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A content analysis of over 1-year worth of online news coverage was undertaken to assess the impact of the election of Barack Obama, America's first Black President, on the overall portrayal of Blacks in the news. Specifically, we investigated whether the potential positive coverage of President Obama and his family displaced more stereotypic coverage of Blacks in the news than simply adding to existing stereotypical portrayals. Results indicate that Blacks achieved greater frequency in coverage compared with prior analyses. However, pervasive stereotyping and negative characterizations of Blacks persisted. Explanations for the minimal impact of the Obama family on the overall presentation of Blacks are discussed within the context of trait attribution and media stacking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key question in the study of minority representation is whether descriptive representatives provide superior substantive representation. Neglected in this literature is the distinction between two forms of substantive representation: rhetoric versus policy. We provide a systematic comparison of presidential minority representation along these two dimensions. Barack Obama was the first African American president, yet his substantive representation of African Americans has not been fully evaluated. Using speech and budget data, we find that relative to comparable presidents, Obama offered weaker rhetorical representation, but stronger policy representation, on race and poverty. While we cannot rule out non-racial explanations, Obama's policy proposals are consistent with minority representation. His actions also suggest that descriptive representatives may provide relatively better policy representation but worse rhetorical representation, at least when the constituency is a numerical minority. We thus highlight an understudied tension between rhetoric and policy in theories of minority representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an ever-changing, racially-charged society, topics of race and racism are frequently being broached in schools. However, reaching the desired racial change after engagement in these discussions on race and racism requires concerted intention on the part of educators and stakeholders. While there is no specific formula in moving toward more racially just environments in our schools, educational leaders must acknowledge barriers, such as institutionalized racism, neutrality, and colorblindness, which serve as veils of oppression, in order to keep discourse on race and racism from becoming circular in nature [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much anticipation heralded the 2008 election of President Barack Hussein Obama. From the posters to the Nobel Peace Prize, the wish fulfillment of a nation wracked by racial politics, a victory for hope, democracy for the rest of us. What is surprising now, after the end of his second term as President, is that we were unable to exercise progressive changes in the description of race through this process of having elected the first Black President. In fact, most indications are now that the election of Barack Obama has instead been used as a pretense to consolidate and improve the extraction of resources through the imprisonment, underemployment, and mis-education of African Americans. The years of Obama's presidency will be seen as those that saw the refinement of the mechanisms by which a Black elite could be identified and required to monitor and control or represent this exploitation as democratic, as the best that the society could do, given the paucity of ambition, the lack of intellectual rigor, the difficulty of living as a Black person in the ghettos scattered across the metropolitan US, the plight of those seemingly neglected in the countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The election of Barack Obama as the first African American to be President of the United States was a momentous event. Because the U.S. constituency (including its majority, Whites) elected an individual who defied history and negative stereotypes, pundits concluded that the U.S. had entered a new 'post-racial' era. Indeed, social cognition scientists adopted the 'Obama effect' to classify the beneficial consequences of Obama as a single African-American exemplar on affect, cognition, and behavior, but these effects have been challenged. As we come to the conclusion of Obama's presidency, this special issue revisits the Obama effect. Six empirical articles collectively examine the factors that create the Obama effect in the first place, and the boundary conditions of the Obama effect ameliorating stereotyping and prejudice and benefiting the social cognition of African Americans themselves. Furthermore, each article provides insight into the potential theoretical and practical implications of Obama's legacy for psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New benchmark estimates of Black-White income ratios for 1870, 1900, and 1940 are combined with standard post-World War census data. The resulting time series reveals that the pace of racial income convergence has generally been steady but slow, quickening only during the 1940s and the modern Civil Rights era. I explore the interpretation of the time series with a model of intergenerational transmission of inequality in which racial differences in causal factors that determine income are very large just after the Civil War and which erode slowly across subsequent generations.“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” —W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the presidency of U.S. President Barack Obama as of May 2016. An overview of Obama's leadership is provided who was elected in 2009 as the 44th president and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to encourage him to stop U.S.' involvement in the Afghan and Iraq wars and close the Guantanamo bay detention camp in Cuba. Also discussed are his achievements and failures, foreign policies, and Iraq and Syrian wars that were started by the U.S.' interference.

