Unpacking President Barack Obama’s “Improbable Story”

Abstract

In lieu of viewing President Barack Obama through the lens of deracialization as a political strategy, this chapter offers an intersectional approach that focuses on Obama as a post-racial, post-feminist politician. Examining the Moynihan Report as an urtext for black cultural pathology melodrama—that is, a neoliberal frame that anticipated much of what we associate with post-feminism, particularly in terms of self-regulation—the chapter assesses black cultural pathology melodrama as it relates to Obama both in terms of his historic 2008 election and his governance. It focuses on the historic 2008 presidential campaign and the cultural milieu in which it occurred by examining Crash and Grey’s Anatomy, popular cultural sites at the time. Obama is variously figured as a “magical Negro,” or prototypical inversion of black stereotypes; an example of a new generation of leadership that nevertheless affirms patriarchal modes of black leadership; and a symbolic father (especially in terms of his My Brother’s Keeper initiative) that serves as an exemplar of middle-class respectability that can rehabilitate the black underclass.