“One of the most important books on racial politics to appear in the United States, Post-Racial or Most-Racial? presents cutting-edge analysis of racial attitudes and their effects on modern American politics. Tesler superbly sets out the extent to which heightened partisan and ideological polarization characterizing American politics in the last two decades is a deeply racialized division and argues persuasively that mass politics became more heavily influenced by racial considerations during Obama’s presidency. Statistically rigorous, theoretically nuanced, and politically important, this is a major work of original scholarship.”

Desmond King, University of Oxford

“Tesler’s subject is racialization: the process whereby racial considerations are brought more heavily to bear on political evaluations. His claim is that Obama’s omnipresence as president and his embodiment of blackness has produced widespread racialization in the white public. The strength of the project—and it is a considerable strength—is Tesler’s brilliant marshaling of evidence in support of his claim: from repeated cross-sectional surveys carried out with identical instrumentation on comparable national samples, before and during Obama’s presidency; from several National Science Foundation-funded studies that reinterview respondents who had participated in previous national surveys prior to Obama’s rise to national prominence; and from a series of artfully designed experiments. Decades ago, Myrdal argued that a fundamental test of the American experiment with democracy was how well we would deal with race. He was right. Tesler has shown how far we have yet to go.”

Donald R. Kinder, University of Michigan

"Tesler makes a powerful argument that race has affected even seemingly non-racial parts of American society.”

Salon

"The main course of the book is an attempt to demonstrate, with scientific validity, the influence of these racial attitudes during the Obama years. This happens to be an exceedingly complicated business, because people are highly sensitive to questions about their attitudes on race, and are thus highly adept at avoiding answers that might show them as racist. . . . Tesler’s book painstakingly shows how comprehensive these problems were when dealing with the nation’s first black president"

Congress & the Presidency