Mixed Race Studies

Family of Freedom: Presidents and African Americans in the White House

Paradigm Publishers
February 2011
288 pages
6″ x 9″
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-59451-833-1
EBook ISBN: 978-1-61205-000-3

Kenneth T. Walsh

This book examines the intertwined relationships between the presidents and the African Americans who have been an integral part of the White House since the beginning of the Republic. The book discusses the racial attitudes and policies of the presidents and shows how African Americans helped to shape those attitudes and policies over the years. The analysis starts with the early presidents who had slaves and tells the compelling stories of their interactions, with an emphasis on how these slaves dealt with bondage in the supposed citadel of American freedom and independence. The book moves through the era of Abraham Lincoln, whose views on emancipation were greatly influenced by the African Americans around him, especially by White House seamstress Elizabeth Keckley and valet William Slade. The book covers the Jim Crow era and proceeds through the political and cultural breakthroughs on civil rights accomplished by Lyndon Johnson in partnership with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The book ends with an insightful analysis of the rise, election, and administration of Barack Obama, the first African American president, including an exclusive interview with Obama.

The Obama Era: A New Age in American Politics

The Huffington Post
2012-12-05

Brandon Hill
Stanford University

Barack Obama’s elections—both 2008 and 2012—have inaugurated a new political reality in America. He has rewritten history in two consecutive elections, and his groundbreaking victories will forever change the game of politics in our country. Before 2008 the political process was perceived as exclusive and elusive, accessible to only a few privileged players. But after two presidential elections of unprecedented campaign involvement and voter turnout, historically soft-spoken and underrepresented groups like African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, women, and young people are now reclaiming ownership of their political destinies. And the revolution is only just beginning.

Welcome to the Obama era.

President Obama has reengineered America’s political atmosphere, where political inclusion has now replaced the status quo. Obama brings a new face to political leadership. He is a refreshing departure from the markedly un-diverse brand of presidents and politicians that preceded him. He is real and relatable and able to reach more people, which encourages new groups to become engaged in the political process. In the Obama era, politics is no longer an enterprise reserved for old balding White men. It is no longer an old boys’ network or a country club aristocracy. Instead, it is a democracy built for and by the everyday American, and it is this inclusiveness that is politically energizing young people, women, and communities of color…

…Obama connects with a broader spectrum of people than past candidates and presidents have. Reagan alienated Black voters with his Welfare Queen caricature. Romney dyed his face orange trying to appeal to Hispanic Univision viewers. Bush refused to let Hurricane Katrina ruin the end of his vacation, surveying the ruined low-income communities from the comfort of Air Force One instead of consoling families on the ground. These types of blunders make it clear why many groups historically have felt disconnected from political leadership.

Obama’s massive appeal to minorities, women, and youth is that he is relatable. He’s real. Little Black boys find confidence in the fact that the president’s hair texture is the same as theirs. Latino parents find assurance in the fact that their president speaks their native tongue. Middle age women find solace in the fact that their president has two young daughters and will protect a woman’s right to her own body. College students across the nation find inspiration in the fact that their president can shoot the breeze with foreign heads of state, shoot down terrorist masterminds, and shoot a wicked jump shot all at the same time. Obama has both swagger and substance, a potent combination that prior commanders in chief have lacked. It’s simple. More people feel connected to the political process because now more people feel connected to their political leader.

The Obama era is a new age that politically empowers the people that the political process has historically overlooked. It is an age where those who were once voiceless have become the most vocal; where the most apathetic have claimed significant authority. Now that minorities and women and youth have taken the reins in the past two elections, I don’t see this trend changing any time soon…

Read the entire article here.

No longer your father’s electorate

The Los Angeles Times
2012-11-08

Paul West, Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Even more than the election that made Barack Obama the first black president, the one that returned him to office sent an unmistakable signal that the hegemony of the straight white male in America is over.

The long drive for broader social participation by all Americans reached a turning point in the 2012 election, which is likely to go down as a watershed in the nation’s social and political evolution — and not just because in some states voters approved of same-sex marriage for the first time.

 On Tuesday, Obama received the votes of barely 1 in 3 white males. That too was historic. It almost certainly was an all-time low for the winner of a presidential election that did not include a major third-party candidate.

“We’re not in the ’50s any more,” said William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer. “This election makes it clear that a single focus directed at white males, or at the white population in general, is not going to do it. And it’s not going to do it when the other party is focusing on energizing everybody else.”…

… “Obama lost a lot of votes among whites,” said Matt Barreto, a University of Washington political scientist. “It was only because of high black turnout and the highest Latino turnout ever for a Democratic president that he won.”

