Barack Obama, who served as the 44th President of the United States, has elicited a number of public perceptions regarding his personality and background. As the first African-American President of the United States, his race and culture played a prominent role, both positively and negatively.
His relative youth (47 when elected) has alternately resulted in his being praised for his freshness and criticized for his inexperience. His temperament and demeanor have been praised for perceived unflappability, but criticized for a perception of lacking emotional attachment.
Origins and identity
Race and culture
Obama, who is biracial, self-identifies as African-American despite being black Kenyan and white American. His father was a black Kenyan from the Luo ethnic group and his mother was white of European descent, mainly of English lineage. Obama, who grew to adulthood after the Civil Rights Movement, had early life experiences that differed from most African American politicians who launched their careers in the 1960s through participation in that movement. He was brought up in Honolulu, Hawaii, lived in Jakarta, Indonesia as a young child, and received a private prep school and Ivy League education.
In a March 2007 op-ed, African-American film critic David Ehrenstein of the Los Angeles Times said that Obama was an early popular contender for the presidency not because of his political record, but because whites viewed him as a kind of "comic-book superhero", who would selflessly solve white people's problems. Black commentators such as Stanley Crouch of the New York Daily News expressed mixed feelings about his racial identity, while others like Laura Washington (Chicago Sun-Times), Gary Younge (The Nation), and Clarence Page (Houston Chronicle) reported a general ambivalence among the black community about his authenticity as an African-American.
In January 2007, The End of Blackness author Debra Dickerson warned against drawing favorable cultural implications from Obama's political rise: "Lumping us all together", Dickerson claimed it, "erases the significance of slavery and continuing racism while giving the appearance of progress". On the liberal website Salon Debra wrote, "African-American, in our political and social vocabulary, means those descended from West African slaves, because Obama is not a descendant of West Africans brought involuntarily to the United States as slaves, he is not African-American," although his father is from Africa. Stanley Crouch wrote in the New York Daily News, "Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan," in a column entitled "What Obama Isn't: Black Like Me".
Addressing the issue of whether he was "black enough," Obama told an August 2007 meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists that the debate was not about his physical appearance or his record on issues of concern to black voters. Obama said, "we're still locked in this notion that if you appeal to white folks then there must be something wrong."
After a McCain advertisement accused Obama of being "just a celebrity like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton," Obama asserted that McCain and other Republicans would try to scare voters because he (Obama) "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." The Obama campaign initially denied that the comment was on race, but campaign strategist David Axelrod later conceded that it was.
Though the media discussed his racial and ethnic heritage, a 2008 post-election poll by FactCheck.org found that about 22% of Americans still incorrectly believed that Obama is half Arab, possibly due to the influence of misleading blogs and the conflation of the religious heritage of his Muslim Kenyan father with being of the Arab race.
In 2010, when filling out his form for the 2010 United States Census, Obama self-identified as African American.
Racism towards Obama
Obama's election was also met with hostile reactions connected to his race, birthplace, and religion, and as president, he faced numerous taunts, racist remarks and generally racialized criticisms by some conservative pundits. Some also falsely claimed that Obama practiced Islam – at a time when anti-Muslim sentiments were prevalent in the United States – with a 2015 CNN poll finding that 29% of Americans believed Obama to be a Muslim.