Born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, Barack Obama was the 44th President of the Untied States. In 2008 he made history by being elected the first African-American president in the nation’s history. In The New Jim Crow, Alexander describes the excitement that surrounded his election, particularly among African Americans, civil rights lawyers, and racial justice advocates. For many, however, this excitement turned to disappointment during Obama’s two-term presidency. Rather than instituting the change that many people hoped he would, Obama mostly continued the “tough on crime” approach advanced by his predecessors. Alexander also discusses the possibility that Obama’s election hindered the fight for racial justice simply by helping to convince people that racism is no longer a major issue in America. She argues that Obama fits into a broader trend of “black exceptionalism,” whereby the success of a select few black people is taken as evidence that no further action needs to be taken to fight racial oppression and injustice. Obama himself advanced this impression by sometimes using rhetoric that blamed poor and incarcerated African Americans for their own predicament, rather than addressing the structural inequality that continues to shape American society.