On 'Race, History, and Obama's Second Term'
February 05, 2013
On January 25, Washington Monthly, in partnership with the New America Foundation, marked the publication of its January/February issue by hosting a two-hour panel discussion on "Race, History, and Obama's Second Term." Led by WM editor-in-chief Paul Glastris, the panel sought to do something "that doesn't much happen in Washington...[that is,] talk frankly about questions of race."
First, though, a factoid, courtesy of political scientist Daniel Q. Gillion: President Obama -- who was sworn in to office for a second four-year term on January 21, a hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln formally issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the American Civil War -- mentioned race fewer times in his first two years in office than any other Democratic president since 1961.
The panelists -- Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II and a contributing editor at the Washington Post; Elijah Anderson, author of the Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life and William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University; Taylor Branch, an award-winning author and historian; and Dr. Gail Christopher, vice president for program strategy at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation -- engaged in a conversation on race in America while answering a series of questions posed by Glastris: What is the state of race relations in America a century and a half after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation? Have we progressed as much as we like to think we have? Why are people of color in America still subject to disparities in health, wealth, education, and incarceration? What might President Obama do in his second term to narrow these disparities? And, at a time of reduced social and economic mobility, what policies that help minorities can also benefit the majority?
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