Obama planted his base in an America that is inexorably becoming more diverse. If left unchecked by Republicans, these demographic trends would give the Democrats a significant edge in future presidential elections.

Latinos were an essential element of Obama’s victories in the battlegrounds of Nevada and Colorado. States once considered reliably Republican in presidential elections will probably become highly competitive because of burgeoning Latino populations, sometimes in combination with large African American populations. North Carolina, where Obama won narrowly in 2008 and came close this time, is one. The Deep South state of Georgia is another. Texas and Arizona in the Southwest are future swing states — by 2020, if not sooner…

Read the entire article here.

The Election of Barack Obama: How He Won

Palgrave Macmillan
August 2010
178 pages
DOI: 10.1057/9780230111790
ebook ISBN: 9780230111790
Paperback ISBN: 9780230103511
Hardback ISBN: 9780230314603

Baodong Liu, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Utah

This book examines the historical election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president from the perspective of racial relations. To trace the effect of time, Liu links Obama’s multiracial winning coalition to the two-party system and the profound impact of racial changes since 1965. Contrary to the popular momentum theory which emphasizes the early victories in mainly two states, Iowa and New Hampshire, this book demonstrates that state context matters. Obama’s electoral performance in a state is better explained by its level of racial tension, rather than the emotional need of Americans to elect a black president.

List of Contents

• Emotion and Rationality: An Introduction
• Minimum Winning Coalition: the 2008 Presidential Election from a Historical Perspective
• Racial Change and the Politics of Hope
• The 2008 Democratic Primaries and the Presidential Selection Process
• Building the Winning Coalition in Time
• Building the Winning Coalition in Space
• Winning the General Election
• The Obama Racial Coalition: Conclusion

Is There Colorism on the Campaign Trail?

The Root
2012-12-13

Keli Goff, Political Correspondent

Experts weighed in on when skin tone matters in politics and society.

(The Root) — The latest installment of CNN’s docuseries Black in America asked the question “Who Is Black in America?” and examined the issue of colorism: bias based not just on race but also on actual skin color. The news special cited well-documented research confirming that lighter-skinned immigrants earn more than their darker-skinned counterparts. But one topic the special did not explore is whether skin-color bias has a tangible impact on American politics, particularly at the national level.

Are Americans more likely to vote for a minority candidate who is lighter-skinned? The experts we spoke with said it appears so.

David A. Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank specializing in research relating to blacks, said that the numbers speak for themselves. “You can’t think of many [black politicians] who are very dark,” he noted.

To his point, most elected (as opposed to appointed) black American politicians who have broken a significant barrier have either been extremely light-skinned or part white. Examples include Edward Brooke, the first black senator to be popularly elected; Adam Clayton Powell Jr., New York’s first black congressman; Douglas Wilder, the first black governor in the U.S.; and David Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor. Then, of course, there is President Barack Obama, who is not as light as the others, but is also not dark — and whom most Americans are aware is of biracial parentage…

…In an interview with The Root, Yaba Blay, founder of the “(1)ne Drop” project and a consulting producer on “Who Is Black in America?” explained, “In slavery, white ancestry communicated, through skin color, one’s approximation to whiteness at a time when whiteness was equated with being human, and blackness was equated with chattel. So looking white was a saving grace. [It meant] you are more human, civilized, smarter — all the more positive associations people assign to whiteness. So when we look at the larger society and the ability to see a black person as a potential leader, I think it’s absolutely connected to colorism in that historical framework.”…

…The intersection of skin color and class status among black Americans began during slavery. As explained in the textbook Black Slave Owners in Charleston, when black female slaves would give birth to children fathered by their white slave owners, some slave owners would leave property or other forms of inheritance to their children, and some would bestow freedom upon them, too. This created a class of “free persons of color” who were more likely to be fair-skinned and have some measure of economic stability, upward mobility and education…

Read the entire article here.

Pete Souza’s Portrait of a Presidency

Time LightBox
Time Magazine
2012-10-08

Phil Bicker, Senior Photo Editor

Pete Souza/The White House

The long view of history tends to be the judge of a presidency. As President Obama embarks on a second term in the Oval Office, it may still be too early to draw conclusions about his legacy as Commander in Chief. What we do know is that Obama’s first term has been a historic one: the first African American to hold the county’s highest office, Obama and his Administration have battled a recession, passed health care reform and legislation to end the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, formally ended the war in Iraq and brought Osama bin Laden to justice.

