How a Black Man Won the Presidency in 2008: the Shifting Meaning of Race in the Political Culture of the Usa Mark James Beachil

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sunderland University Institutional Repository HOW A BLACK MAN WON THE PRESIDENCY IN 2008: THE SHIFTING MEANING OF RACE IN THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF THE USA MARK JAMES BEACHILL A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Sunderland for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2016 1 Abstract The US presidential election of 2008 was considered a milestone for blacks and race in the USA. However, despite the considerable attention given to the election, it has not been placed in historical and political context. In particular, contemporary assumptions about the importance of the symbolism of a black president and about how the election tested the racial outlook of whites pervade the literature. Prior vigorously contested ideas such as equality, discrimination and integration were largely unconsidered during the election and with the Obama victory. This research attempts to bring out why race, considered predominantly through representation and identity, raised considerable energies among the electorate, examining the themes of “hope” and “change”, and the online campaign. To establish exactly what the election was reacting to, the thesis attempts a historical reconstruction of race: first, by working through a critique of realignment theory as the predominant academic view of electoral processes, then through an examination of how whiteness figured as a means to resolve class and related conflicts from the late- nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, and finally examining how whiteness was consolidated through post-war suburbanisation. This reconstruction moves past the idea of race as psychological phenomenon or as a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The thesis then analyses the turnaround on race and why race was posed without reference to equality in 2008 through looking at both the idea of white racial bases and of identity politics. We conclude that the meaning of race in its post- war sense is largely absent in the contemporary USA suggesting that a politics of suburban interests better explains post-civil rights developments than race. We show how the politics of identity, so evident in the election, has been unable to raise issues of equality to address the enormous racial divisions in the USA today. 2 Acknowledgements Thank you to my supervisor Kevin Yuill for his considered advice and for his continued patience in the long waits for anything new. Thank you to my partner Sunmi Lee, who had to live with me during this thesis, always providing the support I needed, including ever enthusiastic readings of the chapters as they emerged. Thanks to Graham Barnfield who looked over a near-complete draft and so brought full circle payback for the rather less expert help I provided for his PhD over twenty years ago in Sheffield. Thank you too to Cheryl Hudson, Andrew Calcutt, and Phil Hammond who gave useful feedback on drafts of various chapters. And thanks to my parents Jim and Barbara Beachill and my brother Darren for being so supportive. 3 Contents Introduction 5 PART I EXAMINING THE 2008 ELECTION 1. An Exceptional Election 59 2. A New Hope? 76 3. Online Activism and the Revival of Politics 98 PART II UNDERSTANDING RACE HISTORICALLY 4. Theories of Electoral Change 133 5. Negotiating Whiteness 168 6. Racial Separation 206 PART III THE SHIFTING MEANING OF RACE 7. Testing the White Electorate 239 8. Identity Politics 270 9. Changing Whiteness 299 Conclusion 331 Bibliography Books and Journal Articles 354 Newspaper and Online Articles 378 4 Introduction The 2008 US presidential election was seen by many as historic in marking the distance that the USA had moved from its previous racial politics. For the veteran Civil Rights commentator, Manning Marable, to elevate a black American as its chief executive was a stunning reversal of history.”1 In examining this election, the aim of the thesis overall is to understand how this had come about. The main question this thesis sets out to answer is “what role was played by race in the 2008 US presidential election?”. For some authors Obama’s victory seemed to speak for itself: if the nation as a whole could support black leadership then this alone was sufficient to show there was a substantial change to previous racial politics.2 Others stressed that Obama had to gather a huge number of white votes for victory. This led to several commentaries that came with the Obama victory which argued that the USA had moved beyond race, i.e. had become “post-racial”. In this argument, the question being asked in the election was not whether voters supported Obama or McCain for president, but rather were white people ready to accept a black man as political leader: were whites able to cast aside their backward prejudices? Some stressed that Obama, despite his victory, had not received the majority of white votes and that this demonstrated the continuing divisions based on race. Of white voters, 55 per cent cast their ballot for McCain (almost 60 per cent of white men and 53 per cent of white women). However, the more nuanced reading was that Obama was not alone in Democrat candidates failing to gain a majority of white votes. Since 1968 1 Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White, (London: Verso, 2009, 2nd ed.), 297 2 The assumption that Obama’s election was, in itself, momentous seemed to be shared with the Nobel Prize Committee who precipitously gave Obama the Nobel Peace prize in November 2009 – the nominations closed just 11 days after Obama took office. 5 Republicans have won the majority of the white vote. Of the last ten presidential cycles Obama had been more successful than any of the white Democratic candidates – other than Bill Clinton. Clinton, like Obama, gained 43 per cent of the white vote.3 Many took it that race had been so important in the USA that, in its symbolism, the vote for Obama in effect acted as a plebiscite on racial attitudes and that other factors could be ignored. However, the reasons for voting for a candidate are by no means exhausted in an analysis of the racial composition of the vote. Indeed in Chapter 8 this thesis develops the argument that voting choice might be better understood in relation to politics connected to the locations where voters live rather than voters’ racial background and views. In exit polls “Only 9 per cent said that race was an important factor in making their voting decision (and of these voters, 53 percent supported Obama!)”4 Even if voters were “shy” about saying their vote was made because of their views on race, the numbers of votes does not explain what meaning race had come to have. Ultimately the thesis aimed to see the shifting meaning of race in the political culture of the USA and connected with change in US history rather than attempt to divine meaning from the changing voting patterns as seen, for example, in the 2008 election. A historical-political analysis allows us to do three things which cannot be done through adding up the decisions of voters and ascribing a racial approach – or 3 The last Democrat candidate to do better than Obama was Carter with 47 per cent of the white vote in 1976. See Dianne M. Pinderhughes, “Race, the Presidency, and Obama’s First year” in Charles P. Henry, Robert L. Allen and Robert Chrisman (eds.) The Obama Phenomenon: Toward a Multiracial Democracy (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 98. Rickey Hill, “The Race Problematic, The Narrative of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Election of Barack Obama” in Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (eds.), Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 145 4 John Kenneth White “” in “A Transforming Election: How Barack Obama Changed American Politics”, in Crotty, William J. ed. Winning the Presidency 2008. (Boulder, Co., Paradigm, 2009), 191 6 otherwise – to these decisions. First, it enables us to establish origins, i.e. where the ideas behind race and the impetus to establish or to dismantle racial ways of thinking comes from. Second it enables an understanding of change. It is not clear why people might change their views on race based on internal motivations or that somehow these changes are shared, i.e. are made en masse. Rather than assume mass change in racial outlook as a given we can attempt to connect with changed circumstances and political approaches over time i.e. we can engage with the political and historical factors and the contestation that brings change about. Third, we can also point enquiries as to what race meant in given circumstances. Rather than consider the understanding of race as fixed we can look at how the meaning connected with the concept of race changes. Obamamania The starting point for our historical-political engagement is to examine the politics and the discussion in the 2008 election itself. This is done in the first three chapters, in the first part “Examining the 2008 Election”. By analysing the campaign and the arguments put forward there, we can see the particular ways in which race was discussed and understood. In the initial chapters there is an examination of the election overall, an attempt to explain the themes of “hope” and “change”, and an analysis of the online campaign which seemed to be the location of much of the dynamism that the election exhibited. Here the thesis looks specifically at the election for clues as to how a black man became president and what this said about the changing meaning of race in US political culture in a society where blacks have little political power and where a myriad of social statistics showed blacks all too often positioned as second-class citizens.

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