Is Neutral the New Black?: Advancing Black Interests Under the First Black Presidents
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2014
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Haverford College. Department of Political Science
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eng
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Abstract
Despite recent affirmations of a post-racial society, race persists as the third rail of American politics. Thus, the unspoken consensus is that politicians and policies must be cast in race-neutral terms to be politically viable. This state of affairs begs the question at the heart of my research: what is the most effective means of advancing race-specific interests in a race-neutral political climate? I formulate a hypothesis that captures the negative cause-and-effect relationship between the degree to which politicians run a race-neutral campaign and the extent to which advancing race-specific interests is politically possible for them once in office. I submit that the more politicians brand themselves as race-neutral during their campaigns, the less able they are to address black interests in their governing capacity. My methodology for testing this hypothesis involves a case study of Presidents Barack Obama and William Jefferson Clinton. The findings of this analysis illuminate how the Clinton and Obama administrations were similar and different in their approach to governance and advancing black interests, and offer reasons why. Both Clinton and Obama demonstrate a preference for race-neutrality in the way they chose to run their campaigns, but Clinton's electoral strategy reflects his willingness to employ race aggressively and opportunistically to curry favor with whites, while Obama addresses race only when it threatens his candidacy. During their presidencies, Clinton and Obama continue to display an ostensible preference for race-neutrality, but for different reasons. Clinton again uses race to reinforce his electoral coalition. His race-neutral policies net him a political gain to the detriment of blacks, while Obama's policies are truly race-neutral. In race-specific policymaking, Clinton is a master of symbolic politics. Yet Obama's race-specific policies build upon and exceed those of Clinton, growing bolder and more public in his second term. Both administrations show how the most impactful efforts to advance black interests are often race-specific policies kept out-of-sight to mitigate the threat of political scrutiny. In this area, Obama has excelled. This research focuses on a relatively unstudied topic within race politics: whether race-neutral black politicians produce different policy outcomes than race-neutral white ones. The hope is that it provides a more nuanced understanding of what blacks can expect from white and post-racial black politicians given the constraints on each.