gains.
Traditionally, homeownership has been a measure of economic well-being, and home equity is a major source of collateral for people seeking bank loans to start a business. Aside from the financial benefits, studies have shown that the children of homeowners tend to perform better in school and have fewer behavioral problems—outcomes of particular relevance to the disproportionate number of black communities where school completion rates are low and crime rates are high.
Despite this grim economic picture, blacks backed Obama in the third year of his presidency almost as strongly as they had on Election Day. Historically speaking, it fit a pattern. Between 1980 and 2004 black support for the Democratic presidential candidate ranged between 83 and 90 percent. Yet Barack Obama managed to squeeze even more out of this voting bloc. He won 95 percent of the black vote in 2008, a year that also saw a record percentage of eligible black voters turn out to elect the nation’s first black president. The surge was driven mostly by black women and younger voters; white voter turnout in 2008 actually fell from what it had been four years earlier. And while black support for Obama had declined slightly by the fall of 2011, it seemed unlikely that black America would be abandoning the president in significant numbers anytime soon. According to Gallup, Obama’s approval rating among blacks had dipped from an average of 92 percent in 2009 to 86 percent in mid-2011. Separate polling by Pew showed that Obama’s support among blacks remained essentially unchanged at 90 percent over the same period.
If anything, these polls were underestimating black support for the president. In 2012, black turnout would increase from 2008 and 93 percent would pull the lever for Obama, notwithstanding clear evidence that blacks had lost ground on his watch. When Obama took office in January 2009, unemployment was 12.7 percent for blacks and 7.1 percent for whites. On Election Day in November 2012 it was 14.3 percent for blacks and 7 percent for whites, which meant that the black-white unemployment gap had not only persisted, but widened, during Obama’s first term.
It could be that blacks, like so many others who supported his reelection in 2012, were cutting the president slack because the economy was already in bad shape when Obama took office. As one black voter put it to a reporter in August 2011, “No president, not Bush, not Obama, could turn the mess that we are in around in four years.” But in the past, the black approval rating of a president had tended to correlate with the jobless rate. Yet black unemployment was lower under George W. Bush than it had been at any point during the Obama administration. In addition, the black-white income disparity that widened under Obama actually narrowed in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, even though Reagan also inherited a weak economy from his predecessor. The Great Recession that began under George W. Bush in December 2007 had officially ended in June 2009, six months after Obama took office.
Economic historians, citing one hundred and fifty years of U.S. business cycles, generally agree that the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery. Not so under Obama, and not so especially for blacks. A report released by two former Census Bureau officials in August 2013 found that since the end of the recession, median household incomes had fallen 3.6 percent for whites and 10.9 percent for blacks.1 Which means that even when controlling for the effects of the economic slowdown that Obama inherited, under his presidency blacks have been worse off both in absolute terms and relative to whites. When Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked black talk-show host Tavis Smiley in October of 2013 if black Americans were “better off five years into the Obama presidency,” Smiley responded: “Let me answer your question very forthrightly: No, they are not. The data is going to indicate, sadly, that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.”2 Blacks seemed to disagree. According to Gallup, Obama’s job-approval rating among blacks was 85 percent (versus just 43 percent among all groups) when Smiley made those remarks.
Broad racial solidarity is another possible explanation for why blacks have remained so bullish on Obama despite his economic record. A black member of Congress told political scientist Carol Swain that “one of the advantages, and disadvantages, of representing blacks is their shameless loyalty . . . You can almost get away with raping babies and be forgiven. You don’t have any vigilance about your performance.”3
The political left, which has long embraced identity politics, encourages racial and ethnic loyalty. It is manifest in liberal support for multiculturalism, hate-crime laws, racially gerrymandered voting districts, affirmative-action quotas, and other policies. “Stick together, black people,” says popular black radio host Tom Joyner, an Obama booster. “No matter what policies he pursues, the president’s racialized embodiment stands as a symbol of triumphant black achievement,” asserts MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry.4 Black politicians have long played off of the notion that blacks owe allegiance to “their own.” Some of the group’s most vicious insults—“Uncle Tom,” “Oreo,” “sellout”—are reserved for those deemed race traitors. Supporting Obama regardless of his job performance is therefore seen by many blacks as not only the right thing to do but the “black” thing to do.
The administration itself has stoked this sentiment in hopes of maintaining strong black support. It has pushed to loosen “racist” drug-sentencing laws. It has sued employers who use criminal background checks to screen job applicants. It has unleashed federal housing officials on white suburban residential communities that it considered insufficiently integrated. The goal is to sustain goodwill with the civil rights establishment and black voters, even if these measures are more symbolic than substantive. Black incarceration rates are not driven by drug laws; empirical research shows that employers who check criminal histories are more likely to hire blacks; and polls have long shown that most black people have no interest in living in mostly white neighborhoods. Yet these kinds of measures are used to foster an “us-versus-them” mentality among blacks and then exploit such thinking for partisan political gain.
Liberals like to complain that, the twice-elected President Obama notwithstanding, we are not a “post-racial” society. The reality is that they wouldn’t have it any other way. Race consciousness helps cohere the political left, and black liberalism’s main agenda is keeping race front and center in our national conversations. That’s why, for example, much more common black-on-black crimes take a back seat to much less common white-on-black crimes. The last thing that organizations like the NAACP want is for America to get “beyond” race. In their view, racial discrimination in one form or another remains a significant barrier to black progress, and government action is the best solution.
The White House and its allies played the race card in earnest after the president kicked off his reelection campaign in 2011. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, in speech after speech, claimed that photo-ID voting requirements hurt minorities, even though such requirements are favored by a large majority of all voters, regardless of race.5 “Are we willing to allow this era—our era—to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise was cut short?” said Holder. “Call on all political parties . . . to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes,” he added. “Keep urging policymakers at every level to reevaluate our election systems—and to reform them in ways that encourage, not limit, participation.”6
Ben Jealous, then head of the NAACP, pressured the Obama administration to oppose these voter ID laws. He told NPR that these requirements have nothing to do with ballot integrity, as proponents insist, and are akin to Reconstruction-era poll taxes. “You look historically, you look presently, and what you see is that when our democracy expands, somebody turns around and tries to contract it,” said Jealous. “You saw it after the Civil War. You see it now after the election of the first black president.”7
Voter ID laws preceded Barack Obama’s 2008 election, and in places like Georgia and Indiana minority turnout increased after the laws were passed. A 2007 study by the Heritage Foundation concluded that “in general, respondents in photo identification and non-photo identification states are just as likely to report voting compared to respondents from states that only required voters to state their name.”8 The findings applied to white, black, and Latino voters alike. The spectacle of a black president’s black attorney general pretending that the black