Somewhere Over the Rainbow? - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Somewhere Over the Rainbow?
Post-Racial & Pan-Racial Politics
in the Age of Obama

Taeku Lee

In his acceptance speech on Tuesday, November

4, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama took note
that “tonight, because of what we did on this date
in this election at this de½ning moment, change has
come to America.” On the same night, Obama’s
Republican challenger, Senator John McCain,
responded similarly: “This is a historic election,
and I recognize the signi½cance it has for African-
Americans and for the special pride that must be
theirs tonight. We both realize that we have come
a long way from the injustices that once stained
our nation’s reputation.” The next day, in a Los
Angeles Times op-ed, scholar and critic Michael Eric
Dyson declared: “The distance from King’s assas-
sination to Obama’s inauguration is a quantum
leap of racial progress whose timeline neither cyn-
ics nor boosters could predict. Today is a bench-
mark that helps to ful½ll–and rescue–America’s
democratic reputation.”1

Looking back through history, few would argue
against the view that Obama’s election to the pres-
idency represented a rupture from centuries of
white privilege as a presumption and a reality.
Since the election, a greater diversity of opinion
has emerged on what the presence of an individual
of African American descent in the White House
means for the future of race relations and racial
politics in America. One particular view, however,
has had a curiously forceful hold on public dis-
course. Beside Dyson’s op-ed, Los Angeles Times
columnist Shelby Steele wondered aloud, “Does

TAEKU LEE is Professor and Chair
of Political Science and Professor
of Law at the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley. His publications
include Mobilizing Public Opinion:
Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes
in the Civil Rights Era (2002), Trans-
forming Politics, Transforming Amer-
ica: The Civic and Political Incorpo-
ration of Immigrants in the United
States (with S. Karthick Ramak-
rishnan and Ricardo Ramírez,
2006), and Why Americans Don’t
Join the Party: Race, Immigration,
and the Failure (of Political Parties)
to Engage the Electorate (with
Zoltan Hajnal, 2011).

136

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

[Obama’s] victory mean that America is
now of½cially beyond racism? . . . Doesn’t
a black in the Oval Of½ce put the lie to
both black inferiority and white racism?
Doesn’t it imply a ‘post-racial’ Ameri-
ca?”2 Then, in the news coverage follow-
ing President Obama’s ½rst State of the
Union address, msnbc commentator
Chris Matthews infamously remarked:
“I was trying to think about who he was
tonight. And, it’s interesting he is post-
racial, by all appearances. You know, I
forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”
In this essay, I examine the continuing
(if evolving) racial undertones of politics
as a touchstone for three main points.
First, I challenge the emergent under-
standing that an electoral key to Obama’s
post-racialism is the debt he owes to
white independents, who presumably
set aside decades of racially polarized
voting and came to his side. Second,
rather than af½rming post-racial aspira-
tions, I stress the need to redouble our
efforts to understand how processes of
racialization and “other-ing” are consti-
tuted and how they are shifting in the
dynamic political moment we now occu-
py. Third, I propose using the concept of
pan-racialism to think about how individ-
uals of a shared demographic come to
engage, politically, as a group. Careful
consideration of how “group-ness” is
constituted is essential to conceiving of
a pan-racial politics across the diversity
of racially and ethnically de½ned groups
in the United States today.

I should preface my discussion of the

current discourse on Obama and post-
racial politics with two reminders. First,
an abundance of proof suggests that ru-
mors of the demise of race are, to sum-
mon Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated.
Even during the election campaign and
in spite of Obama’s best efforts to con-
vey a “post-racial” narrative, public dis-

course in 2008 was replete with signs of
racial schism. It is dif½cult to reflect on
Obama’s candidacy and presidency thus
far without conjuring memories of the
Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s controver-
sial remarks and Obama’s subsequent
“A More Perfect Union” speech; the
McCain-Palin campaign’s thinly veiled
allusions to race and patriotism in their
“America First” sloganeering; the sub-
sequent and ongoing mobilization of
“Birthers” and “Tea Party Patriots”; the
cries of “Foul!” to then-Supreme Court
nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s support for
a “wise Latina” standpoint on the bench;
the “beer summit” between Obama, Vice
President Joe Biden, Harvard professor
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge
police of½cer James Crowley; and many
other instances of racial tension. Post-
racialism, if the pre½x post- means “coda,”
“transcendence,” “abnegation,” or “invis-
ibility,” is clearly more an aspiration (for
some) than a materially achieved fact.
Why, then, in the face of all the vitriol
and viperine attacks, do assertions of
Obama’s post-racialism persist? My sec-
ond reminder is that much of the current
discourse prevails because it is explicitly
framed as non-racial or color-blind, or
it is contrived in terms of patriotism,
constitutionalism, cronyism, or some
other allegedly race-neutral guise. That
is, much like the deployment of stereo-
types of black male hypersexuality and
criminality through images of the fur-
loughed felon William Horton in 1988,3
the racial character of Obama’s presiden-
cy survives through framed messages,
implicit associations, and the semblance
of plausible deniability.

