Obama: the revenge of the black nerd

While most of the American commentariat has been obsessing over the composition of Barack Obama’s cabinet, some black intellectuals have been continuing a debate I explored in my article “Post-racial kitsch?” in the December issue of Prospect.

Many of the African-American academics and writers I spoke to shortly before and after the election were sceptical of the “post-racial” talk that had dominated discussions of Obama’s victory—we shouldn’t be too quick, they argued, to think that with a black man in the…