by Joy-Ann Reid
Associates said support for his Senate bid from home-state congressmen like Bobby Rush and Danny Davis was tepid at best, as was that of Rev. Jackson, who had hoped to see his son and namesake vault from the House to the Senate—a possibility that “Junior” believed (and told Obama as much) his father’s own missteps had helped to foreclose in November 1999, when Jackson swept into Decatur, Illinois, a downstate, blue-collar town once known as “Striketown, U.S.A.,” following the suspensions of a group of black students after a fight at a football game. Jackson launched protests, waving the banner of Selma and facing down the governor himself, only to find out, via videotape, that the young men had been brawling after all. Obama, who enjoyed a respectful, if nominal relationship with Jackson and a friendship with his son, was a much more careful man, and far less eager to turn up the wattage on racial outrage. Turning it down was the way to get more done.
On the day of his keynote speech in Boston in 2004, Obama was reintroduced to Rev. Sharpton before a meeting of black convention delegates. The introduction was made by their mutual friend Charles Ogletree, who had taught both Barack and Michelle at Harvard Law and whose own orientation was that of an activist, having represented clients ranging from the victims of the 1921 race riots that led to the burning of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Anita Hill, to rapper Tupac Shakur.
Obama and Sharpton had met before, at Rainbow/PUSH and other events, but they didn’t know each other well, and Ogletree thought they should.
The state senator stuck out his hand, then launched into an explication of his planned keynote, his multiracial vision, and what he hoped to accomplish in the United States Senate, noting that he’d lived in New York City for a time, during some of Sharpton’s toughest fights. Sharpton, seven years older than Obama and a man who lived very much in the America of remedies, but who also knew well the limits of flight for a black leader who made them his calling, stopped him midsentence, with a knowing smile.
“You do what you’ve got to do tonight,” Sharpton said. “I understand, you’re speaking to the whole party and the whole country, and you’ve got to get elected statewide in Illinois. Don’t worry about it, because I’m gonna take care of the brothers and sisters tomorrow night.”
The two men would develop a quiet understanding and, with time, an increasing bond, based on Sharpton’s belief that there were many lanes along the road to African American advancement; politicians were meant to trod in one, and civil rights leaders in another. “No politician ever marched against himself,” Sharpton would often say. He believed it was his duty to speak to black needs as a civil rights leader, and to challenge power to relinquish the resources that advancement required, while Obama, as a symbol of the black excellence the country was capable of producing, could use his growing platform to cajole the nation to embrace its better angels and do what is right. It was an arrangement that suited both men just fine.
CHAPTER 5
Kanye
[To become president], Obama is gonna have to be the least angry black man in America.
—Unknown
“I HATE THE WAY THEY PORTRAY US, IN THE MEDIA. . . . IF YOU see a black family, it says they’re looting . . . You see a white family, it says they’re looking for food.”
Kanye West had gone off script, and his nerves were visibly jangling as he stood beside a grim-faced Mike Myers on an NBC soundstage.
It was September 2, 2005, nine months into George W. Bush’s second term, and the network was airing a live telethon for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which had violently struck coastal Louisiana and Mississippi a week before, killing more than 1,800 people, many of their bodies floating down rivers of mud. Meanwhile, tens of thousands were stranded on rooftops or in their homes, or crowded inside the filthy Superdome in New Orleans. The devastating storm had flattened a populated area spanning a breathtaking ninety thousand square miles.
West was voicing the outrage felt by many African Americans about the language the media was applying to images of people fleeing the water and desperately grasping for whatever food was left in grocery stores. If they were white, the media called them “flood victims.” If they were black, they were “looters.”
The NBC control room was on alert for any profanity from the rap star and fingers hovered over the switch to trigger the two-second delay. But no one realized that West had veered so wildly off script. Or perhaps they believed he would find his way back.
He didn’t.
“And you know, it’s been five days, because most of the people are black,” the rapper continued, wandering further and further from the scripted words meant to compel donations. He grew increasingly emotional and was struggling to put his thoughts together in a straight line.
“With the setup, the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people . . . the less well-off, as slow as possible,” Kanye continued, allowing that the Red Cross, for whom the telethon had been organized, was “doing everything they can. We already realize, a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and . . . they’ve given them permission to go down, and shoot us.”
Myers shifted back and forth, unsure where to go from there. He scratched the side of his nose and tried to return to the script.
When it was Kanye’s turn again, he didn’t stammer.
“George Bush . . . doesn’t care . . . about black people.”
Myers turned and looked directly at West, as if he wanted to say something. Instead, the camera cut away. (Myers later told GQ magazine he was proud to have been “the guy next to the guy who spoke a truth,” and in 2010 West was goaded into an awkward retraction on the Today show, as host Matt Lauer pressed him to apologize to the former president.)
Conservatives immediately erupted online. The rapper’s comments were cut from the telethon’s West Coast broadcast, and after NBC and the Red Cross were bombarded with angry phone calls, they issued statements distancing themselves from West’s words. Six days after the telecast, West was drowned out by boos from forty thousand fans during a season kickoff concert for the National Football League at Gillette Stadium, outside Boston.
