National Opinions

Poll on president reflects how race continues to shape perception

You'd think it would be a simple question: How popular is President Barack Obama?

And you'd think it would have a simple answer: According to a recent Gallup poll, the president's approval rating stands at 49 percent, the first time it's slipped to less than half. Of course, Obama -- you may have heard this somewhere -- is our first African-American president, and it is a reliable truism that when race enters the picture, "simple" leaves it.




We are not just arguing tomato/to-mah-to here. No, the point is that the headline Prince didn't use, like the dueling approval ratings themselves, testifies that race retains its power to shape -- and misshape -- perception.

Granted, that will be an obvious, even shopworn, observation to anyone with the slightest experience in this all-American conundrum. But it assumes added urgency when you consider that this perceptual gap isn't measuring the impact of race on how we view this year's trial of the century, but rather an actual president of the United States and by extension, the state of the union.



Again, we're talking about a president -- and there is a lot of space between 39 percent and 91 percent. But then Obama has long been the unwitting catalyst for a raucous national discussion on the meaning and impact of race. Because he exists -- and really, where race is concerned, he's done little more than that -- we find this discussion overtaking us everywhere from our newspapers to our televisions to our barber chairs.


The man made history, and that history comes with a burden. More even than most presidents, he becomes a symbol, a lightning rod, a focal point -- not simply for arguments over the economy, the wars, and health care, but for all our tangled, contradictory and unresolved confusions and aspirations of race.

This is what we see quantified in that Gallup poll. The difference in perception it documents serves as a reminder that for two people to see a thing in the same way, it helps to be standing in the same place looking in the same direction. And we black, white and brown Americans are not there yet.

