Barack Obama’s (Im)Perfect Union

This chapter argues that Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech was an appropriate and successful response to a political-personal crisis. He negotiated the controversy surrounding his personal relationship with Reverend Wright by acknowledging racial disparities in the United States without placing blame for those disparities. Accordingly, Obama successfully maintained a post-racial rhetorical stance that appealed to extremely diverse audiences. Yet the speech failed to accurately represent a racially differentiated United States of America. By sanitizing the country’s histories of chattel slavery and racism, Obama’s speech reified many harmful racial tropes. Our essay exposes the potentially damaging strategies Obama employed to resolve his political-personal crisis and considers the rhetorical implications of a post-racial discourse.