George W. Bush, in his memoir, would later describe Kanye’s rebuke as the worst moment of his presidency. Worse than the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Worse than any day during two land wars. Worse than the day Hurricane Katrina tore New Orleans apart. Worse, because the normally brash and temperamental young rapper, who two weeks before had made the cover of Time magazine as the phenom of rap mogul Jay-Z’s record label, had in unsteady fashion affixed the Bush administration’s failures to racism.
Nothing infuriated white Americans more, and those on the right were particularly determined to turn this accusation back on the accuser and by doing so, to defang it. As black conservative writer John McWhorter put it: “We associate a person charging racism with powerlessness. . . . But West’s charge came from a position of, actually, rather awesome power. To call someone a racist today is only a notch or two less potent than calling them a pedophile. Racism may still be ‘out there,’ but it is socially incorrect. It is whispered, hedged, released unintentionally amidst frustration. It is an embarrassment, disavowed even by racists.”
Whatever cultural power West and his words might have had (apparently even over the president of the United States), he had inelegantly but powerfully summarized the anxieties of many black Americans about the power they lacked, even to save their own lives. Louisiana’s population was one-third black—a percentage outmatched only by Mississippi and the District of Columbia—and a third of the black and Hispanic population lived below the poverty line; the poorest residents living in the basin of a topographical soup bowl, stuck in a low-lying landmass often beset by flooding, encircled by high but faltering levies meant to keep Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River at bay. A succession of Democratic leaders had been complicit in the neglect of the low-lying wards, including Louisiana’s governor, Kathleen Blanco, and New Orleans�
�s African American mayor, Ray Nagin, whose evacuation plans proved woefully inadequate as the waters rose, and who had been reduced to profanity-laced tirades when the federal government was slow to respond with emergency help, making Nagin appear as the very picture of the impotency of black power.
For so long African Americans had seen the federal government as their sometimes reluctant savior of last resort, on the right to vote, the right to march, and the right to go to school. Blacks had never been able to rely on state authority, which for so long had been trained against them. But now the federal authorities had failed them, too.
For Barack Obama, Katrina was a particular test. As the Senate’s lone black member, and with mainly black families left chanting for help inside the Superdome, or fleeing Louisiana for Texas or Florida, labeled “refugees” inside their own country, the press was putting immense pressure on him to react. He was traveling overseas when the storm hit, but quickly telephoned Bill Clinton upon his return, signing on to his efforts with George H. W. Bush to raise funds for Katrina relief and, with Senator Hillary Clinton and Barbara Bush, to tour the Houston Astrodome, where thousands of displaced New Orleanians had been moved to temporary shelter.
But as the senator was boarding his flight to Houston on September 5, three days after Kanye West’s tirade, the media was less interested in what Barack Obama planned to do there than what he would say. After all, he had come to national prominence as an eloquent spokesman for racial and political reconciliation. And Katrina was quickly becoming a tale of poverty and race. Would Barack Obama be the conciliator, or would he join Kanye and the growing body of black opinion that agreed with him?
Obama and Hillary Clinton each called for an independent commission to investigate the federal response. But when longtime Chicago reporter Lynn Sweet asked the senator to respond to West’s broadside against President Bush, he demurred. No, the failed federal response was not due to New Orleans being “disproportionately black,” Obama said. No, the local and state officials were not primarily at fault. And no, the Katrina tragedy was not a failure of “personal responsibility” by the victims.
Obama told Sweet that Katrina showed “how little inner-city African Americans have to fall back on,” in a world where largely affluent federal officials blithely assumed they could simply “hop in their SUVs, and top off with a $100 tank of gas and [get some] Poland Spring water,” as they sped out of harm’s way. Sure, “inner city blacks” were underresourced, both in New Orleans and in underserved communities around the country. “But that has been true for decades,” Obama said.
And to West’s rebuke of the president, he added: “What I think is that we as a society, and this administration in particular have not been willing to make sacrifices or shape an agenda to help low-income people.”
It wasn’t a dodge. Obama had long balanced a number of competing inner visions. He was equally the product of his grandparents’ traditionalist midwestern probity and his mother’s internationalist humanism. But he was also influenced by the liberation theology of his mentors in Chicago, including his pastor, Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, and Roman Catholic firebrand Michael Pfleger, who ran an activist ministry that had aided a young Barack Obama during his days as a community organizer. The two men preached social justice in the blended context of race and poverty, and Obama believed deeply both in the racial ecumenism of most Americans and that the country was often guilty of profligacy toward its poor.
After Sweet’s interview with Obama on the tarmac, she wrote that she found him to be conspicuously “measured” in warning against the “false dichotomy” that stated that either personal responsibility or collective societal failure alone was to blame for New Orleanians’ agony.
Even when Barbara Bush further damaged her son’s image by saying that among the displaced she’d met in Houston, nearly “all want to stay in Texas,” having been “so overwhelmed by the hospitality”—and went on to say the people sleeping inside the arena were “underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them”—Obama refused to be drawn in. On the day after the visit, his office released a statement: “There’s been much attention in the press about the fact that those who were left behind in New Orleans were disproportionately poor and African American. I’ve said publicly that I do not subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was racially-based. The ineptitude was colorblind.”
