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OTHER, UPPITY OBAMA

A Content Analysis of Race Appeals in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2012

Maryann Erigha  and
Camille Z. Charles
Maryann Erigha*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
Camille Z. Charles
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
*
*Maryann Erigha, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104. E-mail: merigha@sas.upenn.edu
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Abstract

Until 2008, only White candidates represented either of the two major parties as presidential nominees. Hence, little is known about how race appeals are framed by or against non-White presidential candidates. Barack Obama's election as the Democratic Party nominee allows us to investigate this issue. In this article, we conduct a content analysis of over 160 advertisements from the 2008 U.S. presidential election to examine how race appeals were framed (or countered) by each campaign. We find that the Republican campaign employed implicit racial appeals that played upon stereotypes of non-Whites as “un-American” and “other” and Blacks as “dangerous,” “criminal,” “incompetent,” and “uppity.” In contrast, the Democratic campaign de-emphasized race, portrayed “other” as positive, reinforced American identity, and spoke out against negative advertisements.

Keywords

Barack ObamaJohn McCainPresidential ElectionsRace AppealsPolitical AdvertisementsPrimingStereotypesSubliminal Messages
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Fall 2012 , pp. 439 - 456
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2012

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Footnotes

1

The authors are grateful to Michael X. Delli Carpini and David C. Wilson for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

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