Culture January 1, 1

Jabari Asim’s previous book, The N Word (2007), employed the notorious racial epithet to illuminate the history of American white supremacy. Now Asim, the editor of the NAACP’s bimonthly magazine, The Crisis, employs a similar technique in What Obama Means to study a new chapter in our country’s racial history—the election of our first black president. Acknowledging that Obama, like race itself, conveys a series of shifting meanings, Asim traces African Americans’ evolving image through a narrative of cultural history, highlighting several fulcrums in that history to help explain the unlikely formative saga of President Barack Hussein Obama.