Racial divisions in Obama's America
In March, Northeastern University professors Amílcar Barreto and Richard D. O'Bryant will convene a score of scholars for a daylong conference on gender and identity in the age of Obama. The experts will present scholarly papers on topics ranging from feminism to family, the best of which will be co-edited by Barreto and O'Bryant and then compiled into the second volume of their series on American identity in the age of Obama. The first volume, published in December by Routledge, derived from their 2011 conference on race and identity, which focused on the role of race, ethnicity, and immigration status in shaping conceptions of what it means to be American. Here, Barreto, an associate professor of political science and an affiliated faculty member of the International Affairs and African American Studies departments, and O'Bryant, the director of the African American Institute and a lecturer of political science, explain why Obama's...
