Not Black-Alone: The 2008 Presidential Election and Racial Self-Identification among African Americans

This paper estimates a reduced form racial identity equation for a sample of African American survey respondents. The change in a state’s fraction of white votes for Obama in 2008 relative to Kerry in 2004 provides an empirical proxy for a change in white antagonism toward African Americans. Using Current Population Survey data from 2003 to 2013, this paper finds that there is a positive and statistically significant Obama-effect on African American self-identification as mixed-race rather than as black-alone.