Barack Obama is an American lawyer and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009–2017. He was the first Black person elected to the office. While his campaign messaging of hope and resilience won over many voters who were frightened and demoralized by a terrible financial crisis, his election resulted in many members of the United States’ dominant caste trying to undermine Obama’s presidency with racist smear campaigns. At the same time, many people declared that his very ascendance to the presidency marked the beginning of a “post-racial” society where neither race nor caste defined what a person could achieve in life. Yet Wilkerson believes that such claims ignored the dominant caste’s anger that a Black man was president.
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Barack Obama Character Timeline in Caste
The timeline below shows where the character Barack Obama appears in Caste. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter Eleven: Dominant Group Status Threat and the Precarity of the Highest Rung
...white people continue to perceive any erosion to that system as a threat. When Barack Obama instituted the Affordable Care Act, one white taxi suffering from liver problems driver told a...
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Chapter Twenty-Five: A Change in the Script
The election of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, represented the greatest departure from the...
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...in the land was a “nightmare” that would need to be resisted and remedied. Throughout Obama’s presidency, the opposition party obstructed his proposals and harassed him in Congress. Jan Brewer, Arizona’s...
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...Tea Party movement vowed to “take [their] country back,” while the birther movement claimed that Obama was a foreign national who hadn’t been born in the United States. Republicans purged voter...
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In spite of the roadblocks in his way, Obama managed to push through meaningful legislation on healthcare, climate change, clean energy, and more. But...
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