The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities)

In The Price of the Ticket, Fred Harris contends that Obama's success has, in reality, exacted a negative price. His victory has not only utterly transformed the forms of black politics that emerged in the 1960s and which laid the foundation for his eventual ascendance, Harris claims-it has profoundly weakened them. Harris starts by placing Obama's election within the larger trajectory of the Civil Rights and post-Civil Rights eras, then considers the ramifications of the shift away from an earlier model of black politics that concentrated on ending racial inequality. While Harris recognizes the historic nature of Obama's victory, he also reminds us that it has not effaced the bitter legacies stemming from hundreds of years of white supremacy.

Fredrick C. Harris is Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is the triple award winner of the book Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism and the co-author of Countervailing Forces in African-American Civic Activism, 1973-1994, which received the 2006 W.E.B. DuBois Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2007 Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association. He has been a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. and is a 2012 recipient of the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award at Columbia University.