Judged By His Actions: How President Obama Addressed Race In The First Six Months Of His Administration

INTRODUCTIONThe 'abnormality' in this case, is the highly problematic question of whether, in the foreseeable future, a Black person would win either of the major party nominations or be elected president in America... (Walters, 1988, 159).In 1988, few people could foresee the election of Barack Obama. Consequently, scholars of African American and presidential politics focused their attention on how blacks could maximize their political leverage with an office to which a black could conceivably never be elected. That literature has raised a number of important questions. Are presidents sensitive to African American political interests? To what extent have recent presidents expended political capital to advocate for reducing racial inequality? Is there a correlation between policy responsiveness and black vote share in a winning presidential election coalition?Now that America has elected a black president, we have the opportunity to answer these questions. Most important, we will soon be able to answer the age-old question: does having a black president appreciably change the political, social and economic status of African Americans in the United States?It will be years before we fully know Barack Obama's impact on American and African American life and politics. However, the first few months of the Obama Administration do shed light on the president's policy priorities and whether they are substantive or symbolic initiatives directed at Americans of color. With this in mind, this article examines President Obama's executive orders and public proclamations for evidence of the extent to which his acknowledgement of race differs from that of his most recent predecessors.In the pages that follow, I will provide a brief overview of the related literature. In particular, I will integrate the deracialization, representation and black politics literatures to develop hypotheses about how black presidents are predicted to behave with respect to their black constituents. I then test these hypotheses in a comparison of the public statements of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton during the first six months of their presidencies.BLACK INFLUENCE AND THE PRESIDENCY: AN HISTORICAL OVERVIEWBarker, Jones and Tate (1998, Chapter 11) argued that constituent groups have four avenues of influence in the Executive Branch. They can try to appeal directly to the president to support policies in their interest. They can generate enough third party interest (i.e. through a social movement) to get the executive's attention. Members of the constiment group can become key policy advisors and Cabinet members. Finally, the constiment group can work to get one of its own members elected president. Before 2008, most thought it was impossible for blacks to elect one of their own as president. Thus, Barker and his colleagues focused on the relative ease of gaining influence through the other avenues.Barker et al. contended that it was difficult for blacks to gain leverage through the other channels too. Even when a president was sympathetic to blacks' policy interests, it still took a long time for policy ideas to come to fruition. Most policies require congressional support, which creates additional veto opportunities. By the time most initiatives have gone through the legislative process, the eventual policies look very different from the original ideas. Moreover, they still have to go through an implementation and evaluation phase. If a policy fails to have the intended impact, one may have to start the whole agenda setting and policymaking process over again. Thus, blacks historically sought to influence presidents as advisors or through social movements that made issues of racial justice so publicly salient that they could not be ignored (Barker, Jones and Tate, 1998, Chapter 11).The other way blacks could influence presidential politics was through leverage candidacies. Ronald Walters was at the forefront of developing this strategy. …