Sharpton admits that he is in an unprecedented position: for the first time, the nation’s premier civil rights leader must coexist with a black commander in chief who is extremely popular with the black masses: “I think we developed a respect for each other’s role. We understand we are not the same thing . . . But I think he has grown to learn the need for continued civil rights activism. And I have sensitivity for where he is as the head of the free world. And it is a thin line to walk. History will decide whether we did it well or not. One thing I am convinced of,” he says. Their relationship as black leader and black president “will be a model for how we deal with it in the future, because there is no book yet written about how to do it.”
West has attacked me, too, accusing me of selling my soul for “a mess of Obama pottage,” and of being one of the biggest “cheerleaders and bootlickers for the president.”48 I have offered principled support for the president in tandem with far more sustained criticism. I have even shared my dissenting views with the president face-to-face at the White House. In The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, Jonathan Alter recounts a meeting of black figures with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where radio host Tom Joyner “began to mix it up with the author Michael Eric Dyson, who wanted the administration to target its efforts more on particular black needs.” As I sat directly across the table from the president in an intimate gathering, I disagreed with his universal prescription for helping vulnerable blacks, advocating instead a targeted approach. Alter writes, “Obama jumped in to say he had no problem with Dyson or anyone else disagreeing with him about how to help the needy,” but he got upset with “critics who ‘question my blackness and commitment to blacks.’”49 I said nothing to the president that day that I had not said many times over the years.50
It is possible to offer substantive, even sharp criticism of Obama without resorting to hateful personal attack, as the work of journalists and public intellectuals Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jelani Cobb proves. Coates has never failed to acknowledge the challenges and complications that Obama faces as the first black president. “I don’t wish to minimize the difficulty, rhetorical and otherwise, of being the first black president of a congenitally racist country,” Coates wrote in The Atlantic in 2015.51 But Coates has just as consistently taken Obama to task for emphasizing black moral failings while avoiding the structural impediments that plague black life and reinforce black suffering.52 He argues: “When talking morality in the black community, Obama has always been very clear. Obama has argued that black kids, specifically, have a mentality which reflects shame in educational achievement. (‘I don’t know who taught them that reading and writing and conjugating your verbs was something white.’) He believes that black men, specifically, tend to be more apt to abandon ‘their responsibilities’ and act ‘like boys instead of men.’ He believes that black parents need to learn to ‘put away the X-Box’ and get kids to bed at a reasonable hour.”53
Coates maintains that Obama’s policy message to blacks lacks the same “targeted specificity” and instead supports a race-neutral progressive agenda: criminal justice reform, infrastructure investment, improved health care coverage, and jobs for low-income neighborhoods. Coates writes that progressives “mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy. It is not hard to see why that might be the case. Asserting the moral faults of black people tend[s] to gain votes. Asserting the moral faults of their government, not so much.”54 Coates has elsewhere assailed the Obama administration for talking one way to black America—in harsh moral tones—and speaking another way to the rest of the nation by offering public policy to relieve social burdens. Coates concludes that black Americans “deserve more than a sermon. Perhaps they cannot practically receive targeted policy. But surely they have earned something more than targeted scorn.”55
Jelani Cobb, the author of a fine book on Obama, The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress,56 has subtly challenged Obama’s optimistic measure of racial progress while occasionally decrying Obama’s distorted interpretations of black struggle. When the president, in his 2014 speech in Selma, rejected the notion that the Department of Justice report on Ferguson highlighted endemic racism and the belief that little had changed since the sixties, Cobb offered a more expansive historical view.
