Just a few years ago, the election of Barack Obama signaled to some that the country had arrived at a new reckoning with old categories, that many of America’s racial wounds had healed, or that at least it was possible to move on from them. The term ‘‘post­racial’’ was everywhere: in thousands of newspaper articles and op-ed essays and on the lips of political pundits like Chris Matthews of MSNBC, who proudly said that he forgot, for a moment, that Obama was black. Books were published on subjects like ‘‘postracial cinema,’’ the ‘‘postracial church’’ and ‘‘postracial black leadership.’’ Data from 2008-9 showed that one in seven new marriages was between spouses of different racial or ethnic backgrounds. And an article from The New York Times in 2011 noted that some people felt that ‘‘the blending of the races is a step toward transcending race, to a place where America is free of bigotry, prejudice and programs like affirmative action.’’

The word ‘‘postracial’’ has been around since at least the early 1970s, when an article in this newspaper used it to describe a coalition of Southern government officials who believed that their region had ‘‘entered an era in which race relations are soon to be replaced as a major concern.’’ That didn’t happen. When a 21-year-old white supremacist was charged in the fatal shootings of nine African-­Americans in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, it was a stark reminder that the past half decade has provided little evidence of reckoning or repair. According to a recent Gallup poll, more black Americans in 2015 than in 2014 regard race relations as one of the most pressing problems in the United States. As for the term ‘‘postracial,’’ well, it has mostly disappeared from the conversation, except as sarcastic shorthand.

This is probably how it should be. When people talked about being ‘‘post­racial,’’ they were often really talking about being ‘‘postblack’’ — or, more charitably, ‘‘post-­racist-­against-­blacks.’’ After all, blackness is seen as an opposite to the default — the ideal — of whiteness, and chattel slavery and the legacies it left behind continue to shape American society. Sometimes it seems as if the desire for a ‘‘postracial’’ America is an attempt by white people to liberate themselves from the burden of having to deal with that legacy.

As a child born a few years after Loving v. Virginia — the 1967 Supreme Court case that effectively ended miscegenation laws — to a mixed-­race couple, I was keenly aware of the ways in which many people, especially liberal white people, saw me as an avatar for a colorblind civilization in which the best of white and black America banded together to move beyond this country’s shameful history by birthing beautiful beige-­colored babies. I was subject to a certain inquisitiveness, though well meaning, that I found irritating and doubted was directed at my darker-­skinned brothers and sisters: questions about which parent was black and which was white; incredulity about my hazel eyes; inquiries about whether I consider myself African-­American.

I was a curiosity, and a comfort: a black girl who was just white enough to seem familiar, not foreign, someone who could serve as an emissary or a bridge between blackness and whiteness. It’s true that I can move about the world in ways that many other black people cannot; for one thing, I am rarely racially profiled. My choice, if you can call it that, to identify as black is much different from that of, say, my father or even my own sister, whose skin is at least three shades darker than mine. The eagerness with which people gravitate toward me is not shown to many of the other black people I know. These ex­peri­ences led me to suspect that the breathless ‘‘post­racial’’ commentary that attached itself to our current president had as much to do with the fact that he is ­biracial as with the fact that he is black. His blood relationship to whiteness and its attendant privileges serve as a chaser to the difficult-­to-­swallow prospect that a black man might achieve ownership of the Oval Office.