Barack Obama's decision to mark “Black/African American” on the 2010 census would seem to affirm mixed race Asian American artist Li-lan's feeling that we are indeed not in a “post-racial” time at all. And what would such a label mean? How would we measure the start of a post-racial era? Would President Obama, born in 1961, or Li-lan, a Chinese and European American artist born a generation earlier, be part of the post-racial era? How so, given that both have lived through significant watersheds in U.S. racism? Their identities are shaped just as much by racism as by being Americans. Can we mark a moment and say that from this moment on, all children born will be part of the post-racist era? What happens to post-racialism when racism keeps on happening? This essay examines notions of self within the context of lived experience, cultural politics, and moves conversations beyond mixed race as a black–white phenomenon. More specifically, I trace the experiences of President Obama and mixed race artist Li-lan within a U.S. and a global context to suggest that racism is real even though “race” is a social construct, and that mixed “race” plays a slippery role when it comes to the negotiation of one's public self-representation. How do Li-lan and President Obama present themselves publically in their professional lives and how does this presentation in the arts and in politics—disparate, though some might say related, fields—allow each to bring together people from various backgrounds, building a new American majority that is ethnically, economically, and politically diverse, but certainly not post-racial?

Both Obama and Li-lan have been shaped by being Americans, but Americans of a particularly “cosmopolitan” stripe.