The President intended to make a useful clarification, yet it’s nearly impossible to overlook the fact that the battles in Selma were animated by a local police force empowered to uphold a racially toxic status quo on behalf of a white minority population. Ferguson’s is not a singular situation. It is an object lesson in the national policing practices that have created the largest incarcerated population in the Western world, as well as a veil of permanent racial suspicion—practices that many people believe will deliver safety in exchange for injustice. What happened in Selma is happening in Ferguson, and elsewhere, too. The great danger is not that we will discount the progress that has been made but that we have claimed it prematurely.57
At times, Cobb has taken note of Obama’s calculated historical omissions to make a point, for example, when Obama overlooked the Civil War and armed black self-defense in arguing that black people got their freedom nonviolently.58 At other times, Cobb has wrestled with the punishing paradox of Obama’s historic ascent—and the refuge he takes in the nation’s thin veneer of law and order even as it burns in the fires of Ferguson—as when he writes that “perhaps the message here is that American democracy has reached the limits of its elasticity—that the symbolic empowerment of individuals, while the great many remain citizen-outsiders, is the best that we can hope for.” Cobb’s indictment of Obama’s not entirely blameless entanglement in the fiery aftermath of Ferguson stings: “The air last night, thick with smoke and gunfire, suggested something damning of the President.”59
Cobb also confronted Obama’s failure, in his August 2013 speech to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, to address the yawning racial chasm that persists five decades after that monumental protest, a failure that riddles the purpose of his office: “That Obama could not—or would not—elucidate his plans to address the intractable realities of race and the economic consequences of those realities . . . calls into question the logic of a black Presidency in itself.” Noting that Obama’s “tendency to chide black America in public appears all the more cynical when compared with his refusal to point to his own responsibilities to that community as Commander-in-Chief,” Cobb directly urged Obama to accountability when he concluded that if “we haven’t yet reached that day Dr. King spoke of, then it’s required of us to ask the President—even a black one—what he’s doing to bring it about.”60
Just as Coates and Cobb offer examples of balanced critique, Cornel West, in his better moments—especially when dealing with the presidency of Bill Clinton, whom West ardently supported in his first term until political disagreements challenged their relationship—can provide adept presidential criticism. West says that he criticized Bill Clinton for his welfare reform and crime legislation, and thus did not support him for reelection in 1996 as he had in 1992, when he gave speeches for the candidate. Yet when Clinton won again, West says, “I spoke at the inauguration for his second term and was invited back to the White House to discuss a range of issues.” West was also part of the group of black thinkers who helped Clinton shape his “mend it, don’t end it” speech on affirmative action.61 West says that despite their differences, he and Clinton “could still talk to each other, still learn from each other, still remain friends.”62 No vicious name-calling, no hurtful epithets in the name of radical purity, just reasonably expressed disagreement that did not preclude friendship and, more important, further support, advising, and conversation, the benefits West objects to when they are offered to Obama.
If black leaders and thinkers have followed different paths in their criticism of Obama, they, and the broader black public, have wrestled with the meaning of Obama’s racial identity in a nation where man
y believed that the first black presidency signaled the end of race. Nothing could be further from the truth.
★| 2 |★
“Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching”
Race, Bi-Race, Post-Race in the Obama Presidency
The private plane of presidential candidate Barack Obama taxied down the runway and came to a stop near the SUV that would ferry him, Obama’s Harvard Law School professor and then adviser Charles Ogletree, and his campaign aide Ertharin Cousin and me to Obama’s New Orleans hotel. Obama was in town to appear at the 2007 Essence Music Festival, where I would endorse him on a pleasant July night before a Superdome crowd of some twenty thousand fans.1 First we had a frank discussion in the car ride to his hotel about how Hillary Clinton was taking him to school during their Democratic presidential candidate debates. My bluntness sent a jolt of tension through the car, but Obama encouraged me to offer honest criticism and to tell him how he could improve. Obama’s penchant for professorial rambling played well in the classroom, I said, but it thudded in the debate forum. Obama ruminated and was sometimes desultory; Clinton was crisp and precise, detailed and deliberate. I suggested he swipe a page from Hillary’s debate manual and wed it to a “blacker” rhetorical style. Obama was good-natured about my criticism even though he was fighting a cold amidst the brutal itinerary of an uphill presidential bid.
Later that night I was set to endorse Obama to a crowd that had just listened to rap star Ludacris end a rousing set with his hit “Money Maker.” The throng had already sampled the gospel stylings of singers Smokie Norful and Vanessa Bell Armstrong, and had taken in the stylish song-and-dance routine of singer Ciara. Later the audience would hear the immortal tunes of rhythm and blues greats the Isley Brothers and the O’Jays. But now the first black candidate with a chance to make real noise in the presidential primaries would interrupt the musical program for a fifteen-minute speech. Obama bounded onstage and made the effort to appeal to his audience. He took easy measure of the black crowd and referred to the civil rights struggle to draw his listeners closer to him.
“An amazing thing happened in Selma,” he said. “People looked at each other and said, ‘That’s not who we are. That’s not what we’re about.’ And that led to a mighty stream of marchers. Our children are waiting for us to take the same kind of action.” Obama made an emotional appeal to the black folk who were still hurting from the horrors of Hurricane Katrina two years before. “After Katrina hit, we had to realize that we were no longer the America we had hoped to be. All the hurricane did was lay bare the fact that we had not dealt with the problems of racism and poverty. The biggest tragedy was that desperate hardship was known here before the hurricane. Poverty double the national average was here before the storm. But here’s the good news: America was ashamed and shocked. Our conscience was awakened. We realized that our politics were broken. Suddenly, the curtain was pulled aside to reveal all that.”2 Despite his efforts that night, a journalist noted, some “have doubted Obama’s broad-based appeal to the African-American community; at the Superdome, he engaged the crowd but failed to captivate, as have Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton in the past.”3
Barack Obama’s rapid rise on the national scene raised similar concerns about his appeal to black America and upset a lot of ideas about race. Some critics wondered if Obama were really “black” and what impact he would have on black life and American politics. Obama’s biracial identity caused even more confusion. Could a black man reared in Hawaii as the son of an African father and a white American mother shift from immigrant’s child to contemporary race man? Many Americans believed that Obama’s election meant we would be completely done with race, that we would be living in a post-racial society. If so, how would he relate to the leaders who had forged the path of progress for black America over the last forty years? Obama’s biography eventually gave him a boost among skeptical whites even as it sparked the suspicion of many blacks. Some blacks wondered whether this relative newcomer could charm white America, especially the white America he’d said did not exist in the 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that made him famous (“There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America”).4 Most blacks quickly gave him the benefit of the doubt. They knew he’d had to say what he said, maybe even had to believe it, if he was going to help make America whole. Even if there were different Americas, they should not exist, and he was smart enough to say this in a way that did not offend most whites. He was not being dishonest, just a bit naïve, perhaps, or maybe even stubbornly hopeful, but was it not that hope that had often brought a new day in this land?
