After sponsoring death and despair over centuries and across continents, the scourge of race and racism was finally eradicated in the early twenty-first century. On a cold, late January day in 2009, the ceremony symbolising its end was conducted before a massed crowd of eager witnesses to history numbering almost 2 million, accompanied by a national and worldwide audience of many millions more. It was perhaps fitting that this rite took place in the United States, the nation where, arguably, race had been the most strongly entrenched and deterministic. And as the orator’s words that day noted that America’s ‘patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness’, not only was the enmity of race consigned to history but it was replaced with the audacious hope that ‘as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself’.

The 2008 general election success and inauguration of Barack Obama on 20 January 2009 as the 44th president of the United States signalled many things, often highly contestable. One of the most controversial aphorisms was and, indeed for some, remains a simple statement portrayed in the phantastical rendition that Obama’s ascent confirmed the United States as a post-racial society. If, as the contention goes, an African American could be elected to the highest office in the land and become the ‘leader of the free world’, then race was no longer a barrier to progress and achievement in America. Moreover, if America was post-racial and had become truly meritocratic, then, by extension, it was also en route to becoming a post-racist society (Wise 2009).