Barack Obama’s victory in November 2008 was a historic moment when the themes of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ he had promoted during the campaign came to fruition. His election as the first black US President fitted the conservative narrative of a postracial US society in which race no longer had a significant influence. This thesis argues that Obama’s presidency punctures the illusion of a postracial society by examining a series of real and political controversies around race that occurred during the 2008 presidential campaign and his first term. The controversies selected display various levels of seriousness, reflecting the variety and the nature of racial attacks launched against Obama. The first controversy illustrates how ‘race’ was there from the start as an opportunity for his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton and her husband, former US President Bill Clinton, while the following four controversies are more personalised, having been provoked by Republicans and conservatives around Obama’s relationships with his pastor of twenty years Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his friend Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., his wife Michelle Obama and his father Barack Obama Sr. Close examination of these five attempts to damage Obama politically reveals the extent to which racially- inflected issues and stereotypes prevail in contemporary US society, including pernicious stereotypes which portray African American pastors as radical and divisive, African American men as criminals, African American women as angry, and that harness racial nativism to do so. The analysis of the controversies highlighted here uncovers how Obama’s stance on US race relations developed, and identifies the shifts from his campaign to his presidency and, indeed, to the second term when he made substantial efforts to accelerate overdue reforms in policing and mass incarceration.

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.