The Dead Zone: Stumbling at the Crossroads of Party Politics, Genocide, and Postracial Racism

Examining the parameters of Africana thought with references to the 2008 presidential campaigns that led to the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States, this essay explores the relationship of black elite leadership and black mass disenfranchisement. It identifies the intersection of these two formations as a “dead zone,” that is, a void in practical and theoretical politics, one that reveals central evasions in conventional discourse given its general inability or unwillingness to critique the simultaneous successes and failures of a multiracial democracy that enables antiblack racism and genocide.