Under a blog post I wrote the other day was a short comment. Okay, I know I’m not supposed to read the comments, but this one struck me because of how often I hear it. It simply said “nothing’s changed.” Sometimes I hear that from people who are hurt by a history I’ve outlined. This history resonates with something that they have seen recently or something that has happened to them. They are thinking about the ongoing struggle against inequality that still stifles opportunities for so many African Americans.

Sometimes “nothing’s changed” is a snarky remark, sarcasm from a person that is uncomfortable with something they’ve just learned about the American past. They use the notion of “nothing’s changed” as a way to push back, reminding me through their comment that “hey, the president is black” or whatever proof they’d like to offer as evidence that the whole race thing is over. Most times they are upset.

There seems to be a strange phenomenon in the political climate of race today.

I first noticed it during the 2010 Supreme Court confirmation of Elena Kagan. The search for her liberal past seemed to center around the fact that Kagan had clerked for Supreme Court judge and civil rights veteran Thurgood Marshall. Working for Marshall, who served the lead attorney who argued the case of Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, was taken as evidence, not of Kagan’s qualification, but as evidence of racial bias. In the political climate created by the culture of color blindness, the attempt to try and ignore that anyone has a race at all, suddenly anyone who worked on behalf of racial equality is now at fault.

The big fuss this week is over the new book released today about the President and first lady called The Obamas by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor. An excerpt of the book appeared in the Sunday New York Times and immediately everyone began to put their own spin on the meaning of the book.

Before I read the excerpt, I saw that Salon writer Joan Walsh had tweeted:

Walsh went on to warn that the spin about the meaning of the book would probably reflect earlier efforts to demonize Michelle Obama as mannish, or a closeted, angry black nationalist.

Other folks on the internet have framed the story as depicting a first lady Michelle Obama as a particularly meddling and bossy, driving off staff members, and dictating the direction of the West Wing by ‘leading from behind.’

Blair L.M. Kelley is Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate History Programs at North Carolina State University. She is the author of the award-winning book, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. Through a re-examination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. Focusing on three key cities—New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah—Kelley tells the stories of the brave but little-known men and women who faced down the violence of lynching and urban race riots to contest segregation. Right to Ridewon the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Best Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians.

Kelley’s work as a scholar and teacher is grounded in the notion that confronting the history of race in America is essential to an understanding of our contemporary politics.  Her scholarship, which has been published in scholarly journals and edited volumes, centers on the history of African American resistance to segregation. Also Professor Kelley writes and presents work on African American women’s history, urban history, legal history, and southern history. She teaches courses on African American history, Civil Rights, black popular culture, oral history, and Katrina and the history of New Orleans.

Active inside the academy and out, Kelley’s work was featured on WUNC’s The State of Things, and has provided expert commentary for the New York Times, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Grio.com, Democracy Now, and Blogher.com. She has written several blogs for Salon.com and her blog Unabated Protest is featured on the UNC Press blog site.

Professor Kelley received her B.A. from the University of Virginia in History and African and African American Studies, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Duke University. She is a proud resident of Durham, North Carolina where she lives with her husband and daughter.