President Obama made history in 2008 as the first African American president in U.S. history.

But according to data in a fascinating new Pew Research Center study, a majority of Americans describe the president as “mixed race,” while just more than a quarter (27 percent) call him “black.”

Photo Credit: Pew

While whites and Hispanics are far more likely to describe Obama as “mixed race,” a strong majority of African Americans see him as black. And black voters voted in historically large numbers for Obama. He won 93 percent of the African American vote in 2012 and 95 percent among that group in 2008. (John Kerry won 88 percent of the black vote in 2004; Al Gore won 90 percent in 2000.)

Obama, for his part, struggled for much of his life in how to define himself racially with a Kansas-born white mother and a Kenyan father. David Maraniss documents that process in fascinating detail in his biography of the country’s 44th president. Of Obama’s racial identity, Maraniss wrote:

Here, at age 22, was an idea that would become a key to understanding Obama the politician and public figure. Without a class meant that he was entering his adult life without financial security. Without a structure meant he had grown up lacking a solid family foundation, his father gone from the start, his mother often elsewhere, all leading to a sense of being a rootless outsider. Without a tradition was a reference to his lack of religious grounding and his hapa status, white and black, feeling completely at home in neither race. The different path he saw for himself was to rise above the divisions.

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