NOW FOR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT:Case Study: Racial Realism

the end of the twentieth century, the son of a white mother and a black father would become the nation’s forty-fourth president. Rather, many would have expected Du Bois’s racial realism to cause him to anticipate the drop in President Obama’s public-opinion ratings that occurred by Labor Day of his first year in office (see Adam Nagourney, “Looking for Tea Leaves in Obama’s Sliding Numbers,” New York Times, November 23, 2009). What, then, are we to make of Obama’s presidency? What does it signify? Does his election suggest that the color line in the United States is well on its way to being erad- icated? Does the decline in Obama’s poll ratings hint merely that an excep- tionally talented and appealing individual—one who just happens to be black and who had the good fortune to follow one of the most unpopular occupants of the White House in history—ran a great campaign and was elected presi- dent of the United States but is now being judged on his performance accord- ing to the standards applied to any president?

Given the crushing burden the black-white divide has imposed on African Americans throughout American history, questions about the persistence and disappearance of the color line inspire considerable scholarly interest and carry enormous policy significance. These questions about the color line are hugely important, too, because of the tectonic shift that took place in immigration in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first that has brought millions of newcomers to the country (counting both the foreign-born and their children) who are neither black nor white (Foner and Fredrickson 2004; Bean and Stevens 2003). Almost sixty million such people, largely Latinos and Asians, currently reside here (Bean et al. 2009).