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This study compares filmic and televisual representations of fictional black presidents to white Americans’ reactions to the advent of the United States’s first African American president. My main goal is to determine if there is convergence between these mediated representations and whites’ real-world representations of Barack Obama. I then weigh the evidence for media pundits’ speculations that Obama owes his election to positive portrayals of these fictional heads of state.

The film and television analyses examine each black president’s social network, personality, character traits, preparation for office, and leadership ability. I then compare the ideological messages conveyed through these portrayals to the messages implicated in white Americans’ discursive and pictorial representations of Barack Obama.

Both filmic and televisual narratives and public discourses and images construct and portray black presidents with stereotypical character traits and abilities. These representations are overwhelmingly negative and provide no support for the argument that there is a cause–effect relationship between filmic and televisual black presidents and Obama’s election victory.

Neither reel nor real-life black presidents can elude the representational quagmire that distorts African Americans’ abilities and diversity. Discourses, iconography, narratives, and other representations that define black presidents through negative tropes imply that blacks are incapable of effective leadership. These hegemonic representations seek to delegitimize black presidents and symbolically return them to subordinate statuses.

The resolution of the slavery issue in the United States may have had more to do with economic development and political power than a shift in public morality, but there can be no question that abolitionist discourse played a major role in the expansion of America's republican vision in the nineteenth century. In the human rights discourse of the black abolitionists, ideological conflict centers on the dimensions of reification and fragmentation. Potential answers to the rights question – who is to be included in the American republic? – involve contentious claims about group identities. To examine systematically the strategic use of the jeremiad as a human rights argument in the black abolitionist discourse, this research produced a content analysis study of the antebellum black press in New York State. The findings present the hegemonic discourse and the case that the human rights argument could not have been made without simultaneously undermining the hegemonic view. The black abolitionist discourse in antebellum New York State was the first American experience with the jeremiad as a human rights argument and would not be the last.