Katrina sank Bush’s approval ratings among African Americans, only 15 percent of whom rated the federal government’s response as “good” or “very good” by the time Gallup released its September 14 poll, while just under half of white Americans thought the response was fine. And while 60 percent of African Americans said they believed the federal government responded so slowly because many of those in distress were black and 63 percent said the failure was because they were poor, just 12 and 21 percent of whites, respectively, said the same. More blacks blamed President Bush than Mayor Nagin for the post-Katrina debacle, while whites said the reverse. In every sense, it was clear that even the aftermath of the natural disaster was being viewed from two very different worlds, one white, one black.
Bush’s approval ratings with white Americans, already stuck in the 40s due to disapproval of the Iraq War, stayed there, though when asked “the question,” 7 in 10 white Americans believed that President Bush did indeed “care about black people,” while 7 in 10 black Americans agreed with Kanye West.
DEMOCRATS AWOKE THE MORNING AFTER THE 2006 MIDTERM elections basking in the glow of a victory not seen since 1992. They would again control both houses of Congress, making California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi the first female Speaker of the House. Harry Reid was elevated to Senate majority leader, with Democrats’ fifty-one-seat majority sealed by the consent of two independents. Eighty-seven women now served in Congress, the vast majority of them Democrats, and twenty-three were women of color. The Democratic Party even grabbed a majority of governorships.
In many of the races, victory had come on the strength of black and Hispanic votes, as the white electorate split down the middle, 51 percent for Republicans, 47 percent for Democrats. A postelection analysis found that the uptick in black turnout alone was enough to deliver Democratic Senate seats in Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, where Republican George Allen’s defeat was fueled by controversy over an apparent racial slur. Surging black turnout in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Tennessee helped reelect Democratic governors and helped Deval Patrick become the first black governor of Massachusetts.
Nationally, Democrats triumphed despite losing white men by nearly 10 points, by edging out Republicans among white women and overwhelming them among nonwhite voters, including Hispanics, who just two years earlier had given more than 4 in 10 of their votes to President Bush.
Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman had carried out a reparative campaign to begin to woo African American voters, including a public apology the previous summer for the GOP’s “southern strategy”; he had risked the ridicule and opprobrium of his party’s base by saying, during an address before the NAACP, that “some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.” He added, “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” Nevertheless, black voters were now seemingly out of reach for Mehlman’s party. At the time Mehlman spoke, the NAACP was in the midst of an IRS investigation of its tax status, launched in 2004 after its chairman, Julian Bond, made comments critical of President Bush.
Now, a year after Mehlman’s attempt at rapprochement, the three prominent black Republicans seeking statewide office in swing states went down to defeat: Ken Blackwell for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, Lynn Swann for governor of Pennsylvania, and Michael Steele for a Senate seat in Maryland. Blackwell, the archconservative former Ohio secretary of state whose machinations many Democrats blamed for John Kerry
’s narrow defeat in 2004, received just 20 percent of the black vote in his Senate bid—less than half the haul white Republican George Voinovich had received when he was reelected governor in 1994. Swann, a onetime NFL star, received just 13 percent of the black vote. Steele, the affable Maryland lieutenant governor who ran a campaign supported by some prominent African Americans, including Mike Tyson and Radio One founder Cathy Hughes, and whose campaign ads rarely mentioned his party, received the highest black vote total of the three, at just 25 percent.
Black voters continued to nurse their lingering anger over Katrina—to which they added frustration with the war in Iraq and the ongoing complaints of harassment and intimidation of black and brown voters at the polls. Since 2004, more than forty thousand voting-related complaints had been logged by a national election hotline. The complaints in 2004 ranged from the presence of plainclothes sheriffs along polling routes in Florida, to men carrying official-looking clipboards and driving sedans with law enforcement–style insignia on them challenging voters in Philadelphia, to the discovery that groups with official-sounding names had distributed flyers in Lake County, Ohio, warning that anyone who had registered to vote through the NAACP was ineligible, and flyers in Milwaukee from a fictitious group called the Milwaukee Black Voters League warning that anyone who had cast a ballot in an election that year could not vote in November. In 2006, flyers listing the wrong election day were distributed in multiple states, and there were reports of clipboard-toting “poll watchers” who asked for identification in predominantly black precincts. Sometimes the intimidation was unsubtle. Election protection organizations in 2006 fielded complaints of harassing robocalls targeting Democratic voters in New York, Florida, Virginia, and New Mexico. Tennessee Republican candidate Bob Corker was forced to demand that radio ads that featured jungle drums in the background when black U.S. Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr.’s name was mentioned be pulled off the air. The Tennessee Senate race was also beset by intimations of interracial sex in a TV ad that featured a white woman who appeared to be naked, cooing into the camera for Ford to “call me.” Ford narrowly lost his bid to become the state’s first black senator. And brochures distributed in several states in 2006 warned that going to polling places could prompt FBI background checks or even arrests for unpaid tickets, unpaid child support, or for vague and mythic “voter fraud.”