Not everyone will agree that race per-
sists and that it survives behind a veil of
color blindness and post-racialism. Nev-
ertheless, in this essay, I consider these
premises to be widely acknowledged in
order to focus my discussion on a gener-

Taeku Lee

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

140 (2) Spring 2011

137

Post-Racial
& Pan-
Racial
Politics
in the Age
of Obama

ally hidden transcript in the current
dialectic of post-racialism. Political
media coverage in the ½rst years of the
Obama presidency has been saturated
with at least two controlling messages:
½rst, that Obama’s policy agenda and
governing legitimacy are under siege;
and second, that there is a groundswell
of partisan disaffection–large enough
to forecast an electoral tsunami in the
off-year elections–punctuated by the
ascendancy of Tea Party activists and
other populist uprisings against both
the Democratic and Republican parties.
There is a third, related media message
that captures a key dimension of the cur-
rent dialectic of post-racialism. That is,
nonpartisan (read: white) voters are a
critical segment of the electorate to
whom Obama owes his 2008 victory,
and those voters will bear decisively on
his reelection prospects in 2012. During
the 2008 campaign and after, the primacy
of electoral place given to independent
voters in mass media coverage could not
have been more pronounced. As early
as January 2008, an article in The New
York Times carried the headline, “In This
Race, Independents Are the Prize.”4 In
April, Real Clear Politics ran the article
“Obama’s Independent Edge” with this
punchy subheading: “It’s electability,
stupid.”5

By May 2009, four months after
Obama entered the White House, the
Pew Research Center published the in-
depth report Independents Take Center
Stage in Obama Era.6 As disproportionate-
ly white segments of nonpartisans began
to mobilize protest against Obama, the
framing of that message shifted, starting
with The Wall Street Journal’s November
2009 pronouncement, “Obama is Losing
Independent Voters.”7 Following Massa-
chusetts Republican Scott Brown’s dark
horse Senate victory and the passage of
health care reform in April 2010, The

Washington Times ran the story “Indepen-
dent Voters Turn Angry.”8 A more recent
contribution to this common narrative
summarizes it thus: Barack Obama was
“elected largely by independents and
moderates who were furious at Republi-
cans [and] at the status quo and the deep-
ly divisive politics practiced by the two
main parties”; and the seemingly ephem-
eral currency of Tea Party activists belies
“a much more profound second wave of
disaffected, independent voters.”9
What is instructive in these journalis-

tic diagnostics on independents and the
Obama presidency is the near-total ab-
sence of any consideration of race. Yet
when an explicit consideration of race
is absent, an implicit presumption of
whiteness (and its attendant privileges)
often ½lls the space. As I will argue, the
current discourse on independents is no
different. In some accounts, the indepen-
dents to whom Obama owes his place in
American political history are represented
by political scientists as ignorant, ½ckle,
and ideologically centrist. In other popu-
lar accounts, they are mutinous, intensely
anti-government voters typi½ed by self-
identi½ed Birthers and Tea Party activists.
In both cases, the presumption is that
these voters are white. To challenge that
presumption, Tea Party activists often
create media spectacles to demonstrate
that there are persons of color in their
midst.

Obama’s electoral debt to white inde-
pendents rests on a loosely bundled as-
sociative logic, beginning with the pos-
tulate that the independent vote helped
usher Obama into the White House.
Attached to this hypothesis are two other
suppositions: that independent voters
are white, and that these white voters
transcended their own racial identity
and self-interest because Obama repre-
sented a post-racial politics. From these

138

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

assumptions, it stands to reason that
Obama’s future electoral prospects hinge
on satisfying white independents and
maintaining a resolutely post-racial
political stance.

This trim and tidy logic falters in the
face of some background facts about race,
nonpartisanship, and voting behavior.
Here I borrow arguments from my forth-
coming book with Zoltan Hajnal to un-
derscore three key points.10 First, the
dynamics of partisanship have been shift-
ing rapidly, and whites are no longer a
disproportionate share of nonpartisan
constituents in America. Second, an argu-
ment can credibly be made that Obama
owes a greater electoral debt to non-white
voters (partisan and nonpartisan) than
he does to white independents. Third,
these ½rst two points can sustain an op-
posite inference about electoral debts
and post-racial politics: namely, that
there is a rare opportunity (which is still
not lost, even after the Republican Party’s
gains in the 2010 midterm elections) for
the age of Obama to be a de½ning mo-
ment not for the celebration of a post-
racial politics, but rather for a collective
struggle to build a pan-racial politics.

On the ½rst point, in the earliest aca-
demic and media polls, independents
were a relatively minor and (for the most
part) ignored segment of the American
electorate. The ½rst Gallup polls in the
1940s show a range of 15 to 20 percent of
Americans identifying as independents,
and in the early 1950s, according to the
initial American National Election Stud-
ies (anes) surveys, about 20 to 25 per-
cent identi½ed as such. Studies of inde-
pendents in this period were few and far
between,11 and political scientists gen-
erally took a dim view of these voters.
Philip Converse, for instance, proposed
the idea of a “normal vote,” maintaining
that partisan attachments are linked to
voting behavior.12 V. O. Key more explic-

itly described independents as “an igno-
rant and uninformed sector of the elec-
torate highly susceptible to influence by
factors irrelevant to the solemn perfor-
mance of its civic duties.”13

In these early surveys, presuming that
independents were whites raised few
eyebrows. The most visible sea change
with respect to patterns of partisanship
for non-whites was the realignment of
African Americans from belonging to
the “party of Lincoln” to strong attach-
ments to the Democratic Party. Further-
more, non-whites were almost nowhere
to be found in surveys of partisanship.
From 1952 to 1972, more than 90 percent
of all self-identi½ed independents re-
sponding to the anes survey were self-
identi½ed whites. The authors of some
of the most commonly cited studies of
independents simply excluded all non-
whites from the analysis. They believed
that any “increase in Independents was
con½ned to the white population” and
that including African Americans would
only cloud the analysis; in other words,
the study held that “because blacks are
the most disaffected of any major pop-
ulation group, omitting them also
avoids complications if one examines
relationships between alienation and
independence.”14

What has changed about partisanship
since the 1940s and 1950s? For one, the
growing trend of identifying as an inde-
pendent is unmistakable. By the 1970s,
upwards of a third of Americans (and in
some years, upwards of 40 percent) self-
identi½ed as independents, reacting to
the root question, “Generally speaking,
do you usually think of yourself as a Re-
publican, a Democrat, an Independent,
or what?” This ½gure is striking not just
by comparison to earlier ½gures, but also
because it is no longer uncommon for
self-identi½ed independents to consti-
tute a plurality of the electorate.

