Unless you’re an avowed racist, you probably think Barack Obama’s skin color has nothing to do with your views of his policies. If you hate Obamacare, you hate it entirely on the merits. If you opposed the president’s stimulus package, you did so solely because you’re against governmental attempts to goose the economy.
Don’t be so sure. In the data-rich book Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Michael Tesler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at Irvine, finds that perceptions of race affected nearly everything Obama touched. This interview with Tesler has been edited and condensed.
So — spoiler alert! — you conclude that Obama’s presidency, far from being post-racial, was repeatedly dogged by issues of race. Does Obama himself shoulder any of the blame for that?
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I take an approach of not putting much blame on Barack Obama. There are content analyses showing that he talks about race far less than other presidents. Much to the dismay of critics like Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, he proposes no real race-specific programs. He tries to insulate himself from the politics of race, but despite that, many of his actions are perceived through a racial prism.
Can you explain the concept of the “spillover of racialization”?
The idea is that since Barack Obama is evaluated through his race, and his perceived foreign background, whatever he comes in contact with becomes imbued with racial meaning. So people tend to think policies are more about race than they did beforehand. Health care is the biggest example. But party identification, voting for Congress — all are becoming more divided by, and over, race.
And it’s important to note that it cuts both ways: White liberals become more supportive of Obama’s policies, and white conservatives move in the opposite direction.
You write that Barack Obama “consistently widened racial divides, despite his best efforts to neutralize the political impact of race.” But did he really widen those divides, or did he instead merely expose divides that have been present for a long time?
There are underlying divides over race. What he did is, he helped map them onto politics more than they had been before. One of the things people who are in the academy, or who follow politics closely, take for granted is that the Democratic Party has been more liberal on racial issues. But a lot of lower-information voters hadn’t made that connection. And what Obama helped people do is draw the connection that the Democratic Party is more supportive of racially liberal policies — and so by doing that, he makes it easier to bring their racial attitudes to bear on their political beliefs.
Would Barack Obama’s policy proposals have been more popular and have had a greater chance of passage if he were white?
I give people an experiment where I say “Do you support Barack Obama’s stimulus package versus congressional Democrats’?” Now, Obama’s package is more popular than the one from congressional Democrats, but [reaction to it is] more polarized by racial attitudes. The polarization is important because it makes it harder for Obama to get things done. You have very entrenched opposition because of attitudes on race. Once it becomes infused with race, it becomes more angry. It didn’t necessarily lower support for Obama’s policies, but I do think it made opposition to his policies more angry, more vitriolic, than it would have been otherwise.
So you don’t think it necessarily altered the outcomes on particular proposals, it just changed the tenor of the debate?
You could say, “Do you think John Boehner was opposing Obama’s policies because he was black?” No, I don’t think that at all. But I think it was easier to mobilize opposition, and especially angry opposition, because of Obama’s race. I think it did help fuel some of the gridlock that took place.
You write about the perception of the Republican Party as the “party of white people.” I assume that the rise of Donald Trump would only further cement that idea.
It will be harder for Republicans to moderate on issues of race because of what’s happened during Obama’s presidency. Their base has become more solidly racially conservative and more activated around racial conservatism. It becomes mutually reinforcing so that the party base wants someone who’s going to speak like Trump, and so they nominate someone who speaks like Trump, which further reinforces their image. So they’re in a tough spot, and I don’t necessarily see a good way out of it. Trump has really taken the growing racialization under Barack Obama and further enhanced it.
