Jabari Asim
SPEAKING CLIENT
Editor-in-Chief of NAACP Magazine "The Crisis" and Author of "The N Word" and the upcoming "What Obama Means: For Our Culture, Our Politics and Our Future"
Program Title: What Obama Means
"This is our moment. This is our time," Barack Obama declared in his victory speech on November 4, 2008. Such a moment is an opportunity to explore who we are, where we've been, and what the emergence of a leader like Obama can tell us about our culture, our politics, and our future. In What Obama Means, Jabari Asim, author of the acclaimed The N Word, provides the context needed to understand what the Obama presidency means to Americans of all backgrounds.
Asim moves easily from the contemporary to the historical, showing how performers and athletes, such as Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan, laid the groundwork for Obama as much as did leaders such as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Martin Luther King Jr. He examines the impact of Sidney Poitier (whose Guess Who's Coming to Dinner could have been the story of the president's parents) and how the actor's navigation of Hollywood was a forerunner for Obama's own path in wooing America's white voters. Asim places Obama within the history of the black rhetorical tradition, alongside such figures as James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Barbara Jordan. He also describes how the "Obama phenomenon" grew from the ground up, focusing on the people who caught on even before their leaders did. He demonstrates how Obama turned the old civil-rights model of African American leadership on its head, and shows that Obama's election is evidence of the progress that has been made in healing wounds and broadening America's concept of leadership and inspiration.
Jabari Asim’s gift of being academic and engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking makes him a favorite guest on programs as wide-ranging as The Colbert Report, The Today Show, Hannity & Colmes, The Tavis Smiley Show and countless others. Asim insights are also remarkably timely – for example, his last book, The ‘N’ Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why, followed on the heels of Don Imus’ racist rant in 2007.
Asim spent eleven years at the Washington Post, where he served as deputy editor of the book review section. He also wrote a syndicated column on political and social issues for the Washington Post. Among other accomplishments, Asim is a former vice president of the National Book Critics Circle whose reviews and cultural criticism have been published in the International Herald Tribune, the Phoenix Gazette, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Salon.com, the Detroit News, The Village Voice, Hungry Mind Review, XXL, Code, Emerge, Essence, Africana.com and BlackElectorate.com.
Outside of his work as a journalist, Asim is also poet, playwright, and fiction writer and has published work in a number of anthologies and literary magazines. He was the only writer to have both poetry and fiction included in In The Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers; and other works have been included in collections and anthologies such as Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America; Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence, The Furious Flowering of African-American Poetry, African American Writers: A Literary Reader; and Step Into A World: A Global Anthology of The New Black Literature, among others. A father of five, Asim has written several children’s books including include Whose Toes Are Those, Whose Knees Are These, and Daddy Goes to Work.
Jabari Asim lives in Maryland with his family.
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