Andra Gillespie boldly ushers the study of executive elected political leadership back into the political science discipline with her analysis of Barack's Obama's governance as president of the United States. In Race and the Obama Administration: Substance, Symbols, and Hope, she examines what Obama did for Black people. Despite the many texts that seek to explore the impact of the Obama presidency, none ask this question as directly as Gillespie. As Smith (Reference Smith1984, 370) remarked, there remains “an obvious deficiency in the literature on Black political participation in the failure to study Black appointed officials as well as elected officials.” Gillespie's embrace of this research question alone reveals the clarity her book offers to readers interested in learning how race was incorporated in the Obama administration's agenda and the extent to which those efforts improved the lived conditions of Black people.

Gillespie's empirical study stands alongside formidable political science scholars whose approach to the study of Black politics sought to reveal how power is used to liberate the Black community. In this book, Gillespie takes a strategic, multimethod approach to measure how Obama and his administration appointees sought to improve Black quality of life while taking into careful consideration the institutional powers and constraints of the presidency that can inhibit federal executive action on behalf of Black Americans.

Gillespie introduces a normative theory of political representation and uses a four-pronged analytic strategy to examine the outcomes of Obama's desired impact on Black people, noting that what he actually accomplished for the marginalized and what he wanted to accomplish were not necessarily the same. Intent matters in that the shared racial identity of the president with a substantive Black minority frames Black presidential responsiveness to Black communities as it pertains to the many social and institutional impediments that make the effort at erasing systemic inequities challenging. Gillespie's analysis of presidential desire in respect to minority responsiveness suggests that the first-ever shared racial experience between a Black president and his Black constituents may create the conditions for more direct engagement than that of prior presidents.

As a leading expert in the scholarship on deracialization, Gillespie builds on her previous books (Reference Gillespie2010, Reference Gillespie2012) and establishes that Obama was a deracialized candidate “particularly susceptible to resorting to more symbolic means of racial representation” (p. 6). Acknowledging Price's (Reference Price2016) stated importance of examining the rhetoric of a president, Gillespie does not sufficiently elaborate on the theory building around the debate of Obama as deracialized and furthers the narrative that Obama tried to avoid race as a candidate in an appeal to whites. Yet, not all agree that Obama was deracialized as a candidate or as a president. With scant discussion of targeted universalism, readers are left to draw their own conclusions about how Black representation can work in majority white contexts beyond the case of Obama.

Gillespie does survey the actual impact that Obama and administration appointees had on narrowing gaps in persistent racial inequities. She examines promises made in speeches and progress made in lived material improvements—including, but not limited to, loans to minority businesses, support for HBCUs, closing the unemployment gap, expanding income opportunity, access to homeownership, healthcare, and education, and the increased chances of being victim of discrimination and physical violence.

The book also compares Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton in terms of what each sought to do and what they accomplished. Extending beyond race, the book also covers ethnicity and sexuality, responsive efforts toward Native Americans, members of the LGBTQ community, and more generally, poor Americans, to name a few. Utilizing national opinion polls, and inter-agency data from Obama's cabinet departments, Gillespie shows how Obama's campaign promises to marginalized communities were in fact addressed differentially. In this vein, Gillespie adds her voice to longstanding Black political science scholarship that is somewhat critical of how effective descriptive representation alone can be at improving the substantive conditions of Black people, particularly the poor.

This book is timely and groundbreaking because it examines how a Black president used his power to help his minority community in a largely white society. Gillespie offers a nuanced perspective about Obama's legacy in minority communities as the first minority US president. Employing the use of focus groups and one-on-one interviews to capture Black attitudes toward Obama, Gillespie asked respondents about the relative strength of symbolic efforts of Obama weighed against the backdrop of noticeable improvements in their own lives. Respondents did reveal a nuanced view toward Obama, which Gillespie uses to construct a careful balance between criticizing Obama's actions that did not close racial gaps and acknowledging how his historic presidency was perceived as a successful milestone for many Black Americans. She asks (p. 5): “how do Blacks reconcile their pride in Obama's service to their frustration with the things that did not improve in Black communities?” Gillespie avers that the constraints of the office and the perilous “racially charged environment” in which Obama governed challenge both supporters and detractors of Obama's legacy in Black communities.

Gillespie's take on Obama's actual impact on minorities is also a story about how a president can empower others in his administration to pursue justice, especially when it is not popular. This book is a source of informed analysis that stands between those in marginalized Black communities that judge Obama harshly and those for whom their pride in Obama's historic win meant he could do little wrong. Gillespie's comprehensive methodology reveals the nuance through which Black Americans reconcile their pride and livelihood post-Obama. In her work, Gillespie is effective at dispelling the myths that Obama “did nothing” for Blacks or the exaggeration that he did “everything possible.”