Taeku Lee

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

140 (2) Spring 2011

139

Post-Racial
& Pan-
Racial
Politics
in the Age
of Obama

This shift toward nonpartisanship,
more likely than not, relates to factors
such as declining levels of political trust,
the tendency toward candidate-centered
elections and nonpartisan local elections,
and the putative rise in party polariza-
tion.15 It is also co-terminous with the
rising backlash against the civil rights
movement and urban uprisings in the
1960s on the one hand, and with the
surge of migration to the United States
after passage of the Hart-Cellar Act of
1965 on the other. Thus, the dynamics
of race and immigration redound to the
rise in nonpartisanship in three ways:
whites are shifting their partisanship
from Democrat to independent as a re-
sult of ideological ambivalence between
their racial conservatism and liberal
views on other political dimensions;
African Americans in growing numbers
are moving to nonpartisanship as they
see their political interests marginalized
and their votes taken for granted; and
immigrants and second-generation La-
tinos and Asian Americans in surging
numbers are remaining unbeholden to
parties they know little about and that
do little to reach out to them.16

The growing number of Latino and
Asian American non-identi½ers in the
electorate is part of a broader transfor-
mation in the American voting public.
Some ½fty years ago, white voters made
up 95 percent of the active electorate. By
2008, whites were less than three-quar-
ters of the voting population. This con-
trast over time is even sharper with inde-
pendents. I noted earlier that through
the early 1970s, whites made up more
than 90 percent of self-identi½ed inde-
pendents. According to the 2008 anes
survey, less than 60 percent of all self-
identi½ed independents were white.
Thus, as a general feature of nonpartisan-
ship, it is simply mistaken to assume that
independents are a “white” electorate.

What, then, about the speci½c postulate
that a groundswell of white independents
ushered Obama into the White House?
Here, it is instructive to disaggregate the
claim into two lines of inquiry. First,
we can look more closely at the much-
vaunted new voters of 2008. According
to the Current Population Survey (cps)
Voting and Registration Supplement,
roughly ½ve million new voters were
mobilized in 2008. Of these, the cps
estimates that about two million were
African American, two million Latino,
and six hundred thousand Asian Ameri-
can. The cps also ½nds no statistically
signi½cant new mobilization of whites
in 2008. If one simply carries this data
through the National Election Pool (nep)
exit poll estimates of vote share by race
–speci½cally, that 95 percent of African
Americans, 67 percent of Latinos, 62 per-
cent of Asian Americans, and 43 percent
of whites voted for Obama–one could
reasonably extrapolate that Obama en-
joyed the support of almost 80 percent
of these new non-white voters.

Second, to examine the impact of the
independent vote itself, we can compare
the partisan breakdown of vote patterns
in the 2004 presidential election, when
Democratic candidate John Kerry lost,
to those of 2008. The nep exit poll data
here show some basis for the claim that
Obama owes his victory to (white) in-
dependents. The two-way split favoring
the Democratic candidate remained un-
changed between 2004 and 2008: 89 per-
cent of self-identi½ed Democrats voted
for the Democratic candidate in both
years. By contrast, a slightly higher pro-
portion of self-identi½ed independents
reported voting for Obama (52 per-
cent) than reported voting for Kerry
(49 percent).

To this contrast in vote patterns, three
additional facts should be added. First,
Obama also saw an equivalent increase

140

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

(in percentage terms) in support among
self-identi½ed Republicans, garnering
9 percent of the Republican vote, while
Kerry won only 6 percent of the crossover
vote in 2004. A second key point is that
the 3 percent uptick in independents’
support for the Democratic candidate in
2008, as compared to 2004, is relatively
slender compared to the changes when
voters are differentiated by race rather
than by partisanship. Support for Obama
in 2008 exceeded support for Kerry in
2004 by 7 percent among African Amer-
icans, 9 percent among Latinos, and
6 percent among Asian Americans. Final-
ly, while a majority of all independents
reported voting for Obama, that central
tendency shifts when independents are
differentiated by race: according to the
nep data, only 47 percent of white in-
dependents voted for Obama, compared
to roughly 70 percent of non-white
independents.

These various points on race and in-

dependent voter trends invite caution
in drawing conclusions about contem-
porary racial politics and the view that
Obama and the Democrats are particu-
larly beholden to white independents.
Speci½cally, the evidence calls for a closer,
more careful examination of the way that
racial meanings are either sewn into or
excised from the facts on the ground of
the 2008 election (and, for that matter,
of the 2010 midterm elections). Perhaps
even more fundamental, the breakdown
of voting patterns reveals a dynamic as-
pect in the evolution of democratic pol-
itics in America. The basic ingredients
in the electoral stewpot–that is, who
voters are and for whom they are vot-
ing–are being cooked anew, with an
unmistakable racial and ethnic flavor
to the fusion.

For many, the 2008 election was a
long-anticipated watershed moment.

According to this view, the changing
demographic and racial landscape that
we have observed and experienced in
America since the 1960s led to success
on the national political stage. And that
success was engendered by a pan-racial
coalition of African Americans, Latinos,
Asian Americans, and racially sympathet-
ic whites. To others, Republican gains
in the 2010 midterm elections–and the
attendant rejection of Obama’s agenda
–represent a troubling counterpoint to
Obama’s 2008 victory as well as a reprise
of the racial backlash that followed the
legislative triumphs of the mid-1960s. As
we look forward, a regnant concern of
scholars and political observers alike
will be whether the future is more likely
to look like the election of 2008 or the
election of 2010. In other words, is the
multiracial coalition that was mobilized
in 2008 a harbinger of future election
dynamics, or will the ideal of a racially
progressive coalition fracture under the
weight of economic crises, partisan po-
larization, political distrust, and counter-
mobilizing moral and racial panics?

