The Atlantic has a package of articles about race and politics, race and life, race and culture. Our excellent, maddening, cover story, more on it below, is entitled "The End of White America."
One can fairly well ask right now whether, given the events of the past few years and projecting into the next few, ambitious, declarative magazines like the Atlantic will be tempted to ever again package a series of stories about Black and White America. It's not that we've exhausted the content, or that racial problems no longer vex, or anything like that. It's just that history seems to have eclipsed our ability to describe it using familiar terms, and that our new benevolent overlords -- the Obama generation -- just won't play along. Case in point from our politics: Blagojevich allies dipped into the vat of identity grievance in trying to paint Senate Democrats as racist for not seating Roland Burris, pointing to Harry Reid's expressed fears about the political viability of a trio of urban black candidates. Maybe there's a there there, but the press seems to regard this angle as a very minor deviation, a barely perceptible tangent, an annoyance. My prediction: within two years, an Atlantic cover will ask whether we've become too homogenous, too eager, too earnest, too e pluribus unum. Maybe they'll let me write it.
To the stories: they're must-reads. Check out Ta-Nehisi Coates' meditation and profile of Michelle Obama -- the more transformative of the two Obamas, he contends.
There has been much chatter about Barack Obama as the answer to America's racial gap, as a biracial black man whose roots stretch from Hawaii to Kenya, with an Ivy League pedigree and the seal of the South Side. But he is not the only one entering the White House who has seen both sides, who intuitively grasps the heroic American narrative of work ethic and family, and how that narrative historically failed black people. He is not the only one who walks in both worlds. Indeed, if you're looking for a bridge, if you're looking for someone to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America, to allow us all to look at the American dream in the same way, if you're looking for common ground, then it's true, we should be talking about Obama. But we should make sure we're talking about the right one.BTW: check out Ta-Nehisi's book, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, if you haven't already. Actually, read in on January 19, when Barack Obama and Joe Biden take the train through Baltimore.
Hua Hsu wonders whether the end of a distinctly white cultural style is near (and whether it'd worth saving. As you read the article, don't assume you know what Hua concludes).
Consider the world of advertising and marketing, industries that set out to mold our desires at a subconscious level. Advertising strategy once assumed a "general market"--"a code word for 'white people,'" jokes one ad executive--and smaller, mutually exclusive, satellite "ethnic markets." In recent years, though, advertisers have begun revising their assumptions and strategies in anticipation of profound demographic shifts. Instead of herding consumers toward a discrete center, the goal today is to create versatile images and campaigns that can be adapted to highly individualized tastes. (Think of the dancing silhouettes in Apple's iPod campaign, which emphasizes individuality and diversity without privileging--or even representing--any specific group.)
| 
