A new study by Rice University sociologists finds that since Barack Obama was re-elected as US president in 2012, the mental health of college-educated black men has improved significantly, while the mental health of black men who did not attend college has worsened.
Photo courtesy of The White House/Pete Souza
“Four More Years! Or So What? The Impact of Barack Obama’s 2012 Reelection on Black Adult Mental Health,” will be published in an upcoming issue of Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race.
Lead researcher Tony Brown, a distinguished professor of sociology at Rice University, said he and his co-authors were interested in looking more closely at research examining the health effects of Obama’s 2008 election — which showed a positive effect on black men’s mental health — to see whether anything has changed.
Brown and his co-authors looked at the mental health of black adults 30 days before and 30 days after the 2012 election. Data for the study came from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a national survey of 400,000 U.S. adults that assesses a range of health aspects.
Similar to findings after the 2008 election of President Obama, the researchers found that his 2012 reelection led to significant changes in black men’s mental health. However, this time not all men saw health benefits. Black men with a college education saw a decrease in poor mental health days per month of nearly three days after Obama’s reelection, while black men without a college education saw an increase in poor mental health days per month of more than one day.
“Our analysis suggests that less-educated black men were very disappointed in Obama, or at least felt that he didn’t live up to their expectations or deliver on some of his promises, such as better jobs and access to health care,” Brown said. “We also suspect that Obama’s downplaying of the inequalities and overt racism black men face may have alienated some black men, and perhaps many black women, which is why we believe their mental health is worsening.”
Quintin Gorman Jr., a doctoral student at Rice University and co-first author of the study, said “relative deprivation theory” may explain the change in mental health benefits between 2008 and 2012. This sociological theory describes situations in which individuals may feel deprived of certain resources when comparing themselves to others, and this sense of deprivation can lead to poorer health outcomes.
Brown said this gulf between more and less educated black men was something Obama himself highlighted many times during his presidency, most notably in his commencement speech at Morehouse College, a historically black school in Atlanta.
“In this particular situation, he spoke in such beautiful terms about these men who had just graduated, even encouraging them to ‘pull themselves together’ and not act like low-income black men,” Brown said. “The rhetoric he used suggested that people with a college education were worthy of respect, and we think this type of communication during the Obama era is just one example that may explain why less-educated black men feel the way they do and why their mental health has deteriorated.”
Black women, like those in 2008, have not seen any mental health benefits from Obama’s reelection. Brown couldn’t pinpoint specific reasons why, but said there are a few possible explanations.
“We speculate that black women may have been concerned about death threats against President Obama, and worried about him just as they would worry about their husbands, fathers or sons,” Brown said. “They may also have been concerned about how President Obama would handle discrimination against black men and women, and may have wondered whether any progress would be made on racial issues, especially since so little has changed since 2008.”
Brown also said black women may have worried that Obama’s reelection would lead to racial backlash in the years to come and send the country back to a racist “status quo.”
The researchers said they hope their study will encourage Black people to get more involved in politics and vote for candidates who will stand up for their rights and address broader inequalities, and they hope it will encourage health scholars to rethink the social determinants of health to take into account larger sociopolitical changes like elections.
Julian Culver of Brown University and Asia Bent of the University of California, Irvine are co-authors of the study, which has been published online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X24000043 .