The aspirations we can realistically
glean from the 2008 election depend
crucially on the meaning we attach to
Obama’s win. Much of this essay has
been devoted to a critical stance toward
one interpretation: that Obama’s elec-
tion signi½es the triumph of post-racial-
ism. Proposing an alternative meaning,
of course, requires more than rejecting
post-racialism. While a full considera-
tion and defense of pan-racialism are
beyond the scope of this essay, such a
discussion would start by breaking away
from the prevailing dialectic between a
racial and a post-racial politics. The antip-
odes of this dialectic are a deeply par-
ticularistic (in some renditions, primor-
dial) notion of zero-sum group loyalties
counterposed against a radically disem-
bodied and ahistorical conception of

Taeku Lee

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

140 (2) Spring 2011

141

Post-Racial
& Pan-
Racial
Politics
in the Age
of Obama

willful color blindness. Pan-racialism
proposes to overcome this bind through
a relational and historically embedded
standpoint of mutual recognition, col-
lective inclusion, and moral partiality
between all racial and ethnic groups that
constitute a society.

The dialectic between a racial and post-
racial politics is analogous to the opposi-
tion in ethics between the standpoint of
a subjective and narrowly material form
of ethical egoism and that of an impartial
“ideal observer” (à la Kant, Rawls, or
some version of agent-neutral consequen-
tialism). Breaking free from the dialectic
in ethics requires a defense of moral par-
tiality, whether it is steeped in the tradi-
tion of analytic philosophy17 or in a rela-
tional “ethic of care.”18 The parallel be-
tween race and ethics underscores why
post-racialism is so attractive in some
quarters: there is a reigning fear that a ra-
cial politics behind the 2008 election im-
plies a president and a presidency bound
by particularism and drawn into modes
of political clientelism. The analogy also
suggests that pan-racialism might be a
normatively desirable and defensible al-
ternative to racial and post-racial politics.
To return to the question of what the
future of electoral politics will bring, the
extent to which race is central is especial-
ly pressing given current and future pat-
terns of demographic change. A remix of
electoral dynamics–who votes, whether
their choices will be aligned to political
parties, and whether parties will drum
up the organizational resources and cul-
tural competency to mobilize new voters
–most likely will continue. Most promi-
nent among the reasons for this predic-
tion are the enduringly high rates of in-
migration from Latin America, Asia, and,
to lesser degrees, the Caribbean and Afri-
ca. Moreover, increasing rates of racial
exogamy and mixed race identi½cation
are accompanying the expansion of

immigrant-based ethnic communities
of color. What is unclear is whether
emerging groups such as Latinos and
Asian Americans will evolve into sig-
ni½cant players on the electoral stage
as Latinos and Asian Americans and, if so,
what impact they will have. However,
the impulse to deploy conventional
categories and modes of thinking ham-
pers our ability to understand dynamic
changes in our conceptual tools for study-
ing both politics in general and racial
politics more narrowly.

Politically, our thinking is anchored
by our conventions about partisanship
and its central place in American poli-
tics. Social scientists Donald Kinder and
David Sears, for instance, note that “party
identi½cation remains the single most
important determinant of individual
voting decisions.”19 Yet as already noted
above in this essay and elsewhere, non-
partisanship (and not just Tea Party ac-
tivists) is a growing force.20 Moreover,
this groundswell of nonpartisan discon-
tent is transpiring together with (and
perhaps in response to) a full-blown
political polarization at the level of
partisan elites.21

Among emerging groups such as Lati-
nos and Asian Americans, nonpartisan-
ship is especially widespread, and inde-
pendents are not the only nonpartisan
group of relevance. The relationship of
Latinos and Asian Americans to the pre-
dominant two-party system in the Unit-
ed States underscores a pivotal point:
the party identi½cation scale that most
political scientists continue to use (rang-
ing from strong Democrats on one end
to strong Republicans on the other, with
independents at the midpoint) appears
increasingly irrelevant to many Ameri-
cans. It turns out that modal Latino or
Asian American survey respondents sim-
ply do not know how to place themselves
on such a scale. “Non-identi½ers” (those

142

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

who respond to survey measures of party
identi½cation with “I don’t know,” “no
preference,” “none of the above,” or “I
just don’t think in terms of parties”) are
more than one out of every three Latinos
or Asian Americans. When self-identi½ed
independents are added to this group,
nonpartisans comprise more than half
of all respondents in the 2006 Latino
National Survey (lns) and the 2008 Na-
tional Asian American Survey (naas).22
Thus, we limit our ability to accurately
study and fully understand the electoral
changes afoot by adhering to well-worn
ways of categorizing and conceptualiz-
ing politics.