Through adversity and triumph, public victories and private setbacks, chief official White House photographer Pete Souza and his team of photographers have relentlessly documented the actions of the President, the First Lady and the Vice President since Obama took office in early 2009.

As the President runs for a second term, LightBox asked Souza to reflect on his time photographing Obama and share an edit of his favorite images that he and his staff made during the President’s first term; the photographs offer a fascinatingly candid insight into the life of the President while painting a portrait of Barack Obama the man, husband and father…

Read the entire article and view the 125 photographs here.

2012 Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the President

Time Magazine
2012-12-19

Michael Scherer

Photograph by Nadav Kander

Twenty-seven years after driving from New York City to Chicago in a $2,000 Honda Civic for a job that probably wouldn’t amount to much, Barack Obama, in better shape but with grayer hair, stood in the presidential suite on the top floor of the Fairmont Millennium Park hotel as flat screens announced his re-election as President of the United States. The networks called Ohio earlier than predicted, so his aides had to hightail it down the hall to join his family and friends. They encountered a room of high fives and fist pumps, hugs and relief.

The final days of any campaign can alter the psyches of even the most experienced political pros. At some point, there is nothing to do but wait. Members of Obama’s team responded in the only rational way available to them — by acting irrationally. They turned neckties into magic charms and facial hair into a talisman and compulsively repeated past behaviors so as not to jinx what seemed to be working. In Boca Raton, Fla., before the last debate, they dispatched advance staff to find a greasy-spoon diner because they had eaten at a similar joint before the second debate, on New York’s Long Island. They sent senior strategist David Axelrod a photograph of the tie he had to find to wear on election night: the same one he wore in 2008. Several staffers on Air Force One stopped shaving, like big-league hitters in the playoffs. Even the President succumbed, playing basketball on Election Day at the same court he played on before winning in 2008.

But now it was done, and reason had returned. Ever since the campaign computers started raising the odds of victory from near even to something like surefire, Obama had been thinking a lot about what it meant to win without the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of that first national campaign. The Obama effect was not ephemeral anymore, no longer reducible to what had once been mocked as “that hopey-changey stuff.” It could be measured — in wars stopped and started; industries saved, restructured or reregulated; tax cuts extended; debt levels inflated; terrorists killed; the health-insurance system reimagined; and gay service members who could walk in uniform with their partners. It could be seen in the new faces who waited hours to vote and in the new ways campaigns are run. America debated and decided this year: history would not record Obama’s presidency as a fluke…

…Two years ago, Republicans liked to say that the only hard thing Obama ever did right was beating Hillary Clinton in the primary, and in electoral terms, there was some truth to that. In 2012 the GOP hoped to cast him as an inspiring guy who was not up to the job. But now we know the difference between the wish and the thing, the hype and the man in the office. He stands somewhat shorter, having won 4 million fewer votes and two fewer states than in 2008. But his 5 million-vote margin of victory out of 129 million ballots cast shocked experts in both parties, and it probably would have been higher had so much of New York and New Jersey not stayed home after Hurricane Sandy. He won many of the toughest battlegrounds walking away: Virginia by 4 points, Colorado by 5 and the lily white states of Iowa and New Hampshire by 6. He untied Ohio’s knotty heartland politics, picked the Republican lock on Florida Cubans and won Paul Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wis. (Those last two data points especially caught the President’s interest.) He will take the oath on Jan. 20 as the first Democrat in more than 75 years to get a majority of the popular vote twice. Only five other Presidents have done that in all of U.S. history.

There are many reasons for this, but the biggest by far are the nation’s changing demographics and Obama’s unique ability to capitalize on them. When his name is on the ballot, the next America — a younger, more diverse America — turns out at the polls. In 2008, blacks voted at the same rate as whites for the first time in history, and Latinos broke turnout records. The early numbers suggest that both groups did it again in 2012, even in nonbattleground states, where the Obama forces were far less organized. When minorities vote, that means young people do too, because the next America is far more diverse than the last. And when all that happens, Obama wins. He got 71% of Latinos, 93% of blacks, 73% of Asians and 60% of those under 30.

