The way is still not smooth

Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy

Pantheon Books. 336 pp. $25.95

What It Means to Be Black Now
By Touré

Free Press. 288 pp. $25

Ann Coulter couldn't stay out of it. Her broadside about "our blacks are so much better than their blacks" fixed African American Republicans with the uncomfortable grimace of having overindulged in five-alarm chili.

How those remarks by either can call African Americans to follow the Republican Party is subject to fierce debate, and merits discussion more serious than the fodder of cable-channel shout TV.

Barack Obama's oratory and intellect vaulted him to the Oval Office. Nearly three years into his term, his performance is now tracked minute by minute in the blogosphere. And as the 2012 presidential election approaches, the question, in an atmosphere peppered with coded racial language, that the 2008 Obama campaign sought to mute nearly roars: Does race matter?

In The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency, Randall Kennedy's exquisite scholarship perceptively dissects the question of race. The Harvard University law professor follows intellectual tradition, each assertion carefully footnoted or attributed before he states his point of view.

Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now, by novelist and culture critic Touré, covers similar territory, but in colorful language that would be at home in a barbershop. If this implies that Touré's work should be taken less seriously, it shouldn't be. The energetic and gifted writer speaks to a new generation of political participants, notably those in Twitter range of Obama.

Kennedy's analysis takes on the trash of superficial arguments ("Obama is playing the race card"; "Obama isn't black") and in doing so, confronts intellectuals at the right and left ends of the political spectrum. In a sense, Kennedy walks with the president on the tightrope necessary for him to attain and hold the highest office in the land.