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AMBIGUITY AND AMBIVALENCE IN THE VOTING BOOTH AND BEYOND

A Social-Psychological Perspective on Racial Attitudes and Behavior in the Obama Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2009

Destiny Peery  and
Galen V. Bodenhausen
Destiny Peery*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University
Galen V. Bodenhausen
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University
*
Professor Destiny Peery, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The issue of race has followed Barack Obama since he emerged on the national political scene, continuing unabated throughout his successful 2008 presidential campaign. Although the issue of race is not always explicitly acknowledged or discussed by Obama himself, the implications of his successful candidacy for U.S. politics and the ways people in the United States think about race more generally have been of great interest to media pundits, social scientists, and laypersons alike. Race has been considered a substantial barrier to the electoral success of previous non-White political candidates; therefore Obama's success requires reconsideration of how race can be expected to influence political outcomes in the future. In addition, his biracial identity also raises questions about how his role as a prominent cultural figure will affect existing racial categories in the United States. A review of social psychological evidence highlights the importance of understanding the ambivalence that characterizes contemporary racial attitudes, as well as the ways in which definitions of race and racial categories may be changing, in order to understand the impact that Obama could have on the future of racial politics. We conclude that Obama's victory represents a large step in the direction of increasingly positive racial attitudes and more sophisticated public conceptualizations of race, but steady progress in the coming years is not guaranteed. We consider some of the opportunities and obstacles that may affect the trajectory of future gains in the struggle for racial equality in the Obama era.

Keywords

Racial AttitudesRacial CategorizationHypodescentStereotyping
Type
STATE OF THE DISCOURSE
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Spring 2009 , pp. 71 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2009

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