them with highly varied and vividly portrayed personal experience.” —Noam Chomsky   “Such is the genius of Dyson. He flows freely from the profound to the profane, from popular culture to classical literature.” —Washington Post     “In [Dyson’s] prose one hears the fervor of a Sunday sermon; in his ideas one see the analytic scrupulousness of a man who knows a thing or two about tenure committees.” —Time   “[O]ne of the most graceful and lucid intellectuals writing on race and politics today.” —Vanity Fair

A provocative and lively deep dive into the meaning of America's first black presidency, from “one of the most graceful and lucid intellectuals writing on race and politics today” (Vanity Fair). Michael Eric Dyson explores the powerful, surprising way the politics of race have shaped Barack Obama’s identity and groundbreaking presidency. How has President Obama dealt publicly with race—as the national traumas of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott have played out during his tenure? What can we learn from Obama's major race speeches about his approach to racial conflict and the black criticism it provokes?  Dyson explores whether Obama’s use of his own biracialism as a radiant symbol has been driven by the president’s desire to avoid a painful moral reckoning on race. And he sheds light on identity issues within the black power structure, telling the fascinating story of how Obama has spurned traditional black power brokers, significantly reducing their leverage.  President Obama’s own voice—from an Oval Office interview granted to Dyson for this book—along with those of Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Maxine Waters, among others, add unique depth to this profound tour of the nation’s first black presidency.