On November 5, 2008, the nation awoke to headlines, such as that of theNew York Times, that read “OBAMA. Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout.” For many, the near-prophetic election of an African American to the highest position in the land is a watershed moment that confirms the declining significance of both race and racism in the nation. Accordingly, a wide variety of activists, cultural critics, and political pontificators issued pronouncements to that effect. Just after the election, Adam Geller ofUSA Todaywrote, “The principle that all men are created equal has never been more than a remote...

The history of the “Grand Old Party” (GOP) and African Americans is a rich and tumultuous one. And it is a relationship guided by factors put into play long before the formation of the Republican Party in 1854. Chief among those factors is the subject of race.¹ This chapter provides a brief account of the Republican Party’s relationship to the black/white color line, especially how the GOP shifted to being the party of white conservatism after the political realignment of the Southern Strategy of the 1940s. In turn, we present this chapter—largely for those unacquainted with the role of...

On December 12, 2011, right-wing commentator and former Fox News host Glenn Beck directed a statement toward the Tea Party Movement (TPM): “[A]sk yourself this, Tea Party: is it about Obama’s race? Because that’s what it appears to be to me. If you’re against him [Barack Obama] but you’re for this guy [Newt Gingrich], it must be about race.”¹

When Glenn Beck—one of the nation’s most incendiary commentators, a former organizer and defender of the TPM, and a man who attempted to alienate Obama from white voters when he said that the president had a “deep-seated hatred for white...

In the landmark textThe Black Image in the White Mind, Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki began with a prescient observation: “Recent studies reveal that racially distinctive images pervade news of Blacks and other minority groups, and that these images can influence Whites’ opinions, and political preferences and votes.”¹ A decade after these words were penned, and with Barack Obama occupying the White House, does racism in the news continue to structure opinions about nonwhite people? Contemporary research answers this question with a resounding “yes,”² but while we know a great deal about the effects of such racism on racial...

When it comes to race and politics, there is a familiar theatrical dance. Since the political realignment of the 1960s, Democrats have charged Republicans with trying to suppress the voting blocs of blacks, given their decidedly Democratic leaning. In response, Republicans vigorously deny such actions and decry the accusations as an underhanded play of the “race card”—exploiting progressive or antiracist attitudes by accusing others of racism. And so the finger pointing generally goes.¹

The drama unraveled in May of 2012 when the former Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer unloaded a 630-page deposition in which he outlined a systematic...

In 1985, the national Democratic Party backed a series of focus groups to ascertain why working-class whites had abandoned their traditional support for the party. Pollster Stanley Greenberg attributed politicized white flight to dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party’s increasing association with black voters. These defectors expressed an intense distaste for issues salient to black voters and even for black voters themselves. Whites’ racial animus influenced much of their thinking about, and attitudes toward, government and political issues. Blacks became an easy scapegoat for what whites perceived to be wrong in their lives; blacks were a “serious obstacle to their personal...

We have attempted to demonstrate that for some decades the political Right has harbored an aversion toward, fear of, and dislike concerning nonwhites—particularly African Americans. Such animus has become nowhere more evident than in the rising right-wing racial angst since the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States. As we noted in chapter 5, for those on the Right who harbor some racial bias against President Obama, that bias is likely to reside outside of their conscious awareness. Nonetheless, despite the fact that those biases may be unconscious, they are quite consequential. In...

On the evening of November 6, 2012, the presidential election results underscored what pollsters had projected, a victory for President Barack Obama. For those from the left to the middle-right of the political spectrum, these results were unsurprising. In the weeks leading up to the election, despite the small gain that Mitt Romney achieved following President Obama’s poor debate performance on October 3, most nonpartisan polls had President Obama leading anywhere from three to six percentage points for the popular vote and having a lock in the Electoral College. In the end, the only swing states that went for Romney...