The Historical Road to BarAxelrod Obama
Harris tries to explain Obama’s race-neutral ascendency through an interpretive description of U.S. black politics over the last half-century. His first chapter demonstrates how the evolution of his two historically contending black political strategies – (A) multi-racial coalition politics and policy “universalism” vs. (B) independent politics for policies that directly target racial disparities –cleared a path for Obama’s ascendancy.
It is no mistake, Harris argues in his second chapter, that Obama’s road to the White House passed through Chicago, “the political capital of black America” since at least the late 1920s, when the city’s black South Side voters sent the first black Congressman since Reconstruction to Washington.
Harris’s third chapter tries to link Obama’s silence on racism to the rising popularity within black American Christianity of “the prosperity gospel” – a conservative, market-friendly religious world view that tells blacks to pursue and embrace economic success on the basis of personal effort, dropping supposedly “dysfunctional” concerns with racism and structural and societal problems.