Communicating race and culture in the twenty-first century: discourse and the post-racial/post-cultural challenge

Following the US presidential race of 2008 which resulted in the election of the nation's first Black president, the media, scholars, and the general public began to describe the US as 'post-racial.' This essay considers the ways in which 'post-racial' is a euphemism for 'post-cultural' within a framework of erasing Black cultural elements of identity, memory, and heritage in order to frame a whitewashed US history that is free to decentralize the legacies of enslavement and inequality. Featuring three communicative artifacts of Afrocentric agency produced during the first decade of the twenty-first century, this essay uses political speeches from Barack Obama and Eric Holder, dramatic texts from August Wilson, and the art of documentary from M.K. Asante, Jr. to counter the myths of post-racialism.