The Center for New Racial Studies (CNRS) at UCSB is a developing "think tank" that focuses on the dynamics of race and racism in the 21st century. We are committed to revitalizing racial studies on our campus and beyond. We are an affiliated group of faculty from the social sciences and humanities who work on racial issues from a wide range of disciplines: we have among us historians, literary critics, musicologists, sociologists, political scientists, and specialists in education. We study race from very different vantage points: global, national, local, and experiential.

CNRS grew out of a series of informal meetings and sporadic campus events held over 2002-2004 to discuss our ongoing work on such subjects as: the massive rates of imprisonment affecting communities of color, the meaning of white identity, the rise of a new American empire, the phenomenon of "Islamophobia," and the links between racism, sexism, and homophobia, to name just a few (!) issues. We are located in the UCSB Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research (ISBER), and maintain ties as well with the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC).

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WE MUST CLAIM THIS VICTORY!

The electoral victory of Barack Obama signals a new opening in US politics, and also has tremendous significance for the world at large. Many felt this triumph was out of reach; other supporters feared the very success of an African American: that it would somehow damage the cause of racial justice or inevitably lead to a "sell-out."

We view Obama's triumph as both a moment of closure and a great opening. On Nov. 4, 2008 the American people not only chose to end the epoch of reactionary rule that began with the election of Nixon, consolidated under Reagan, and only met its demise under Bush II; they also recognized that the age of "neoliberalism" was at an end. This epoch -- characterized by state-led expropriation and violence against the most vulnerable social groups both at home and across the globe -- has produced a wide-ranging crisis: economic, ecological, sociopolitical, and indeed constitutional.

With Obama we are entering a new epoch of far-reaching reform: egalitarian and democratic in spirit and direction. While it is still too early to evaluate his policies and program, it is already evident that Obama's approach will strive to build political consensus and avoid radical polarization, both in US and in global politics. No doubt this will draw criticism from many quarters, but it is both principled and imperative. Obama may best be characterized as a "practical idealist."

We are aware that race and racism remain key organizing principles of US and global society, sociopolitical facts that no single political event, however momentous, can undo. We also understand the importance of inclusive efforts to quantitatively reduce and qualitatively transform the racial injustice on which our nation -- and the modern world as a whole -- have been constructed. We see in Barack Obama the first president capable of recognizing the imperative of challenging racism. He is the first and only president ever to have been on racism's "receiving end." Because of that, and because of his intellectual clarity and practical history in the political struggle against oppression, we view him as someone able to draw the connections between racial injustice and the general absence of equality, democracy, peace, and yes, human freedom, both at home and around the world.

We take seriously Obama's call: "We are the ones we have been waiting for." This can only mean that our efforts at movement-building and at community organization at all levels of society will greatly determine the way this electrifying possibility develops in practice. Community organization -- for racial and gender justice, to end the poverty that afflicts so many, to bring peace to those ravaged by war and state violence on battlefields, in prisons, and in our own neighbohoods -- these are our objectives now.

Let us remember that President Obama is one of us: someone who has sat in endless political meetings in poor neighborhoods, who has worked to bring low-income people together for neighborhood action, who denounced the Iraq war from its beginning, who has studied and taught critical race law. For the first time in decades, perhaps for the first time ever, we have a leader whom we can respect. He must provide new direction, and so must we.

WE MUST CLAIM THIS VICTORY!

(-h/t to Nikhil Pal Singh for that phrase...)

The Center for New Racial Studies is based in the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research (ISBER), University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-2150.

Copyright (c) 2006 The Regents of the University of California, All Rights Reserved.