If support for Obama was, in part, due to his seeming “different” from other black men, we could even say that racism, albeit of a 2.0 variety, was instrumental in helping him attract support from white voters. Finally, let us recall that Barack Obama downplayed issues of race within his campaign, rarely if ever spoke to concerns about racial inequity, and went out of his way to distance himself from his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, so as to curry favor with white voters who found Wright’s condemnations of U.S. foreign policy and our history of racism troubling.
