Matt Bai wrote this piece a few months back where he makes the argument that Obama’s candidacy signals the end of black politics. he references a new ethos among post civil-rights era African-American politicians that resist being pigeonholed as “simply” black. These younger African-American politicians, like Artur Davis (U.S. Rep. Alabama), Harold Ford (former U.S. Rep. Tennessee), Corey Booker (Mayor Newark, NJ), Deval patrick (Governor – Massachusetts), tend to be Ivy League educated and, to use the language of diversity, effective at “cultural switching” – the ability to be conversant in a diverse number of cultural settings.

This “vanguard” of Black politician doesn’t see their rise to power as uniquely tied to the black community so they don’t feel obligated to serve that community’s interests exclusively. As Corey Booker explains in the Bai piece:

“I don’t want to be pigeonholed,” he said. “I don’t want people to expect me to speak about those issues.” By this, presumably, he meant issues that revolve around race: profiling by police, incarceration rates, flagging urban economies. “I want people to ask me about nonproliferation. I want them to run to me to speak about the situation in the Middle East.” Since the mayor of Newark is rarely called upon to discuss such topics, I got the feeling that Booker does not see himself staying in his current job for anything close to 20 years. “I don’t want to be the person that’s turned to when CNN talks about black leaders,” he said.

Politicians like Booker aren’t intending to deny their race. Rather they are challenging what it means to be “raced” in fundamental ways. In this passage, he seems to suggest that “blackness,” at least for middle-class blacks, is becoming what Mary Waters famously called an “optional ethnicity”

Even so, Booker told me that his goal wasn’t really to “transcend race.” Rather, he says that for his generation of black politicians it’s all right to show the part of themselves that is culturally black — to play basketball with friends and belong to a black church, the way Obama has. There is a universality now to the middle-class black experience, he told me, that should be instantly recognizable to Jews or Italians or any other white ethnic bloc that has struggled to assimilate. And that means, at least theoretically, that a black politician shouldn’t have to obscure his racial identity.

In Booker’s first run for Newark mayor against Sharpe James, his “in between-ness” for lack of a better term was a major obstacle in his election. This excerpt from Streetfight, a wonderful film chronicling the first Booker-James mayor’s race highlights the contradistinction between “old” and “new” politics.

It does say something revealing that Booker lost this bid to be mayor of Newark (although he won his second). Similarly, is says something that Obama lost his first Congressional race in Chicago to Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther. In both cases, the “new politics” candidate was painted as an ivy-league outsider who didn’t understand the predominantly African-American community they were running to represent.

I don’t agree with Bai that we’re at an end in identity politics. What I think it means is that identity politics will have to be employed in more sophisticated, less transparent ways to be effective. Bill Clinton serves as an object lesson in how not to play identity politics.

This ham-handed effort to racialize Obama only allowed him to portray himself as “above” the old politics of racial division. If you recall, his gauzy South Carolina primary victory speech, the subject of the celebratory Wil-I-Am song, is what sling-shot him into Super Tuesday. This here’s good identity politics.

This “new” identity politics is defined by pivoting from identity to talk about transcending identity. “We are one America” only has resonance if you’re speaking from the experience of someone who has historically been viewed as part of the “other” America. This speech wouldn’t work very well if it was John McCain making it.

What do you think about Bai’s argument?