Race and the Bully Pulpit: The U.S. Presidency and the Quest of Equality in America

Abstract

In calling for articles for this special issue we sought to feature the institution of the US presidency and its implications for racial and ethnic politics in the United States. It was our sense that the race, ethnicity, and politics (REP) literature would benefit from such an emphasis by increasing and complementing the modest amount of extant research on the presidency within the subfield. At the time, bringing in racial dimensions would enrich the presidency research. While presidency scholars have often used case studies about issues racial and ethnic politics to develop theories about the functioning of the institution (see, for example, Graham, 1990; Milkis et al., 2013; Tichenor, 2016), presidential studies writ large has been slow to adopt core theoretical perspectives from the REP subfield. Similarly, the insights from the rich tradition of research on the US presidency propagated by pioneering scholars of color—like Barnett (1983), Walters (1988), and Walton (1985) has been largely unrecognized and underappreciated. Since behaviorism emerged as the dominant approach to the study of racial and ethnic politics in the 1970s. The election of Barrack Hussain Obama as the 44th president in 2008 generated a resurgent interest in the presidency and the role that the institution plays in racial and ethnic politics with the REP subfield (Tesler and Sears 2010; Sanchez et al., 2012; Smith, 2013; Price, 2016; Tillery, 2019). Our goal with this volume is to support this burgeoning movement. To that end, we have sought to prompt, promote, and to provide critical assessment of the extent and the ways in which “presidential-related” activities—including presidents, presidential administrations, policies, as well as election processes— acknowledge, engage, frame, or conceptualize ideas, and emphasize (or ignore) social factors, public policies, as structured by factors relevant to race and racial equality (or inequality) in US politics. Our goal is to spur the growth of presidential research in the REP subfield to rival the rich traditions that the field maintains in Congressional studies (Minta, 2011; Wallace, 2014; Tate 2018) and State and Local politics (Browning et al., 1986; Grimshaw, 1995; Hero 1998). The six articles that comprise this special issue have risen to the challenge of our call. They fall roughly into three very common trajectories of research on the US