How “American” is Barack Obama? The role of national identity in a historic bid for the White House Thierry Devos 1 , Debbie S. Ma 2 1 San Diego State University 2 California State University, Northridge Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Thierry Devos, Department of Psychology, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182-4611, USA. E-mail: tdevos@mail.sdsu.edu doi: 10.1111/jasp.12069 Abstract Against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential election, we examined the extent to which the American identity was implicitly and explicitly associated with Barack Obama compared to Tony Blair (Study 1), Hillary Clinton (Study 2), and John McCain (Studies 3 and 4).When conscious control was relatively limited and targets were categorized based on race, the American identity was less strongly associated with Obama than with the other candidates. This effect was stronger than when the candidates were categorized based on their personal identity (Studies 1–4), gender (Study 2), political affiliation (Study 3), or age (Study 4). In addition, the extent to which candidates were differentiated in terms of implicit and explicit associations with the American identity predicted the relative willingness to actively support them. Throughout the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s national identity underwent intense scrutiny. Concerns about Obama’s lack of patriotism were raised when he declined to wear a flag pin and failed to salute the U.S. flag on one occasion. Opponents emphasized his foreign-sounding middle name (Hussein) and ties with Indonesia and Kenya in order to weaken his perceived Americanness. And in the most direct challenge to Obama’s national identity, the so-called “birthers” vocally alleged Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Some claimed that he was born in Hawaii before it became part of the United States, while some maintained that he was actually born in Indonesia. Even well into his presidency, attempts to invalidate Obama’s citizenship persist. In an effort to put this issue to rest, the White House released the Long Form Birth Certificate of President Obama on April 27, 2011. Despite this, the issue of President Obama’s place of birth has flared up yet again during his reelection campaign. One could attribute these instances to the adversarial rhetoric of political contests; however, the sentiment that Obama is not truly American might also be symptomatic of a pervasive difficulty people have in granting American status to non-White Americans. Indeed, researchers have shown that the American identity is more strongly associated with Americans of European descent than with African Ameri- cans, Asian Americans, Latino/as, and even Native Americans (Devos & Banaji, 2005; Devos, Gavin, & Quintana, 2010; Nosek, Smyth, et al., 2007). The propensity to equate being American with being White is particularly robust on implicit measures and occurs even when explicit knowledge and per- ceptions indicate otherwise. Put simply, the label “American” is more swiftly granted to people of European descent than to members of ethnic minorities. This phenomenon can be conceptualized as a form of exclusionary patriotism (Sidanius & Petrocik, 2001): National attachment becomes inextricably linked to a relative exclusion of subgroups that do not embody the dominant definition of the national identity. In line with this idea, survey data showed that the more White respondents, par- ticularly those in the working class, expressed an attachment to U.S. symbols, the less likely they were to vote for Obama (Parker, Sawyer, & Towler, 2009). Similarly, a longitudinal study revealed antiegalitarian voters opposed Obama due to his perceived foreignness (Knowles, Lowery, & Schaumberg, 2009). The purpose of the current studies was twofold. First, we sought to document more directly that Obama was less closely associated with U.S. symbols than White politicians and that this effect stemmed at least to some extent from racial categorizations. Second, we examined whether indi- vidual differences in the ease with which people associated Obama with U.S. symbols predicted willingness to support him relative to White politicians. Regarding the first aim, we Journal of Applied Social Psychology 2013, 43, pp. 214–226 © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 2013, 43, pp. 214–226