The zero-sum game of race and the familiar strangeness of President Obama

Across his presidency, Barack Obama has been situated as the signal of (racial) national progress and (racial) national decline, prompting heightened attention to national race talk. In this article, we return to the September 2009 announcement that President Obama would give a speech directed to the nation’s schoolchildren. The speech quickly became a site of contentious race talk with critics alleging socialism and communism, not race, and advocates offering praise. We argue that despite different invocations of race, both critics and advocates invoke similar logics of race, ground in notions of strangeness and familiarity that function both to (dis) engage race and to reiterate race as racist threat. These similar logics produce a zero-sum logic of racism that precludes complex conversation.