A black president can dismantle a tradition while performing blackness rhetorically

Evidence

Who would have thought that the election of the nation’s first black president would occasion the moment for this kind of crisis in black America? It is the sort of irony we usually only find in fiction. A reversal of sorts: a black president who presides over the dismantling of a tradition, who masterfully uses the language of black struggle in the service of Wall Street, who is lauded for his celebration of black culture and his performance of black cultural cues, but whose policies leave much to be desired. This is someone who chastises black people for eating Popeye’s chicken for breakfast. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 395

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader reading on the value gap and how symbolic racial progress coexists with structural inequality; also resonates with the post-Obama retrospective literature on his presidency.