That last number is the one Obama revels in most. When he talks about the campaign, he likes to think about the generational shift the country is going through on topics like gay marriage — an issue on which he lagged, only to reverse himself last spring. He connects it to the optimism he felt as a young man, the same thing he always talks about with staff in the limo or on the plane after visits with campaign volunteers. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” reads one of the quotes stitched into his new Oval Office rug — an old abolitionist cry that Martin Luther King Jr. repurposed while marching on Selma, Ala. Obama believes in that, and he believes he is more than just a bit player in the transition. “I do think that my eight years as President, reflecting those values and giving voice to those values, help to validate or solidify that transformation,” he says, “and I think that’s a good thing for the country.”…

Photograph by Nadav Kander

…In an age of lost authority, Obama had managed to maintain his. In group after group, the voters told the researchers they believed the President was honest, lived an admirable personal life and was trying to do the right thing. “Here’s what I heard for 18 months,” Simas says. “‘I trust his values. I think he walked into the worst situation of any President in 50 years. And you know what? I am disappointed that things haven’t turned around.’ But there was always that feeling of ‘I am willing to give this guy a second shot.’”

In different rooms, behind different one-way mirrors, Republicans made the same discovery. “There was almost nothing that would stick to this guy, because they just liked him personally,” Katie Packer Gage, Romney’s deputy campaign manager, said after the election. Most of those who had voted for Obama in 2008 were still proud of that vote and did not see the President as partisan or ideological. When Republicans channeled their party’s many furies, attacking Obama as an extremist, it backfired among swing-state voters. “The kind of traditional negative campaign that the Obama campaign did was not available to our side,” explained Steven Law, who oversaw more than $100 million in anti-Obama advertising for American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS…

Read the entire article here.

Note from Steven F. Riley: President-Elect Barack Obama was Time’s Person of the Year for 2008.

That Barack Obama self-identifies as African American rather than ‘Mixed’ has probably little to do with a rejection of his mother’s heritage or a radical kind of separatist politics. Rather, Obama’s identity is informed by his social experience, and the reality of racism is evidenced not simply in his experiences in the 1970s or 1980s, but in the continued focus on his place of birth and by the fact that over 90% of White American voters in Mississippi and Alabama voted for his opponent.

Dr. Omar Khan, “Who are we? Census 2011 reports on ethnicity in the UK,” Runnymede Trust: Intelligence for a multi-ethnic Britain, (December 11, 2012). http://www.runnymedetrust.org/blog/188/359/Who-are-we-Census-2011-reports-on-ethnicity-in-the-UK.html

Who are we? Census 2011 reports on ethnicity in the UK

Runnymede Trust: Intelligence for a multi-ethnic Britain
2012-12-11

Dr. Omar Khan, Head of Policy Research

Every ten years the Census provides us with multiple insights into the state of modern Britain. In today’s release of the 2011 Census, we find that the Black and minority ethnic (BME) population has reached nearly 8 million – roughly the population of Scotland and Wales combined.

Overall, the BME population is now 14.1% of the overall total in England and Wales, rising from 7.9% in 2001. This doesn’t include the significant ‘White Other’ population which is now 2.5 million, or 4.4% of the overall population. Much of this growth has been through immigration, and many will assume that the ‘White Other’ population is primarily Eastern European. However, this population also includes White French, White Australian, White Argentinian and White American people, which explains why this disparate ‘group’ is now some 12.6% of the population of London.

Combined with the 40% of the population that is Black and minority ethnic, a minority of London’s residents are now ‘White British’ (46%). While this is indeed a striking development, it masks an arguably more significant development – the greater dispersal of ethnic minorities across the UK. Contrary to much received wisdom, Britain is becoming less ‘segregated’ every year.

Between 2001 and 2011, the regions whose BME population has grown the fastest are those that had the fewest ethnic minorities in 2011. So Wales, the North East and South West have all doubled their proportion of BME people (from just over 2% to over 4%), while London and West Midlands, which had the most BME people in 2001, have grown the slowest. There are more BME people living across the UK, including in villages and the countryside, and this phenomenon can be expected to continue.