The same can be said of well-worn
ways of categorizing and conceptualiz-
ing race. In the domain of racial politics,
a further anchor that moors our thinking
is the continued predominance of what
Juan Perea termed a “Black/White bina-
ry paradigm.” Here, the accuracy of the
term paradigm–at least in the Kuhnian
sense–is debatable, and Perea’s de½ni-
tion of it as “the conception that race in
America consists, either exclusively or
primarily, of only two constituent ra-
cial groups, the Black and the White,”
already feels dated.23 Yet “black” and
“white” continue to stand in as met-
onyms for two distinct models of poli-
tics. “Black” represents an archetype
for a distinctive group politics based in
racial self-de½nition and solidarity.24
“White” represents a duality: of simul-
taneously being nowhere and everywhere,
de½ned in direct opposition to the experi-
ence of African Americans and accepted
without interrogation as the “null” hy-
pothesis or “normal” state of affairs.25
To consider the role of Latinos and
Asian Americans in the future of racial
politics, we might begin with a question
posed by historian Gary Okihiro: “Is
Yellow [or Brown] Black or White?”26
Much of the extant political science

research on partisanship presumes a
binary outcome variable whereby Lati-
nos and Asians will either identify pre-
dominantly with the Democratic Party
on the basis of group attachments, as
African Americans have since the civil
rights era, or split more evenly between
parties on the basis of nonracial inter-
ests and ideologies, as whites are pre-
sumed to do. Similarly, scholars of polit-
ical participation often imagine that La-
tinos and Asians will either be spurred
into action by their racial group con-
sciousness–a dynamic found among
African Americans–or brought into pol-
itics through their socioeconomic posi-
tion, civic skills, or the mobilizing force
of organizations–as is found to be the
case for whites. This binary logic further
extends to debates over coalition poli-
tics, with scholars seeking to discover
whether Latinos and Asians will form
multiracial coalitions with African Amer-
icans or pan-ethnic coalitions across con-
stituent ethnic groups, or whether racial
and ethnic markers will recede in signi½-
cance and cede to ideological, issue-spe-
ci½c, or context-speci½c determinants of
intergroup conflict and cooperation.

In conceiving of the future of racial
politics in these familiar, if problematic,
dialectical terms, scholars and political
observers presume that demographic la-
bels such as “Latino” and “Asian Ameri-
can” imply a prima facie basis for group
politics.27 This premise, which I refer to
as the “identity-to-politics link,” has a
solid empirical foundation for African
Americans but is decidedly less certain
for other racially and (pan)ethnically
de½ned groups. We cannot assume that
Latinos and Asian Americans are func-
tionally isomorphic either to African
Americans (for whom a strong racial
group identity and corresponding politics
are expected) or to whites (for whom the
absence of such identity-based politics,

Taeku Lee

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

140 (2) Spring 2011

143

Post-Racial
& Pan-
Racial
Politics
in the Age
of Obama

or the presence of undifferentiated pro-
cesses of assimilation into “whiteness,”
is expected).

Discerning whether we are headed for

a racial, post-racial, or pan-racial elector-
al future will require better theoretical
frameworks for race and racial politics. I
propose, as one point of departure toward
such improved frameworks, an examina-
tion of several speci½c and conceptually
separable processes that are often bun-
dled together when identity categories
are linked to group politics. These pro-
cesses include racial classi½cation, cate-
gory identi½cation, and group conscious-
ness, as well as two aspects of collective
action: venue selection and coordinat-
ing choice.

In what follows, I describe each of these
processes and illustrate their potential
utility by examining their speci½city to
one emerging group: Asian Americans.
For most informed observers, the idea
of a politics of Asian Americans as Asian
Americans may seem like a nonstarter.
While Asians in America may commonly
be de½ned under a single, “pan-ethnic”
rubric, beneath that thin fascia of social
convention lies a remarkable “heteroge-
neity, hybridity, and multiplicity” that
de½es simple categorization.28 Further-
more, while the sheer growth in numbers
of Asian Americans is dramatic and un-
likely to plateau, a disproportionately
low number (slightly more than one in
three Asian adults in the United States)
are active voters. As mentioned above,
nonpartisanship is pervasive among
Asian Americans as well.

Yet precisely because the idea of a
group-based politics for Asian Amer-
icans qua Asian Americans seems in-
choate, and perhaps even untenable,
Asian Americans represent an especially
important test case for theories of racial
group identity. For one, periods of rapid

change and growing complexity–includ-
ing the present times–often represent
critical junctures for rede½ning existing
group boundaries and intergroup rela-
tions. Furthermore, Asian Americans
represent a prima facie “most different”
case to African Americans. While both
groups share the joint experience of ex-
ternally perceived homogeneity, inter-
nally lived heterogeneity, and a resulting
history of marginalization and struggle,
their racial positions are distinct. The
“relative valorization” of Asian Ameri-
cans as “model minorities” is a relation-
al standpoint vis-à-vis African Ameri-
cans: in the public imaginary, Asians are
praised for exhibiting putatively model
behavior relative to other racial minori-
ties, who are supposedly less norm-con-
forming and virtuous in their behavior.
Classi½cation. To determine whether a
coherent and politically signi½cant con-
ception of pan-ethnic “group-ness” exists
for Asians in the United States, we must
½rst more fully understand how a society
de½nes, categorizes, and counts its popu-
lation by identity categories. Our current
pentachromatic classi½cation system–
per the 1977 Of½ce of Management and
Budget (omb) “Directive 15” and, before
that, the 1965 Equal Employment Oppor-
tunity Commission (eeoc) “eeo-1” form
–is generally adopted and replicated in
surveys and other modes of data collec-
tion without much question or consterna-
tion. Yet even a cursory glance over time
reveals the often contested and radically
unstable nature of the identity categories
we use to de½ne a population in racial
and ethnic terms. In short, those catego-
ries are not foreordained but wrought
through a combination of social, eco-
nomic, legal, and political processes.29
Americans of Asian origin never ½t
comfortably into the country’s initial
racial categorization of Caucasian/white,
Negro/black, and American Indian.

