Post-racial or Most-racial? ― Race and Politics in the Obama Era

Most Racial starts where Michael Tesler and David Sears’ last book--Obama’s Race, the story of the 2008 presidential election—leaves off. Tesler’s new book will provide the definitive account of the role of racial attitudes in mass politics during the Obama presidency. It tells the story of how, when, and why a wide swath of Americans became significantly more polarized by racial considerations than they had been before Barack Obama’s ascendancy and in spite of his administration’s strenuous efforts to neutralize the political impact of race. Rather than ushering in a new, post-racial era, the first black presidency in history has ironically resulted in the most-racial era of modern times Marshalling a vast amount of observational and experimental survey data, Tesler shows how racial attitudes have “spilled over” to influence so many aspects of mass political decision making. These range from people’s evaluations of presidential candidates and their partisan attachments, to seemingly non-racially related issues such as preferences about public policy and their subjective evaluations of objective economic conditions. Anti-black attitudes, for example, became a significantly stronger predictor of opposition to governmental health care after Obama became the face of the policy. Some people even had more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when told it was John Kerry’s dog. Most broadly, Tesler argues that this racialization of our politics is behind both a growing partisan division between racially liberal and racially conservative white and an expanding political divide between white and non-white Americans that could shape our politics for years to come. It is, according to our reviewer, “certainly one of the most important books on racial politics to ever appear in the United States.”

Michael Tesler is assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the author ofObama’s Race, also published by the University of Chicago Press.