Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama

Political scientist Ambar (American Cicero) takes an informative look at interracial friendships among “political and cultural elites” in America. Contending that such relationships have the power to “shap[e] democratic discourse and possibilities along racial lines,” he examines 10 pairings across 200 years of American history. At their first and only White House meeting, in April 1864, Abraham Lincoln asked Frederick Douglass to help organize “a band of black spies” to go into the Confederate states and bring back to the North “an infusion of newly liberated blacks... [who] would invigorate the Union army, and further demoralize the South.” When William James invited his student W.E.B. Du Bois to a dinner held by Harvard’s Philosophical Club in 1891, it was “recognition that social equality among the races was a real possibility.” In the 1930s and ’40s, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune “engaged in a political dance that sought to advance mutual, and at times discordant, goals.” More recently, Barack Obama and Joe Biden overcame their political disagreements and differences in temperament by forging a bond based on “mutual respect and admiration felt over family.” Ambar’s lucid history lessons and spirit of optimism make this an enlightening study of how racial progress is made. (June)