File: powell final for Darby Created on: 3/15/2009 12:55:00 PM Last Printed: 4/3/2009 10:11:00 AM POST-RACIALISM OR TARGETED UNIVERSALISM? john a. powell The United States made history on November 4, 2008 by electing Barack Obama as the first African-American President of the United States. This remarkable event has generated a sense of pride and a collective celebration that is shared worldwide. The installation of a Black President, whose election was supported by a significant minority of white American voters, is an occasion imbued with meaning. The political, social, historical, and cultural significance of the election has been expressed in many ways and interpreted differently in different quarters.1 Over the next several months, if not years, Americans will be trying to determine its contours, synthesizing its various strands. As we engage this consequential process, different segments of society will undoubtedly continue to express and promote different meanings, each of which will have important ramifications. Questions will emerge, such as how are we to understand racial conditions in society, and what is the proper role of public policy and law for addressing or avoiding racial questions? These questions about where we are as a society on the issue of race are not just factual or descriptive, but are deeply political, having implications for how and when we respond to existing racial conditions and the scope of our collective obligations. In exploring this set of questions, I employ a different terminology than what is normally used to discuss this issue. Instead of using the standard nomenclature of race and racism, I will use the term “racialization.” I do so because the language of race and racism is understood in a way that is too limited and specific to help us acquire greater insight into the important questions posed at the outset. By racialization, I refer to the set of practices, cultural norms, and institutional arrangements that are both reflective of and simultaneously help to create and maintain racialized outcomes in society. Because racialization is a historical and cultural set of processes, it does not have one meaning. Instead, it is a set of conditions and norms that are constantly evolving and interacting with  john a. powell is the Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Moritz College of Law, the Ohio State University and Executive Director, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Ohio State University. The author does not capitalize his name. I would like to thank Jessica Larson and Stephen Menendian for their research assistance. 1. Already, there are claims being advanced that Section 5 pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act are no longer necessary, since they are predicated on polarized racial voting patterns, which the election of Obama supposedly refutes. See Adam Liptak, Supreme Court Takes Voting Rights Case, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 10, 2009, at A13, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/washington/10scotus.html?_r=1&hp. 785