144

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Consequently, the racial classi½cations
assigned to them are variable and often
arbitrary. Here, two pivotal legal deci-
sions are instructive. In the 1922 case
Takao Ozawa v. United States, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that a person could
not be deemed white by virtue of light
complexion because individuals of Jap-
anese origin belonged to an “unassimil-
able race.” Three months later, in an
apparent reversal of its decision, the
Court ruled in United States v. Bhagat
Singh Thind that, despite the anthropo-
logical consensus of the day, persons
from the Indian subcontinent were to
be classi½ed as Caucasian; a person of
Asian-Indian origin, however, could not
be deemed white because such a classi-
½cation violated “the understanding
of the common man.”

Our present system of racial classi½-
cation is no less mired in contradictions.
The most recent decennial census forms,
for instance, imply that some populations
de½ned by national or territorial origin–
Asian-Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japa-
nese, Korean, and Vietnamese–are sep-
arate races (categorically equivalent to
“white” and “black, African American or
Negro”), while others–Mexican, Puerto
Rican, and Cuban, for example–share a
single “ethnicity.” Moreover, in 1997, the
omb revised its Directive 15, drawing the
boundaries of Asia (for the purposes of
racial classi½cation) between the Asian
subcontinent and the Middle East; ac-
cordingly, individuals with “origins in
any of the original peoples of Europe,
the Middle East, or North Africa” are
de½ned as white. As former director of
the U.S. Census Bureau Kenneth Prewitt
laments, “[T]he racial measurement sys-
tem is now vastly more complicated and
multidimensional than anything preced-
ing it, and there is currently no prospect
of returning to something simpler.”
He adds that this system is “less well

grounded in science than any other pop-
ulation characteristic measured by the
nation’s statistical agencies.”30

Category Identi½cation. The second pro-
cess that links demographic identity cat-
egories to a group-based politics is the
degree to which individuals identify with
the racial classi½cations assigned to them.
The mere contrivance of racial categories
is no guarantee that the individuals to
whom the categories are meant to apply
will accept them. The intrinsic distinction
between how individuals think of them-
selves (identi½cation) and how those
individuals might be de½ned by others
(ascription) may seem like a mere theo-
retical possibility, but that possibility
is likely to be quite palpable for certain
groups, such as new immigrants who
come with no priors on the grammar
of race in the United States.

The non-automaticity of category iden-
ti½cation is visible in the responses that
Asian Americans give in opinion surveys.
Consider the category “Asian American,”
the pan-ethnic rubric that is commonly
ascribed to U.S. residents of Asian ori-
gin. Respondents to the 2008 naas were
given the prompt, “[P]eople of Asian
descent in the U.S. use different terms
to describe themselves,” and then asked
how they thought of themselves.31 Only
about one in eight respondents self-iden-
ti½ed primarily as “Asian American,”
with roughly 70 percent preferring their
ethnic/national origin group (for exam-
ple, either “Filipino” or “Filipino-Amer-
ican”). By contrast, in the 2006 lns,
the proportion of respondents who self-
identi½ed as “Hispanic” and “Latino”
was roughly equal to self-identi½cation
with national origin descriptors (at just
below 40 percent).32

Group Consciousness. A third key com-
ponent of a racial group-based politics is
a shared sense of commonality and col-
lective interests. This process potential-

Taeku Lee

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

140 (2) Spring 2011

145

Post-Racial
& Pan-
Racial
Politics
in the Age
of Obama

ly is decisive because not all individuals
and groups who accept an identity label
ascribed to them will agree about what
that label means to their subjective sense
of self. These categories may, on the one
hand, represent nothing more than ana-
lytic truths or linguistic conventions. Yet
on the other hand, they may embody an
intimate connectivity among individu-
als. Here again, it is instructive to con-
sider immigrants and their offspring as
newcomers to American society. An im-
migrant from El Salvador may choose to
self-identify as “Latino” as a learned re-
sponse, taking cues from his or her rela-
tives, friends, coworkers, or neighbors.
Yet it hardly follows that the individual
would feel a sense of solidarity or com-
mon destiny with others who have also
learned to self-identify as Latino.

We have seen that few Asian Ameri-
cans identify primarily with the prevail-
ing pan-ethnic descriptor. But do they
share a greater sense of common pur-
pose or collective consciousness, not-
withstanding their attachment to labels?
naas respondents were asked about
their sense of “linked fate” or, more
speci½cally, whether “what happens
generally to other groups of Asians in
this country affects what happens in
[their] life.”33 In this sense of “group-
ness,” the picture is mixed: while close
to 40 percent of respondents agreed that
their personal lot was at least somewhat
connected to the fate of other Asians,
only 9 percent reported a strong connec-
tion. By contrast, nearly three out of
every four African Americans surveyed in
the 1996 National Black Election Study
reported at least a “somewhat strong”
sense of linked fate; close to 37 percent
felt a “strong” connection. At the same
time, Asian Americans who feel a strong
sense of collective consciousness are
politically distinct from those who do
not: they are more likely to be partisans

and ideologues, to be politically active,
and to perceive political commonalities
with Latinos, African Americans, and
other non-whites.

Group-Based Coordination. A ½nal pre-
condition to group politics is coordinat-
ing collective action itself. The road from
af½nity to action is often winding and
bumpy, if connected at all. Collective
action does not materialize spontaneous-
ly, even in the presence of agreement
about the applicability of group labels
and solidarity among those to whom the
labels are attached. Moreover, there are
multiple aspects of choice that require
coordination. Ab initio, those who intend
to act together in the best interests of the
group must ½rst decide (or at least accept
as a premise) that politics is a meaning-
ful venue for the pursuit of the group’s
interests. Despite clear and strong civic
norms of participation and the historical
memory of empowerment through col-
lective movements, it is still far from ob-
vious that racialized groups–especially
when social stigma and material priva-
tion factor into that racialization–are
inclined to pursue recognition and reme-
dy through politics rather than the collec-
tive pursuit of economic advancement,
cultural maintenance, bonding social
capital, community self-determination,
or some other mode of group-based en-
gagement. For immigrant-based groups
such as Latinos and Asian Americans,
the question of where to direct collective
efforts is likely to be especially pressing.