The article discusses politics and a racial divide in America, and it mentions what the author refers to as white voter backlash against the nation's first black President Barack Obama. Demographic change in the U.S. is addressed, along with the concept of white privilege in the country and the growth of America's non-white population. Voting rights protections in the U.S. are examined, along with a decrease in the nation's white population. Race-related conduct (racialism) is assessed.

Purpose: This study compares filmic and televisual representations of fictional black presidents to white Americans' reactions to the advent of the United States's first African American president. My main goal is to determine if there is convergence between these mediated representations and whites' real-world representations of Barack Obama. I then weigh the evidence for media pundits' speculations that Obama owes his election to positive portrayals of these fictional heads of state. Methodology/approach: The film and television analyses examine each black president's social network, personality, character traits, preparation for office, and leadership ability. I then compare the ideological messages conveyed through these portrayals to the messages implicated in white Americans' discursive and pictorial representations of Barack Obama. Findings: Both filmic and televisual narratives and public discourses and images construct and portray black presidents with stereotypical character traits and abilities. These representations are overwhelmingly negative and provide no support for the argument that there is a cause-effect relationship between filmic and televisual black presidents and Obama's election victory. Research implications: Neither reel nor real-life black presidents can elude the representational quagmire that distorts African Americans' abilities and diversity. Discourses, iconography, narratives, and other representations that define black presidents through negative tropes imply that blacks are incapable of effective leadership. These hegemonic representations seek to delegitimize black presidents and symbolically return them to subordinate statuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, ANES included for the first time-along with standard explicit measures of old-fashioned and symbolic racism-the Affect Misattribution Procedure ( AMP), a relatively new implicit measure of racial attitudes. This article examines the extent to which four different measures of racial prejudice (three explicit and one implicit) predict public opinion during and after the 2008 election, including Americans' views towards several racial policy issues, their evaluations of, and feelings toward, Barack Obama, and their attitudes toward a Black president in general. Oversamples of African American and Latino respondents in the 2008 ANES enable us to broaden our tests of these measures beyond traditional White samples. We find that racial prejudice played an important role for all racial/ethnic groups but that the traditional explicit measures of racism are by far the stronger predictors for all of our dependent variables (compared to the new implicit measure) for both White and Black respondents. Surprisingly, the AMP adds clear explanatory power only to models in the Latino sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on one of the historical events acting as an indicator of social change, the 2008 election and 2012 re-election of, an African American as U.S. President Barack Obama. It discusses religion as a factor in the 1928 and 1960 elections and also 2008 elections reflecting racial stratification change in the nation. It also includes theoretical independent variables generated by counting protestant and other denominations in the country as reported in religious congregations and membership in the U.S.

As America's first black president, Barack Obama's race became a symbolic indicator both abroad and at home. While looked upon as a sign of progress and celebrated overseas, Obama was deemed too foreign, especially by his political opposition here at home. This article chronicles how both points-of-view came into being and argues that despite both side assuming his policies would be different from his predecessor, Obama's policies rather, are a continuance thereof. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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In this article, the author compares between pessimism and realism saying that both are totally different but when it comes to politics, they are synonymous. The author relates both the words with the current state of the society by citing the four-year-old event of election of the first African American President of the U.S. The president had to face failing economy, low employment and criticism of daily worldwide issues which was realistic as well as pessimistic.

The author discusses the incidence of shooting of Michael Brown, an African American teenager, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014, and suggests that this event shattered the delusion of the historic election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the U.S., which was considered the end of this kind of racial tensions in the country. According to him, this instance reveals the precarious position of African Americans in the U.S.