The Race Whisperer and Governing with Words are engaged in the same intellectual project of elucidating the ways in which presidents use the bully pulpit to shape, manage, and persuade the public and other political actors to adopt their racial perspective and resulting policies. Both projects were completed in the waning days of the Obama administration and as Trump’s ascendancy began. As a result, these projects have taken on increased significance as political scientists attempt to understand yet another shift from national hope to bigoted hysteria. It is a familiar reversal of fortunes for Civil Rights advocates and race scholars who see this shift as reminiscent of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, or the 1960s Civil Rights movement and the rise of the Far Right.

The two books’ respective approaches to studying the power of presidential statements regarding race are quite divergent, however. While Gillion takes the wide-angled macroscopic approach of a large data set, I choose to focus on particular speeches (or collections of speeches) or moments as exemplars of larger mechanisms that presidents use to mobilize support for their positions. In his review, Gillion questions what burrowing into a single speech or a particular experience can tell us. Essentially, he asks, what is the power of a “snapshot” in the study of American politics?

I would argue that carefully chosen snapshots crystalize events and allow for in-depth inspection with greater detail and nuance. They provide a global view of a singular event as it was reported by participants, spectators, media accounts, pundits, historians and, yes, political scientists. Gillion is right that choosing which snapshot to focus on is crucial, but it is neither random nor haphazard. Rather, choosing which snapshots are exemplary requires the creation of similar rubrics to the ones used to code large data sets. It requires sifting through the enormous numbers of formal statements, press conferences, remarks, and interviews to take note of trends and moments of pivotal change that transform ideas and opinions. Snapshots stop time and allow scholars to articulate in fine-grained detail what was happening just prior to the pivotal snapshot moment, and how that moment in turn shaped what came after it. In fact, they complement the arguments based on large data sets, such as Gillion’s, by expounding on any anomalies and counterintuitive findings. Snapshots are the explanations behind peaks (and nadirs) in graphs.

Finally, in this project, my primary concern was to discuss how Obama’s sophisticated view of race and racialized rhetoric worked for him and what it means for the future of black politics. Understanding that racial meaning is a constructed rather than a static feature of American politics gave Obama license to craft a personal narrative that molded itself to resonant racial narratives that inspire diverse political support. My book argues that scholars must be attentive to more than finesse when it comes to minority candidates’ need for and approach to attracting white voters. In addition, they have to be attentive to the ways that minority candidates shape their own identities and relationships to their communities of origin. It also forthrightly argues for more focused contextualizing of political language and the power of rhetoric in political science, not less.