I just finished reading "What Obama Means," by Jabari Asim. And before you start rolling your eyes... well, the book is not so much about Obama as it is about the journey that African Americans had gone from the times of slavery to the present, and all the cultural and social steps that allowed a black man to be the president of the United States.
The section on black athletes, musicians, and other artists that paved the way for African Americans to be widely popular and even seen as models of what's cool is very revealing and very well done, as well as the chapter on the "Magic Negro," which explained not only what a Magic Negro is but also all that controversy with that song played in the Rush Limbaugh show.
Some random quotes I really liked:
As Maureen Dowd noted in the New York Times, "The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it." (Page 124)
As DuBois and other have put forth, casting excessive blamo on the less educated and economically disadvantaged allows successful blacks to hide their obligations to their brethren behind by-the-bootstrap myths of self-propelled ascent. In a speech delivered in 1934 on the day he resigned from the NAACP, DuBois outlined the consequences of such mythmaking in apocalyptic terms. "If the leading Negro classes cannot assume and bear the uplift of their own proletariat," he said, "they are doomed for all time." (Page 139)