Reimagining Equality
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Dreams from My Father ends with Barack Obama’s marriage to Michelle, whose family history includes enslavement in South Carolina and Georgia. Michelle’s is the quintessential African American migration story. Generations of her family traveled from Africa to various rural settings in the southern United States, then to northern cities, landing finally in Chicago. Yet one of Michelle Obama’s relatives has lived her entire life on the land where their ancestors were enslaved.
In 1964 Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born into a community much like the one that Lorraine Hansberry’s family attempted to integrate and where Robinson’s great-grandparents had come as part of the Great Migration. But by the time the future First Lady reached her tenth birthday, the working-class neighborhood that had once been primarily white was predominantly black, since all the whites had fled. The Robinsons owned their home, a three-story bungalow, having previously occupied its top-floor apartment as tenants of one of Michelle’s aunts. Barack Obama was drawn to Michelle’s stable family, including the aunts, uncles, and cousins from throughout the city who surrounded the couple at family gatherings. With Barack and Michelle’s marriage and the birth of daughters Sasha and Malia, the Robinson family’s slavery-to-success saga became part of Obama’s family story; their sense of place became his.
He had years before declared himself black, but during the early part of his presidential campaign, America was poised to see just how African American Barack Obama was. Pundits speculated about whether he was “black enough” or “too black.” The question was much more complicated than it might first appear, as Obama was called on to establish himself in the story of blacks in America. As a candidate, he approached the question of racial identity with delicacy, neither confirming nor denying it as a compelling factor—at least not entirely. Mrs. Obama was much more forthcoming, which might have lent weight to the criticism that she was “militantly” black and “angry.”6 Campaigning for her husband in the critical South Carolina primary, Michelle Obama reminded black voters of Rosa Parks’s courage in order to move them to put away their doubts about Barack Obama’s chances of becoming the first African American president.7
Ironically, arguably the finest moment of his campaign was the occasion on which Barack Obama was compelled to address race squarely. On March 8, 2008, he gave one of his most famous speeches to date. In “A More Perfect Union,” he defended himself against claims that he was a follower of a race-conscious theology that his former pastor and mentor, Chicago minister Jeremiah Wright, preached. In the address, Obama paid homage to the historic struggle against racial discrimination in America and incorporated it into his own narrative, even as he asked people of all races to try to experience the consciousness of others. Months after this speech, according to journalist David Remnick, Barack Obama went beyond acknowledgment of the civil rights movement; speaking to a group of civil rights elders, he “insisted on his place in” it.8 Americans’ positive reaction to “A More Perfect Union” and Obama’s embrace of an African American identity suggest a country primed to come to term with its racial past and to move forward.
Nevertheless, as embedded in the American experience of the search for place as Barack Obama’s saga is, New York Times columnist David Brooks distrusted it. As the presidential race tightened in August 2008, Brooks described Obama’s life story as “a peripatetic journey through Kansas, Indonesia, Hawaii and beyond” (emphasis added). Despite the decades during which Obama lived in Chicago, Brooks found him “hard to place” and “hard to plant.” The former Chicago police reporter contrasted Obama with his opponent. John McCain firmly positioned himself in the American narrative as he “discover[ed] his place in a long line of warriors that produced him,” according to Brooks. He disparaged the voyage of a “man who took the disparate parts of his past and constructed an identity.”9 I applaud Obama’s effort to find the place where he belonged. But in his criticism, Brooks underscores the social and political significance of place in our imagination of who belongs, and especially of who should lead our country.
With what journalist Gwen Ifill calls Barack Obama’s “breakthrough” entry into politics, many were ready to put race aside and elect a junior Democratic senator from Illinois. Nearly two generations earlier, President Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights prompted states throughout the South to abandon the Democratic Party. Border states and states in the Midwest followed suit, ending histories of straight party-line representation and starting a trend toward straight Republican ticket voting. Economic concerns played a part as well. But from 1964 well into the 1990s, according to Sam Gibbons, a Democrat from Florida, “Republicans [were] able to capitalize on [race], creating what is, in effect, an all-white party.”10 In 2008, over fifty years after that initial shift in voting patterns, some racial memories were either fading or being altered. In a CNN poll prior to the election, seven out of ten said that race was not a factor in their decision in the presidential election.11
I have never felt the significance of an election as I did on that brisk morning in November 2008. I woke up early and relished waiting in line to cast my ballot for Obama and talk about the election and its significance with fellow voters. In Massachusetts, I was sure to find like-minded Obama supporters. As it turned out, 61 percent of the Bay State’s electorate cast ballots for him. In my native state of Oklahoma, John McCain received 65 percent of the votes. A fellow expatriate, Jan, wrote me:
I was on the Internet all night looking at the map and the county breakout (yes, I can be a political junkie). I informed my daughter that her county, Madison, in Alabama went for Obama along with about 6 other Alabama counties. East Baton Rouge Parish, Orleans Parish, Caddo (Shreveport) were the bigger parishes in Louisiana that were Obama by up to 15 points. Surprisingly, in Oklahoma, no counties were blue.12
Nevertheless, I was encouraged—over half a million people in Oklahoma voted for Barack Obama, a Democrat. And my sister reported that in the Tulsa public elementary school where she is principal, a racially diverse student body elected Obama by a landslide in their mock election. “They don’t know we live in a red state,” she told me.