Obama’s high optimism did not keep some black folk from asking if they could trust a man who never got angry or impatient in public. Many more blacks came to believe that his cool demeanor would make him the perfect first black president. Others wondered how any black man or woman who did not sometimes feel anger about the brutal facts of race could be anything but profoundly ignorant of what is really at stake. Or was he just willing to tell white Americans white lies about everything being just fine so they could eat the bread of false brotherhood while many blacks starved from neglect or indifference? Some worried that a half-white man might be halfhearted in speaking for black interests. Before Obama became a supernova in the galaxy of American politics, he was considered an inconspicuous star whose trail brought big questions and grave doubts.
Am I Black Enough for You?
It seems odd that many questioned Obama’s literal blackness from the start, as the New York Times reported a number of blacks were doing in 2007.5 It is easy to understand a wrestling with the politics of blackness but not so much with its genetic makeup. Anthropologists have told us for decades that there is no such thing as “race” beyond the meanings we give it in our society. That does not mean that the definitions of race we create and pass along do not dramatically affect our daily lives. It means only that those definitions do not have a strict biological anchor. There is a far deeper interaction than usually advertised between the cultures we make and the chromosomes we inherit. Both play a role in helping us to understand, or to complicate, racial identity. We must keep this in mind when discussing two related but distinct charges made about Obama: that he was not black, and that he was not black enough. The former argument is dressed in genes, even if it is also cloaked in social and cultural consequences. The latter charge is a political judgment. Its proponents worried whether Obama would sidestep or misuse traditional meanings of blackness passed on by activists and intellectuals alike. Both of these charges about Obama prove that we cannot just search the soil of science for the meanings of blackness; we must also unearth the ground of our political priorities.
Stanley Crouch and Debra Dickerson, two prominent cultural critics, led the charge of Obama’s non-blackness. Crouch and Dickerson have often challenged received wisdom in their politically incorrect views of race, which made it seem likely that they would defend Obama against such charges rather than size him up as one parent and a few genes short of black. Before Obama decided to run, Crouch argued that if he did take the plunge, he would help us understand “the difference between color and ethnic identity.” Crouch said that Obama does not “share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves.” Thus, Crouch contended, “when black Americans refer to Obama as ‘one of us,’ I do not know what they are talking about.” That is because Obama, despite some brushes with the treatment typically doled out to blacks, “cannot claim those problems as his own—nor has he lived the life of a black American.” Crouch maintained that Obama “will have to run as the son of a white woman and an African immigrant,” and that should he become our first black president, “he will have to come into the White House through a side door—which might, at this point, be the only one that’s open.”6
A couple of months later, Debra Dickerson, in the parlance of gambling, saw Crouch’s racial definition and ra
ised him a qualification or two. She had not earlier had “the heart (or the stomach) to point out the obvious: Obama isn’t black.” Like Crouch, she argues that “black” describes those folk descended from West African slaves. There is a big difference, she says, between blacks and “voluntary immigrants of African descent.” Dickerson thus supports Couch’s distinction between color and ethnic identity. To look at them, it is hard to deny that American-born blacks and voluntary immigrants of African descent are both “black” because of color and DNA. But the political and cultural meanings of blackness in this country belong exclusively to American blacks. Dickerson says we “know a great deal about black people” but “next to nothing about immigrants of African descent.” Both sides gain in the bargain of our ignorance of the facts. Black Americans get to claim Obama as one of theirs, and whites get to prove they are not racist by embracing a black man—except, in each case, he is not black in the way we usually mean it. Dickerson concludes that Obama “had no part in our racial history, he is free of it. And once he’s opened the door to even an awkward embrace of candidates of color for the highest offices, the door will stay open. A side door, but an open door.”7
Crouch and Dickerson foresaw the “side door” advantage of Obama’s non-blackness: black Americans rode the coattails of an African immigrant into political places they would never ordinarily see, while Obama took advantage of opportunities forged by those same blacks who have been denied the benefits he enjoys. Crouch and Dickerson also highlight a paradox: even though Obama may represent black interests, when whites accept him they are not accepting American blacks. What they are endorsing instead is an exotic foreign blackness over an unsexy native blackness. This position represents a reversal of the old saying “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” Many whites apparently are willing to take their chances on blacks they do not know rather than the ones they know.8
The Black Presidency Page 5
