Communication Monographs
Volume 78, Issue 4 (2011)
pages 535-556
DOI: 10.1080/03637751.2011.618140
Christopher B. Brown, Assistant Professor of Communications
Minnesota State University, Mankato
This study examined responses on the potential impact of Barack Obama’s presidency from 16 semi-structured interviews with White males in leadership positions in various organizations across the United States. While numerous studies examine the circulating racial discourses on Obama, few studies explore how he is represented in first-hand accounts from those in the public, specifically from White-male elites. This study examined interview discourses from White-male elites to reveal how they imagine race through Obama. In positioning Obama among the pantheon of great-man leaders, this study showed how dominant racial ideologies get legitimatized and reworked when members of the dominant group desire to construct racial meanings onto a popular Black leader.
I will never forget the morning after it was announced that Barack Obama would become the first African-American President of the United States. That morning, I got onto the bus and sat near a few people who were discussing the election results. As usual, I was the only African American on the bus; after all, the city of Albuquerque has a minuscule Black population. As I sat down, a Caucasian man, who was engaged in the conversation with two other passengers, immediately turned to me and congratulated me on the election. I looked at him quizzically, but replied, “I appreciate it.” At that point another man, apparently Latino, turned to me and said, “See brother, you don’t have much to worry about anymore.” I replied ambivalently, “I guess everything is all good now!” He ardently insisted, “Yeah brother, there are going to be a few changes; don’t you think so?” I shrugged and sheepishly replied, “I guess it looks that way.” The night of the announcement, I too felt proud, but I doubted that Obama’s election would extract the systematic and oppressive circumstances of a racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist society. Sensing that I was not sharing their enthusiasm, the passengers turned away from me and continued with their discussion.
During this time, I was conducting interviews with White males in leadership positions in their organizations to understand how they characterize leadership and heroism. In talking about leaders in US history, they all extolled the valor and foresight of the forefathers in creating a vision for what would eventually become the basic virtues of the US democracy. Some even praised the heroic acts of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy for galvanizing movements in circumstances where their viewpoints were considered unpopular in the mainstream. While my initial interest was to understand how these men construct leadership, I was quite surprised to hear how candidly they spoke to the leadership potential of Barack Obama. Like the passengers on the bus, these men embraced Obama as someone with the potential to alter the course of history, because he represented a healthy vision of future race relations in the United States. It is at this point that I began to ponder how the intersection of my racial and gender identity with that of the bus riders and these leaders gave rise to reflections verifying that racism has little to do with the politics of race in the United States.
The present study examines how and why race enters into the discussion of masculinized leadership when discourses of racial transcendence are appropriated by White-male elites in a cross-race interview context. Specifically, I analyze the rhetorical tactics (see Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) that these White-male elites employ when positioning Obama among the pantheon of great men in history. In this essay, I defined White-male elites as those who self-identified as White; who work in high profile positions such as chief executive officer, president, or partner in law firm; and who are US citizens. Unlike most people of color and White women, White-male elites fit the description of people who occupy spaces in which they can reside in various privileged locations: White, male, nominally heterosexual, affluent relative to economic status, and privileged relative to educational status. Scholarship rarely documents White-male elites’ constructions of race (though see Feagin & O’Brien, 2003). In fact, scholarly research on race and communication provides considerably more attention to the views of ordinary White people like college students (Bonilla-Silva & Forman, 2000; Jackson & Crawley, 2003; Jackson & Heckman, 2002; Martin, Krizek, Nakayama, & Bradford, 1996; Moon, 1999). In that regard, I contend that communication scholars must pay close attention to White-male elite expressions on race and ethnicity, given the relative power and privilege that comes with their linguistic and rhetorical styles, and given that institutional spaces are organized around their cultural repertories.
In commenting on studies of race and communication, Allen (2007) asserted that communication theorists often “neglect to delve into race in critical, substantive ways” (p. 259). I heed Allen’s concern and show how ideological discourses of race manifest in White-male elites’ constructions of Obama. This requires considering the implications for valorizing discourses of great-man leadership through discursive constructions of Obama. As Jennings (1960) and Wrightsman (1977) have noted in their critique of the great-man theory, a sudden act by a great man could alter the fate of the nation as great men maintain the appropriate traits for a particular point in history. It is my contention that these White-male elites embrace Obama as a great man leader to suggest haphazardly that it is better to speak of racism in the past tense. As we will see, critical work on race not only examines racial discourse and its manifestations, but also investigates its imaginative (or ideological) dimensions (Leonardo, 2005) how these White-male elites imagine race through Obama to suit their own ideological purposes…
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