Obama’s skin looks a little different in these GOP campaign ads

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

For some people, identifying themselves as more than one race matters little if Americans tend to put people in either the “Black” or “White” categories. Former President Barack Obama, who has a White mother though he identifies as Black, has described being mistaken for a waiter or parking valet before he was famous.

“I am a White woman who married a Black man and had a Black baby,” said Amanda Lewis, a sociologist who runs the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“That’s the way others see her. That’s the way we think of her,” Lewis said of her daughter. “The opposite doesn’t happen. Instead of trying to make White people more comfortable, we need to embrace the multiracial democracy we’ve become.”

Tim Henderson, “Multiracial Residents Are Changing the Face of the US,” Stateline, May 13, 2022. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2022/05/13/multiracial-residents-are-changing-the-face-of-the-us.

Obama’s skin looks a little different in these GOP campaign ads

Obama’s skin looks a little different in these GOP campaign ads

The Washington Post
2015-12-29

Max Ehrenfreund

A new study shows that negative ads targeting President Obama in 2008 depicted him with very dark skin, and that these images would have appealed to some viewers’ racial biases.

The finding reinforces charges that some Republican politicians seek to win votes by implying support for racist views and ethnic hierarchies, without voicing those prejudices explicitly. The purported tactic is often called “dog-whistle politics” — just as only canines can hear a dog whistle, only prejudiced voters are aware of the racist connotations of a politician’s statement, according to the theory…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Max Ehrenfreund, Solomon Messing, The Washington Post, Washington Post

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2015 at 02:12Z and is filed under Articles, Barack Obama, Communications/Media Studies, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Obama’s skin looks a little different in these GOP campaign ads

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