When he gave the commencement address recently at Howard University, President Obama spoke about race and the interests of African Americans in the United States. While exhorting students to “be confident in your blackness,” Obama also challenged them to “question the world as it is” and “stand up for those African Americans who haven’t been so lucky [as you are].”
The address received broad news coverage, in no small part because it went against the conventional wisdom that, throughout his presidency, Obama has largely declined to speak to the interests of black Americans. Indeed, black activists, public intellectuals and political scientists have taken Obama to task for ignoring African American concerns to maintain his standing among white voters.
But is this conventional wisdom true? No. Our investigation of presidential rhetoric shows that Obama has paid more attention to black interests than any other president since Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
Here’s how we examined this
In our paper recently published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, we examined presidential attention to black interests between 1969 and 2012. Our study, thus, covered Obama’s first term in office — the very period in which, given the need to reach out to white voters in order to win reelection, we might expect Obama to be most likely to ignore the concerns of African Americans.
To study presidential attention to the interests of African Americans, we first defined “black interests.” While it’s common to define black interests as relating only to civil rights or social welfare spending, we argue that this assumes knowledge of black interests without investigation and denies agency to African Americans themselves. In our view, “black interests” should be defined as whatever African Americans believe to be most important — whether these include civil rights and poverty or not.
Step 1: Identify black interests
Thus, to identify “black interests,” we consulted annual Gallup polls dating to the late 1960s that include a question asking what Americans perceived to be the “most important problems facing the country today.” Significantly, these questions were open-ended, allowing respondents to construct their own understandings of their interests. We coded both African American and white responses, enabling comparison of responses by race.
We coded each unique response to the question under one of 10 broad issue categories, including economic inequality and civil rights, social welfare issues, macro-economic issues and problems, pocketbook economic issues and problems, and six additional categories. Economic issues were separated into “macro” and “pocketbook” level categories to differentiate between issues such as inflation and unemployment. We grouped civil rights and economic inequality together because the traditional civil rights agenda has always incorporated demands for economic, social and political equality. The “civil rights” category included both African American civil rights concerns and issues prioritized by the women’s, Latino and LGBT movements.
The figure below shows the number of years each issue was mentioned among the top three by blacks and whites respectively between 1968 and 2012.
In this figure, the x-axis measures the number of years the issue was in respondents’ top three concerns. . The y-axis is “Issues,” with respondents divided into black and white. Source: Data from Gallup polls, 1969-2012. Figure: Compiled by Rhodes, Nteta, and Tarsi.
Strikingly, while social welfare (mentioned in 34 separate years) and inequality/civil rights (17 years) were often in the top three concerns for black respondents, so, too, were other issues. Notably, pocketbook economic issues made the top three list in 33 years, and macro-economic issues in 21 years. National security issues were in the top three in eight years. In short, African American respondents identified a diverse array of topics as among the “most important facing the country.”
That’s important. Blacks and whites tend to have very different views on civil rights and social welfare matters, with blacks generally more liberal. Thus, if African Americans did focus exclusively on these issues, we might expect presidents (including Obama) to ignore black interests. But if blacks identify a much broader array of issues as “most important,” that greatly increases the likelihood that presidents (including Obama) might represent black interests.
Step 2: Assess whether presidents addressed those concerns in those years
Next, we assessed presidential attention to each of our 10 topic areas. We did this by analyzing how often they were mentioned in “major” presidential speeches, defined as televised presidential addresses to a national audience. We looked at major presidential addresses between 1969 and 2012, which covers the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama (first term only).
To do so, we developed dictionaries of keywords for the 10 topic areas, drawing on words that were actually used in the major presidential addresses included in the study. We used an open-source dictionary-based quantitative content analysis program to estimate presidential attention to each of the topic areas, with attention measured as the proportion of total words in a given year’s worth of major addresses contained in the dictionary related to each category.
We then examined whether and to what extent the issues deemed most important by black and white Americans received the most attention in the presidential addresses. In our study, we employed a variety of measures to assess presidential attention.
Step 3: Compare and contrast each year’s presidential mentions of an issue with black and white interests in that issue during that year
In all of our analyses, the presidential measure for each year was matched with the previous year’s Gallup data to ensure that we were measuring presidents’ responsiveness to public priorities, not presidents setting the agenda — to which the public responded.
We measured how often the single most important policy issue for black and white respondents appeared among the president’s top three presidential priorities. We also measured how often the single-most-important issue identified by blacks and whites, respectively, was also presidents’ single-most-discussed priority.
The most intuitive measure here is the degree of “overlap” — that is, the degree to which presidents’ top three priorities were the same as the top three of blacks and whites. For example, if the top three policy priorities of black Americans in a given year were also the three issues given most attention by the president in the following year, the overlap score would be three. (Our measure of “overlap” did not require blacks/whites and presidents to rank these priorities in the same order).
The figure below shows the average overlap between presidential priorities and those of blacks and whites, respectively, for each presidential administration between Nixon and Obama. For each president, the summary score is simply the mean over all the years of the president’s tenure in office (or, in Obama’s case, his first term in office).
Here, the x-axis measures average overlap between presidents’ addresses and citizens’ concerns. The y-axis shows this data by presidents. Figure compiled by Rhodes, Nteta, and Tarsi.
Several conclusions are apparent. First, as a general matter, presidents since LBJ’s Great Society haven’t paid much attention to African American interests. Rather, they’ve focused on whites’ top concerns.
Obama departs from this dramatically. He has given a great deal of attention to the issues blacks consider most important — much more attention than any other post-Great Society president. In fact, and remarkably, our estimates suggest that Obama has given more attention to African Americans’ priorities than to whites’.
Which isn’t to say that Obama has ignored white interests. On the contrary, he has also paid more attention to the interests of white Americans than has any other post-Great Society president.
Obama stands out as the president who most represented both black and white interests.
In the end, our research suggests that the conventional wisdom — that Obama has largely ignored black interests — is misleading. Once we consider the issues that black Americans actually consider important, we find that Obama has taken his own advice and represented “those African Americans who haven’t been so lucky.”
Jesse H. Rhodes is an associate professor in the department of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Find him on Twitter @JesseRhodesPS.
Tatishe M. Nteta is an associate professor in the department of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Melinda R. Tarsi is an assistant professor in the department of political science at Bridgewater State University.
