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African Americans and Obama’s Domestic Policy Agenda: A Closer Look at Deracialization, the Federal Stimulus Bill, and the Affordable Care Act

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Polity

Abstract

To assess President Obama's deracialized agenda-setting strategy, this article draws from two Gallup Organization polls and a 2010 survey of political behaviors and racial attitudes by the University of Arkansas Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society and the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute. We extend the debate about deracialization by focusing on two of Obama's most important policy initiatives: the American Recovery and Reinvestment (ARRA) and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also referred to as the Affordable Care Act). The debates over ARRA and the Affordable Care Act placed Obama in an unenviable position. The study will show that many African Americans supported these policies despite Obama's use of deracialized rhetoric. This support was not necessarily due to blind faith or racial loyalty. African Americans believed these laws would improve their own vulnerable situations and reinforce the federal government's commitment to remedying racial inequities.

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Notes

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  40. The coding for these measures are: race (black=reference category, white=2, other=3), gender (male=1, female=0), marital status (married=1, not married=0), region (South=reference category, Midwest=2, East=3, West=4), school-aged children (coded “1” if the respondent has school-aged children), and church attendance (coded as “1” for “frequent church attendance”); work status (employed full-time=reference category, part-time=2, unemployed/not employed=3), education (measured on a 6-point scale from the least educated to those with graduate education), and income (measured as a continuous variable); age is also a continuous variable measured from the youngest to the oldest respondents.

  41. Michael Henderson and D. Sunshine Hillygus, “The Dynamics of Health Care Opinion, 2008–2010: Partisanship, Self-Interest, and Racial Resentment,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy & Law 36 (December 2011): 953; Michael Tesler and David O. Sears, Obama's Race: The 2008 Election and Dream of a Post-Racial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 156.

  42. Shayla Nunnally, Trust in Black America: Race, Discrimination and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 215.

  43. Evelyn Simien, Black Feminist Voices in Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).

  44. Melanye T. Price, Breaking Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 50.

  45. Nunnally, Trust in Black America, 110–17.

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  47. William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

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Lewis, A., Dowe, P. & Franklin, S. African Americans and Obama’s Domestic Policy Agenda: A Closer Look at Deracialization, the Federal Stimulus Bill, and the Affordable Care Act. Polity 45, 127–152 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2012.25

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