One of the striking findings of the census is the reduction in the overall number of ‘White British’ people by over half a million people. So one reason the BME proportion of the population is rising is because the White British population is shrinking. In most regions of England and Wales this decrease or growth was actually quite minimal (with the White British population growing by more than 2% over the decade only in the South East), but London was notable because there were 600,000 fewer White British people living there in 2011 compared to 2001. This clearly points to the phenomenon of White British people leaving the capital, and explains much of the rise in London’s proportion of BME people…

…Inevitably much coverage of the census will focus on the rising ‘Mixed’ population, which now is the second largest, at some 1.2 million people. While the rise in the number of people categorized as mixed has been quite remarkable, so too has the overall BME growth, meaning that the ‘Mixed’ population is only 1% more (15.6%) of the total BME population than it was in 2001 (14.6%)…

…On most social outcome measures, the ‘Mixed’ population shows enormous variation, with Black Caribbean-White and Black African-White people more likely to have outcomes similar to Black people generally. In other words, rather than viewing the ‘mixed’ population as a single group with shared social experiences, we should rather focus on the continued salience of race, and in particular how the racial background of parents affects the social outcomes of children…

…It is also significant that many of these categories have large and growing populations. This raises the final important question – how identity shifts over people’s lifetimes and indeed across generations. While the overall share of Black people within the BME population remained about a quarter, there was a sharp decrease in the proportion who identified as ‘Black Caribbean’. However, the ‘Black Other’ group saw the steepest rise, suggesting that some children of Black Caribbean parents are happier with this ethnic identity.

Depending on how identity and social experiences change, we might expect further development of the current census categories. For example, the children of White Polish parents may plausibly identify as ‘White British’, as many of the grandchildren of Irish and Italian migrants now do, while many ‘Mixed’ people may rather identify as one of their parents. Here it’s worth emphasizing again the importance of social experiences and social outcomes in understanding race and ethnicity. That Barack Obama self-identifies as African American rather than ‘Mixed’ has probably little to do with a rejection of his mother’s heritage or a radical kind of separatist politics. Rather, Obama’s identity is informed by his social experience, and the reality of racism is evidenced not simply in his experiences in the 1970s or 1980s, but in the continued focus on his place of birth and by the fact that over 90% of White American voters in Mississippi and Alabama voted for his opponent.

So while it is important to understand self-identification in thinking about race and ethnicity, people cannot simply choose an identity of their own making, nor can they escape the views and prejudices in others in navigating the world. In the UK, the unemployment rate for Black young men is now 55%, Chinese graduates with better results have lower earnings than their White colleagues and Black and Asian women face such difficult experiences in the labour market that some of them change their names on their CVs…

Read the entire article here.

Othering Obama: How Whiteness is Used to Undermine Authority

Altre Modernità/Other Modernities
ISSN 2035-7680
Number 3 (2010)
pages 112-119
DOI: 10.6092/2035-7680/517

David S. Owen, Associate Professor of Philosophy; Director of Diversity Programs, College of Arts and Sciences
University of Louisville

In this paper, I argue that the sociocultural structuring property of whiteness has been utilized to marginalize President Obama and effectively undermine his presidential authority.  Whiteness functions in a largely invisible and ostensibly deracialized way to normalize the interests, needs, and values of whites, while at the same time marginalizing and devaluing the voice of people of color.  Analyzing the health care debate through this theoretical lens generates insights into how the debate reproduced the system of racial oppression, and how whiteness functions in political discourse.

Introduction

The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency in 2008 was undoubtedly a truly historic moment. The election of a self-identified black man to the highest political office in the nation was symbolic of a degree of progress the U.S. has made towards racial justice. However, there has been considerable disagreement in public discourse about how substantive a change this Obama presidency reflects. Some have  claimed (and did so immediately after the election) that the Obama presidency signals the end of racial oppression in the U.S. Others have argued that while the Obama presidency is significant, it does not indicate that the system of racial oppression has dissolved over night. This debate was sharpened in the summer of 2009 by the public discourse concerning health care reform. To many, that discourse often devolved from rational policy critique to racist attacks of Obama. And, in fact, the topic of racism broke into explicit discourse during this period, culminating with former President Jimmy Carter accusing many of the president’s critics with racism. Much of the debate around whether or not the critics of health care reform were behaving in a racist manner turned on the question of intent: Did they, or did they not, intend to send a racist message? I will argue in this paper that this question misses the point. The system of racial oppression, which was not dissolved on election night in 2008, is maintained and reproduced by behavior that echoes and carries forward racist imagery, representations, and symbols of the past in the guise of structures of whiteness. While there were clearly explicitly racist actions taken by the health care reform critics, much of the harm and effectiveness of the racially oppressive behavior is found in what ostensibly looks like non-racial behavior. Such behavior appears to be non-racial because it presumes the norm of whiteness. These debates provide a constructive case study for understanding how people of color can be marginalized and devalued—even when they have achieved very high accomplishments…

Read the entire article here.