For Asian Americans, survey data sug-
gest that the pursuit of common in-group
interests does not necessarily take place
in the political arena. Respondents to the
2008 naas were asked, “what, if any-
thing, do Asians in the United States
share with one another?” Of four pos-
sible bases for commonality given–“a
common race,” “a common culture,”
“common economic interests,” and

146

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

“common political interests”– the high-
est proportion of respondents believed
that Asian Americans shared a common
culture (almost two-thirds) while the
lowest proportion (under 40 percent)
believed that politics was a unifying di-
mension of the Asian American expe-
rience. At the same time, respondents
with a strong linked-fate orientation
were also signi½cantly more likely to
believe that Asians shared all four foun-
dations: more than half of Asian Amer-
icans with a strong linked-fate orienta-
tion were likely to view Asians as sharing
collective political interests, while only
one in three who rejected the linked-
fate hypothesis viewed Asian Americans
as having common political interests.

Beyond the choice of politics as the
proper venue for collective pursuits,
group-based coordination requires
agreement over what to do. That is, a
given group of individuals originating
from various countries in Asia may be
given the common label “Asian Ameri-
can,” may self-identify with that descrip-
tor, may feel a sense of solidarity with
their sisters and brothers in that identity
category, and may even agree that poli-
tics is the proper place for their racial
projects. Nonetheless, there are many
aspects of collective choice, such as
whether to focus one’s politics at the
federal, state and local, or transnational
level; whether to form a partisan bloc
vote or a less partisan swing vote; or
whether to influence policy agendas by
engaging in the electoral arena, gaining
access through campaign contributions,
or building a strong “civil society” of
community-based organizations, volun-
tary associations, and advocacy groups.
These key steps in collective choice are
often presumed to materialize in the
case of African American politics, where
the modes and levels of political partic-
ipation are multiple and where, for a

given election, 80 to 90 percent of indi-
viduals within this demographic identify
with the Democratic Party and vote, often
in lockstep, with the party’s political
candidates.

For Asian Americans, by contrast,
there are several interrelated and unfold-
ing narratives of choice. One recurring
theme is the relatively high proportion
who are unattached to either of the two
major parties that de½ne U.S. politics;
yet there is a discernible trend toward
forming partisan ties the longer one is
in the United States. Further, there has
been a trend over the last several presi-
dential elections toward Asian American
voters crystallizing as a strongly Demo-
cratic segment of the electorate. A sec-
ond theme is the still relatively low pro-
portions that vote; however, the 2008
election shows (as with Latinos and
African Americans) the capacity for a
sizable and decisive mobilization. A
third, related theme is the continuing
reluctance (for the most part) of the
majority of candidates and party elites
to view Asian Americans as a segment
of the electorate that can be mobilized;
nevertheless, those Asian Americans
who report being contacted by a party
or candidate are signi½cantly more likely
to be voters. On the last point, the 2008
naas data show that respondents who
were mobilized by a party or candidate
were more than twice as apt to be a “like-
ly voter” than those who were not. More-
over, the campaign effort to contact po-
tential voters had a clear substitution ef-
fect: it increased support for Obama and
decreased the proportion of undecided
voters.

This essay is somewhat of a two-step

with two left feet. One foot is tapping
out the rhythm of the commonly held
view that the 2008 election heralded the
inception of a post-racial era of electoral

Taeku Lee

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

140 (2) Spring 2011

147

Post-Racial
& Pan-
Racial
Politics
in the Age
of Obama

politics and that Obama owes a primary
political debt to white independent vot-
ers who abandoned their racial loyalties
to make history. Against this narrative,
I have suggested that Obama’s electoral
success is also the result of the mobiliza-
tion of partisan and nonpartisan voters
of color. Moreover, the current political
moment might just as well be the har-
binger to a more pan-racial, not post-
racial, era of politics. Along the way, I
have also highlighted several ways in
which nonpartisanship is increasingly
multiracial, multifaceted, and politi-
cally consequential.

Meanwhile, the other foot is tapping to
the rhythm of an important background
question: that is, will demographically
de½ned populations come to do politics
together–and if so, when and how?
Here, one must be careful of a disruptive
counter tempo: the tendency to look at
emerging, immigrant-based groups such
as Latinos and Asian Americans through
the lens of African American or white
politics. A group basis to politics is con-
tingent, not on other groups’ political
narratives, but on the convergence of
multiple processes: namely, the contes-
tation and construction of racial and
ethnic descriptors that align with how
a population thinks of itself; a shared
sense of common destiny and collective
solidarity within a given population,
de½ned in ethnic and racial terms; and
coordination on the ½tting venue for the

pursuit of common goals as well as on
the collective choice itself (to be swing
voters, bloc voters, or non-voters; to
engage in elections, community activism,
or some other mode of engagement; and
so on). To animate these steps, I have
sampled some beats from the politics of
Asian Americans to see how they jive (or
fail to jive) with this identity-to-politics
link. In doing so, I hope not only to have
illuminated why the politics of a group
such as Asian Americans remains distinct
from that of both African Americans and
whites, but also to have uncovered the
processes that must be activated to solid-
ify a more (or less) group-based politics.
Ultimately, both feet in this polyrhyth-
mic dance come together on two simple
yet crucial points. First, prevailing beliefs
about post-racialism, nonpartisanship,
and their de½ning effects on the political
moment are aspirations and assumptions
as often as they are established facts. To
accept them is to permit tacitly an act of
collective obscurantism. Second, what
many have called the “age of Obama”
is neither a predestined outcome nor a
material fact. It is a public construction
whose form will depend on how we in-
terpret ongoing events and determine
which future (racial, post-racial, or pan-
racial) we struggle for. Barack Obama,
irrespective of his preferences on the
matter, stands as a metonym for race
relations in the twenty-½rst century.

endnotes
1 Michael Eric Dyson, “Race, Post Race,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2008.
2 Shelby Steele, “America’s Post-Racial Promise,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2008.
3 See, for example, Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages,
and the Norm of Equality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
4 Jeff Zeleny, “In This Race, Independents Are the Prize,” The New York Times, January 6, 2008.
5 John Avlon, “Obama’s Independent Edge,” Real Clear Politics, April 29, 2008.

