Has Obama Ignored African American Concerns? Nope. Here’s the Evidence.

[two_third padding=”0 15px 0 0px”]Has Obama Ignored African American Concerns? Nope. Here’s the Evidence.

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.

JESSE H. RHODES, TATISHE M. NTETA & MELINDA R. TARSI
JUNE 2016   |   THE WASHINGTON POST

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[/one_third_last][two_third padding=”0 15px 0 0px”][dropcap]While[/dropcap] 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.
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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.

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