Harris’s fourth chapter connects Obama’s color-blindness to the black middle and upper classes’ timeworn “politics of [racial] respectability,” which preach “tough love,” “proper behavior” and “good values” for the black poor, downplaying the problem of racial oppression.
“Obama’s Axelrodian politics have furthered encouraged the ‘marginalization of blacks’ community interests.’”
Harris’s fifth chapter recounts the success enjoyed by black politicians who have pursued race-neutral strategies (e.g. former Virginia Governor Doug Wilder and current Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick) to win favor from white voters – along with “wink and nod” backing from blacks – since the 1980s. A key figure in this story is Obama’s white media guru David Axelrod, white former advisor to Chicago’s first black mayor Harold Washington. Before he helped Obama craft a candidate brand that soothed white fears even as it “signal[ed] to persuadable white voters that they had an opportunity to make history by electing the nation’s first black president” (Harris, 151), Axelrod did color-blinding/race-neutralizing media work for white-friendly black politicians like Michael White (Cleveland mayor), John Street (Philadelphia mayor), Dennis Archer (Detroit), and Deval Patrick.
Harris’s sixth and final chapter shows how Obama’s Axelrodian politics have furthered encouraged the “marginalization of blacks’ community interests” – something made all the more perturbing by “the Obama administration’s attention to other constituencies such as the gay and lesbian movement and the Tea Party” (Harris, xxii). It is even more troubling in light of steady worsening of black America’s already dire economic straits over the last five years.