Just posted on The Spectator World, David Garrow has a review of Claude Clegg's The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama. Here is a sample:
What did change over the course of Obama’s presidency, and indeed within Obama himself, was a conscious appreciation of just how great a role his visible racial identity played in defining Americans’ reactions to him. In July 2009, after only eight months in office, Obama offhandedly commented on the unwarranted detention of his friend Henry Louis Gates by observing that the arresting officer had acted “stupidly.” His approval rating among white polling respondents dropped measurably and never again rose above 50 percent. That led to a pronounced presidential reluctance to address racial questions that endured until well after his 2012 reelection victory.
In late April 2015, following the death of Freddie Gray in a Baltimore police van, Obama exhibited his greatest “candor, earnestness, [and] exasperation” about racial injustice when he complained that “we just don’t pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped.” To Clegg, this was “a newly revealed President Obama,” and one who eight months later, in a December 2015 interview with National Public Radio, went a good bit further in commenting that “the specific virulence of some of the opposition directed towards me…may be explained by the particulars of who I am.”
The review is not paywalled. You can read it here.
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