On November 4, 2008, as word spread that Barack Obama was the president-elect, people became audaciously and conspicuously hopeful. From Washington, DC, to Los Angeles, people danced in the streets. In Berkeley, California, crowds marched from the university to the People’s Park—site of passionate antiwar and antigovernment demonstrations in the 1970s—where they hoisted an American flag and sang the national anthem. An event in Chicago’s Grant Park, which had once been considered a dangerous place, brought together people of all races, men and women and children, old, young, and in-between. With Oprah Winfrey in the throng, it’s fair to say that the megawealthy and not-so-wealthy were represented, as were assorted religions, sexual orientations, and political backgrounds.
Obama changed America’s electoral map by being the first Democratic nominee in decades to win in Virginia, Iowa, and Indiana. Hispanic voters, who helped President George W. Bush capture Colorado and New Mexico, favored Obama over McCain. To be sure, the shifting of political concern that CNN tapped did not mean that race was dead. Twenty-nine percent of those polled said that race was a factor in their choice for president.13 Out-and-out bias still existed. In an ABC poll, 12 percent of voters said they were “uncomfortable” with an African American president, and the CNN pollsters found 5 out of 100 people who said that race was the single most important factor in their choice.14 Nevertheless, for the time being, the election of Barack Obama changed racial politics in all corners of the country. In getting moderates to cross party and racial lines, he made the Democratic Party seem all the more inclusive.
On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009, even as the country was on the brink of a financial crisis that some analysts claimed might match the Great Depression, Americans were generally hopeful. According to a Pew Research Center poll, although they weren’t optimistic about much,
Americans took pride in an election that showed the country was making racial progress.15 As history was made, the link between national identity and our president’s race was affirmed. While a black couple occupies the nation’s most symbolic home—to those within and outside its borders, America is a more inclusive nation.
The White House: A Home for the Obamas
The First Family’s move into their new space was a media event. Barack Obama woke up to his new home in the White House with a 70 percent approval rating, proving beyond a doubt that the majority of America was ready for a black president. After the election, observers declared that once President and Mrs. Obama, Sasha, and Malia took up residence in the nation’s capital, equality was realized. When Mrs. Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, moved in with the family to help with her granddaughters, and when the First Lady independently planted an organic vegetable garden on the South Lawn that would serve as a source of family food and for teaching local children, Michelle Obama’s concept for what she called “the people’s house” became clearer. Even the selection of their children’s new pet, Bo, signaled that the Obamas were shaping a home to suit the needs and style of a young and active “all-American” family. According to press reports, not even the president is exempt from dog duty. Mrs. Obama walks Bo in the morning and “I’m the guy with the nightshift,” Mr. Obama told a reporter.16
A month into the new president’s term, Michelle Obama’s approval rating of 49 percent surpassed that of four former First Ladies. (Forty-four percent of those polled had no opinion.) Some had been offended by her comment during the primaries that she was “proud of America” for the first time in her life, but many of us who share the desire to embrace America as our home, as well as to be embraced by America as full citizens, understood what she meant. The efforts of Barack Obama’s critics to cast Michelle as angry and militantly unpatriotic didn’t stick; only 5 percent of those polled viewed her negatively. A year after moving into the White House, the self-described “mom in chief” enjoyed soaring approval ratings, even as the president’s dipped.17 Even so, her high approval rating leaves open the question of whether America would embrace a woman commander in chief, as opposed to the mom-in-chief role Michelle assigned herself. More specifically, Barack Obama’s election provided very limited context for extrapolating how the public would respond to the candidacy of a black woman.
Despite the goodwill engendered by the presidential election, issues of gender, race, and place linger. Questions about Obama’s “place,” like the ones raised during the campaign by David Brooks, have resurfaced. Months into his presidency, members of the so-called “birther movement” clamored for the public’s attention with calls for proof of Obama’s citizenship. They and others cited Barack Obama’s childhood experiences in Indonesia as evidence that, as a “non-native,” he did not belong in the White House. The calls for proof of President Obama’s place of origin, Hawaii birth certificate notwithstanding, indicate that a vocal minority of Americans are still not “at home” with Barack Obama as president. President Obama’s detractors have characterized his few acknowledgments of race as reverse discrimination. Radio talk-show hosts assign a racial preference label to race-neutral policy. One dimwitted and callous pundit characterized humanitarian aid extended in 2010 to earthquake-ravaged Haiti as “racial pandering”; health care reform has been dubbed “racial reparations.”18
Barack Obama’s presidency is another milestone in the full citizenship of African Americans and others who have felt left out politically or marginalized. For all Americans, it shows that the country can accept a black man as its best representative. African Americans enjoy the right to be represented by the government and to represent the people of the United States. But the first black president’s achievements must mean more.
