The effect of Obama saliency on individual-level racial bias: Silver bullet or smokescreen?

a r t i c l e i n f o President Obama's election has been construed as a potentially positive force for intergroup relations, but this issue has not been previously addressed experimentally. In experiment 1, conducted 4–5 months after the election, White participants were primed with either President Obama or nature before completing a variety of race-related measures. Results indicated that priming Obama did not influence implicit racial bias or internal motivation to control prejudice. However, consistent with exemplar and symbolic racism theories, participants primed with President Obama expressed greater agreement with the tenets of symbolic racism and were more reluctant to accept the possibility that they personally harbored subtle racial bias. Experiment 2, conducted 21 months after the election, replicated the Obama effects from experiment 1 and showed that priming another Black exemplar (Oprah) also increased symbolic racism. Results suggest that highly successful Black exemplars currently serve as a smokescreen for symbolic and subtle racial biases. Since the election of President Obama, people have debated questions that begged to be asked when the first Black man became president of the United States. What does this mean for race relations in the United States? Will President Obama's historic achievement encourage positive intergroup attitudes? Many people have expressed hope that his presidency would spur positive intergroup relations (Newport, 2008). However, questions with a different focus have also surfaced. For example, what does Mr. Obama's election imply about current levels of racism in the United States? Is America now beyond racism, and is President Obama an emblem of our newfound post-racialism? In the event that President Obama triggers this line of thought, attitudes and motivations toward Black people may take a turn for the negative. The present research investigated what kinds of race-relevant attitudinal and motivational effects follow from making President Obama salient to Whites. Although prior research has investigated levels of implicit racial bias (Plant et al. in relation to Mr. Obama's election, none of this research included experimental manipulations (leaving causal conclusions ambiguous), and all were conducted around election time. Our aim was to provide an experimental test of the effects of " Obama saliency " across a broad range of individual-level racial measures. In addition, whereas our first experiment (conducted 4–5 months post-election) focused on the effects of priming President Obama only, the second experiment (conducted 21 months post-election) also examined the effects of priming another highly …