148

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

6 The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Independents Take Center Stage in
Obama Era: Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987–2009 (Pew Research Center,
Survey Reports, May 21, 2009).
7 Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen, “Obama is Losing Independent Voters,” The Wall
Street Journal, November 14, 2009.
8 Jennifer Haberkorn, “Independent Voters Turn Angry,” The Washington Times, April 2, 2010.
9 Tom Foreman, “The Sweep: Vikings, Voters, and the Charge of the Militant Middle,”
cnn.com, September 29, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/09/29/foreman
.militant.middle/index.html (accessed October 3, 2010).

10 Zoltan Hajnal and Taeku Lee, Why Americans Don’t Join the Party: Race, Immigration, and
the Failure (of Political Parties) to Engage the Electorate (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2011).

11 See, for example, Samuel Eldersveld, “The Independent Vote: Measurement, Charac-
teristics, and Implications for Party Strategy,” American Political Science Review 46 (3)
(1952): 732–753.

12 Philip E. Converse, “The Concept of a Normal Vote,” in Elections and the Political Order,
ed. Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes
(New York: Wiley, 1966).

13 V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting, 1936–1960

(New York: Vintage, 1966), 92.

14 Bruce E. Keith, David B. Magleby, Candice J. Nelson, Elizabeth Orr, Mark C. Westlye,
and Raymond E. Wol½nger, The Myth of the Independent Voter (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), 32.

15 Morris Fiorina with Samuel Abrams and Jeremy Pope, Culture War?: The Myth of a

Polarized America (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005); Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole,
and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches
(Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 2006).

16 Hajnal and Lee, Why Americans Don’t Join the Party.
17 See, for example, Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism: A Philosophical
Investigation of the Considerations Underlying Rival Moral Conceptions (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1982); and Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986).

18 See, for example, Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s

Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); Virginia Held, The Ethics
of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

19 Donald Kinder and David Sears, “Public Opinion and Political Action,” in Handbook of
Social Psychology, vol. 2, ed. Gardner Lindzey and Eliot Aronson (New York: Random
House, 1985), 686.

20 Hajnal and Lee, Why Americans Don’t Join the Party.
21 Fiorina with Abrams and Pope, Culture War?; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, Polarized

America.

22 Luis Fraga, John A. Garcia, Rodney E. Hero, Michael Jones-Correa, Valerie Martinez-
Ebers, and Gary M. Segura, Latino Lives in America: Making it Home (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2010); Janelle Wong, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, Taeku Lee,
and Jane Junn, “Race-Based Considerations and the 2008 National Asian American
Survey,” Du Bois Review 6 (2009): 219–238.

23 Juan F. Perea, “The Black and White Binary Paradigm of Race: Exploring the ‘Normal

Science’ of American Racial Thought,” California Law Review 85 (1997): 1219.

Taeku Lee

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

140 (2) Spring 2011

149

Post-Racial
& Pan-
Racial
Politics
in the Age
of Obama

24 See, for example, Richard D. Shingles, “Black Consciousness and Political Participation:
The Missing Link,” American Political Science Review 75 (1981): 76–91; Lawrence Bobo and
Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,”
American Political Science Review 84 (1990): 377–393; Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule:
Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994);
Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

25 See, for example, Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women,
Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993); Ian Haney López, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York:
New York University Press, 1996).

26 Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1994). David Hollinger takes a novel approach to such
questions by proposing that we shift the referent from the experience of African Ameri-
cans vis-à-vis the “one-drop rule” to the experience of white domination vis-à-vis the
“one-hate rule”; David Hollinger, “The One Drop Rule and the One Hate Rule,”
Dædalus 134 (Winter 2005): 18–28.

27 Taeku Lee, “From Shared Demographic Categories to Common Political Destinies? Im-
migration and the Link from Racial Identity to Group Politics,” Du Bois Review 4 (2008):
433–456.

28 Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 1992); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cul-
tural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

29 See, for example, Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal
Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).

30 Kenneth Prewitt, “Race in the 2000 Census: A Turning Point,” in The New Race Question:

How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals, ed. Joel Perlmann and Mary Waters (New York:
Russell Sage, 2003), 357, 360.

31 For this and in remaining sections, the survey data are from the 2008 naas, the ½rst

nationally representative sample survey of the political behavior and attitudes of Asian
Americans. It includes 5,159 interviews conducted between August 18, 2008, and October
29, 2008. The primary sample consisted of the six largest Asian national-origin groups
(Asian-Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese), and respondents
were interviewed in English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Japa-
nese, and Hindi. See Wong, Ramakrishnan, Lee, and Junn, “Race-Based Considerations.”

32 Some of this difference is due to the relative proportion in the two samples of foreign-
born respondents; 88 percent of the weighted sample of the naas is foreign-born,
compared to 67 percent of the lns.

33 Dawson, Behind the Mule.

150

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
4
0
2
1
3
6
1
8
2
9
9
9
9
d
a
e
d
_
a
_
0
0
0
8
3
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
8
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Download pdf