As Gwen Ifill noted in her 2009 book The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, “There is evidence that Barack Obama has not transcended race,” but there is also “proof that he has redefined what racial politics is.” Others, like political scientist Andra Gillespie, assert that Barack Obama won by adopting a posture that was “race neutral.” But Gillespie admits that “deracializing” is not a simple concept, whether it’s applied to a political identity or a specific political agenda.19 No political contest can be entirely devoid of race, nor can it be gender neutral. Whether by supporters or foes, the categories that we like to think don’t matter continue to be raised. What’s more, race and gender neutrality can come back to haunt a candidate who wins with this approach. They can even amount to “golden handcuffs,” inhibiting the elected official from ever addressing race- or gender-specific issues. With so many left adrift by the recession, I ponder whether racial progress should be measured by one black family’s occupation of the White House, as those responding to the Pew poll asserted.
One of the defining features of The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks is a huge hole dug by her character Foundling Father, a black grave digger who finds purpose in his life through impersonating Abraham Lincoln, reenacting Lincoln’s assassination for a penny. The hole is a replica of “the Great Hole of History,” an amusement park attraction where visitors view renditions of past events. Each performance seems to generate a new understanding of what America is and wants to be. Barack Obama’s election and his presidency add to an understanding of America and what it means to be black in America. Yet he also reminds me of Parks’s character Brazil, Foundling Father’s son, who at the play’s end asserts the need to climb out of the “Great Hole of [American] History.”
A More Inclusive Democracy
Notwithstanding the strident opposition to his presidency, and even the setback the Democrats suffered in the 2010 midterm election, I have no doubt that Barack Obama’s election bridged a political divide. As president, he has an opportunity to bring us even closer to the inclusive democracy that his election portended.
In times of turmoil, by confronting prejudice, past U.S. presidents have shaped who is at home in America and with whom America is at home. Like no other document in our country’s history, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation expanded our thinking about who belonged. Lincoln’s legacy to African Americans was the opportunity he gave them to become citizens, something that had been denied them by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case. Early in the Civil War, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act of 1862 into law, giving people who had no chance of inheriting property an opportunity to own acreages, considered a critical condition for prosperity in mid-nineteenth-century America. For a majority of the newly freed slaves, land was essential, as farm work and rural culture were all that they knew. The Homestead Act, despite its flawed origins in manifest destiny, combined with the Emancipation Proclamation to give people like my grandfather Henry Elliott chances well beyond what they were born into. The legislation gave blacks, and others who had been locked out of the American Dream because they lacked the resources to buy land, opportunities to belong, to enjoy the benefits of citizenship, and to be represented by their government. Through these acts, Lincoln expanded our democracy.
As the country descended into the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal suggested a type of egalitarianism that attracted throngs who were dispossessed and others who saw their fates linked to the destitute. Despite some New Deal policies’ accommodation of racism and President Roosevelt’s failure to secure rights for blacks, the democratic appeal of his proposals was so strong that it prompted African Americans to reinvest in the country’s political system and defect from the party of Lincoln to the Democratic Party. In this respect, Roosevelt succeeded, in large part, because of his wife Eleanor’s overtures to the black community. But without a doubt, Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to provide a safety net were not limited to blacks and other racial minorities. To this day, people of all backgrounds enjoy New Deal programs, and the country is better off because the government insures safe working conditions, a minimum wage,
and financial security for the elderly. Moreover, Roosevelt’s efforts to stem the Depression-era housing crisis by promoting home ownership opportunities opened the door for Harry Truman’s post–World War II building projects, which put fifteen million returning GIs in homes and helped give rise to a middle-class ownership rank.
Progress toward bridging America’s racial gap stagnated following World War II. As the country grappled with racial disenfranchisement at the protests of the civil rights movement, President Lyndon Johnson utilized his political might to move the passage of landmark civil rights legislation. By including prohibitions against housing discrimination and protections against gender discrimination in work and in the granting of credit, the law set the stage for residential integration in urban and suburban settings. Johnson’s highly criticized War on Poverty brought attention to the limited opportunity for homes available to the poor. It was under President Johnson’s watch that the concept of rights truly became inclusive and progressive. But Johnson’s approach to inclusion came at a political cost. White voters’ support of the Democratic Party dwindled in the decades that followed. Many went straight to the party of Lincoln, which would be rebranded as the party of Ronald Reagan.
Glaring inconsistencies and violent contests over home were apparent in each president’s agenda. Various populations, often identifiable by race or gender, were simply left out in the cold. Lincoln’s definition of citizenship never seemed to include women or Native Americans. Indeed, well after his death, even with the enactment of laws granting protections to newly freed male slaves, neither women nor indigenous people were invited to become full members of the country’s political community. Tribes were still suffering from being uprooted from their homelands, and there was no attempt to address that loss.