On November 4, 2008, the United States elected Barack Obama president, elevating an African American to the country’s highest office for the first time. Because Obama’s rise illustrates how far the United States has come from the days when blacks were denied the right to vote, when schools and water foun- tains were segregated, when it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry, and when racial classification was reduced to an absolutist dichotomy of black and white, it is fitting to ask: Does Barack Obama’s election signify substantial ero- sion in the country’s long-standing black-white color line? Many scholars and pundits assert that his victory indicates that the country has finally moved beyond race and that the color line long dividing blacks and whites has largely disappeared. For example, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, in an op-ed piece titled “Is Race Out of the Race?” (Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2008), argued that Obama’s enormous appeal among white voters reflects a dramatically changed political climate in the United States and that Americans no longer struggle under the burden of race. Other observers proclaimed, in a similar vein, that the Civil War had finally ended and that the United States has become a “postracial” society, no longer bound by racial strictures (see Michael Eric Dyson, “Race, Post Race,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2008, “Opinion”; Thomas L. Friedman, “Finishing Our Work,” New York Times, November 5, 2008, op-ed; Adam Nagourney, “Obama Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls,” New York Times, November 5, 2008, op-ed).

Undoubtedly, Obama’s ascendance to the presidency is a historic event of great importance, one that has broken through barriers many thought would never be breached. In light of W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous and pessimistic prophecy over a century ago, “The problem of the twentieth-century will be the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men” (1903/1997, 45), few probably would have thought that shortly after

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