Race as temporality / journey

Obama's speech and Coleman's essay both (intentionally or unintentionally?) revealed rhetoric of race as temporality. This makes me think of embodied cognition — the idea that we understand abstract concepts through physical, grounded metaphors, such as the passage of time as a journey. I'm wondering if race is another way of creating a concrete image of time and therefore a part of the journey metaphor. Obama revealed a conception of race as temporal and a journey with phrases like "we all want to move in the same direction" and "move beyond some of our old racial wounds." The progression of Obama functions as a metonymy for the progression of blacks, which in turn metonymizes the progress of the country; "the historical weight of racism may be transmuted into a lightness (or speed) of being" (Coleman 184).

Similarly, Coleman discusses race as "a trapdoor through which one can scoot off to greener pastures." A door is created in order to pass through it. Is race something that exists so that one day we can travel beyond it? Have oppressed races, in the American imagination, come to embody the past mistakes which, like race, are "not even past" (Obama claims)? Does the end of their oppression, or the end of colonial time, signify a landmark at which the past is finally past? It is impossible to live in an absolute progressive society because one day the now-progressive ideologies will be antiquated, unless change stops. Is the fixation on moving past race a way of disguising this problem, or of creating a time when no more changes are needed, when the union is "perfect"?

In addition to racial oppression as a symbol of the past, the idea of "primitive races" also seems to function that way. The evolution of society is described as a journey as well; "civilized" people can look at "primitive" people and say "we're past that juncture." In the theory of evolution, this journey starts in Africa and "progresses" through Asia and to Europe; is this narrative part of the metaphor of race as a journey? Or is the future a return to the past, to "nature"? Paradoxically, Coleman says that Kant "uses a native to point us toward the denatured creatures we must become” (182).