Polls indicated that better-educated whites were more willing than their less-educated peers to give Obama a look the first time around in 2008.18 It is widely believed that education lessens white bigotry toward blacks and other minorities. The challenge to such a belief can be glimpsed in some well-educated whites who cling to narrow views of race and disturbing beliefs about black folk. But many white Americans proudly embraced Obama as the last best hope of a healthy American politics. Some whites viewed Obama as a heroic progressive, a claim harder to sustain as he got closer to the center so he could get closer to the White House.19
A drawback to Obama’s adoption of a cosmopolitan black identity was that it led some whites naïvely to believe that his success signaled the end of racism. Former New York mayor and Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani—who controversially argued in the aftermath of Ferguson in 2014 that black-on-black crime was the reason white cops were heavily posted in black communities—said on air the night of Obama’s election in 2008 that his victory would move the nation beyond “the whole idea of race and racial separation and unfairness.”20 Other whites did not quite believe that the death knell of racism had been sounded in a single election. But they did hope that Obama’s election would quench racial passion and suspend the need to obsess any longer over race. However the idea got prepared and cooked, millions of Americans feasted on the notion of pushing past race to a post-racial era. That is because blacks and whites are both racially exhausted, but for strikingly different reasons, most of which have to do with clashing stories about the roots and spread of racism, our greatest social malady.
It is hard to believe that the election of a single black man could do away with hundreds of years of bigotry or that his success could wash away the hurt and humiliation that stain the American soul. But post-race rests on an opportunistic paradox: Obama was seen as an exceptional black man who was not quite like most other blacks, but enough like them to relieve white guilt in his election. By voting for Obama, many whites seemed to believe they could collectively clear themselves of the racist charge that had been unfairly hung on them for all the misdeeds of their predecessors. It was as if the sins of the nation were cleansed by his ascension on high, thus bypassing all the ugly business of suffering and death that usually precede such elevation. In fact most discussion of post-race proves we desire resurrection on the cheap: the nation wants quickly to silence talk about race’s role in slaughtering black opportunity in the name of selfish group advancement, and then peg its hopes for forgiveness on the body of a figure who absolves it of its transgressions in exchange for his coronation, and his agreement not to talk too much about the original sin of race. Obama has largely kept faith with this scenario.
One of the damaging beliefs held up by Obama’s two presidential victories is that there was enough racial offense to go around, and that, in recent times at least, there was equal suffering on both sides of the racial divide. Many whites acknowledge that black folk suffered slavery and Jim Crow apartheid a long time ago. But they also want it known that whites are often wrongly thought of as racist, that their good efforts to end racism are grossly underappreciated, and that whites have been unjustly harmed by affirmative action in the name of black progress. For many whites, the problem is thinking about race at all, not how current thinking about race may be tied to the problems of the past. For these folk there is just as much harm in present efforts to fix what is wrong with race as there is in the existence of old-style racism, which is pretty much the only kind that can be admitted to have existed, since it points the finger away from contemporary whites. Who wants to attend to ugly and entrenched habits that scar the national landscape and grapple with deeply unjust structures that corrupt politics and culture?
A willful immaturity in the Age of Obama stalls contemporary discussions of race and makes it seem that talking about racism is just as bad as racism itself. If the obstacles of the past have been wiped away, the logic goes, then so should the language of race disappear, or be banished. But racism is tricky; it infiltrates language and culture, since those are its original wombs; and it hibernates, and awakens to yawn, and then roar, in institutions like schools and churches, and in structures like the social order and the legal system. Hard-nosed critics who point this out are often blasted for not moving on and accepting the racial success before their very eyes. Obama made this charge during the racial fallout in 2014 from protests against police killings of unarmed black men, saying: “I think an unwillingness to acknowledge that progress has been made cuts off the possibility of further progress. If critics want to suggest that America is inherently and irreducibly racist, then why bother even working on it?”21 (Perhaps Obama forgot his passionate 1990 introduction of Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell at a rally in support of Bell’s demand that the law school hire a tenured black female professor, where Obama applauded Bell for “speaking the truth” and for his “excellence of . . . scholarship” that led, two years later, to Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well, a book whose subtitle suggests the nation’s persistent plague: The Permanence of Racism.)22 The greatest impediment to progress in this atmosphere is seen as black folk who will not stop talking about race instead of working hard like Barack Obama to succeed. If he can be president, then any black person can do anything. If blacks fail, it is not because there are lingering racial barriers; it is because they are unwilling to take advantage of ample opportunities to thrive.
Black Americans have put forth their own take on such a belief. From the moment Obama was elected president, blacks proclaimed that they had “no excuses” not to dream bigger or to reach higher on account of Obama’s success. It was downright inspiring to feel the electricity for excellence circulate even more intensely among blacks because Obama had taken the White House without asking for pity or offering any excuse. This gives the lie to those who claim black people do not get excited over the prospect of individual success. The smartest blacks know they can take heart and draw incentive from Obama’s example while admitting that many more Barack Obamas could emerge if they had the opportunity to shine. Barack Obama is not the first black person capable of being president; he is the first black person to get a chance to prove it. When it comes to opportunity it is a two-they street: they, black people, should certainly do all they can to succeed, and they, white people, should do all they can to remove barriers to success.
Comedian Chris Rock brilliantly captures in a 2015 New York magazine interview the paradox of progress as a barometer of American race relations in brutally honest terms that Obama could never utter:
When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before . . . There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years . . .
The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps on producing nicer white people.23
It is easy to see why many blacks have also been seduced by the notion that they have simply got to stop talking about race as much as possible. That is different, by the way, from doing everything they can to make sure that race is not a problem they need to discuss. Many blacks feel that if they are going to succeed, they have got to put the kibosh on race talk and try to better themselves by relying on personal, not social, struggle. This stance rests on common sense as much as conviction, since most whites are fed up with blacks who will not do otherwise. The outlines of black aspiration thus trace the level of white tolerance. Many white Americans say that pure merit determines who gets jobs and school admissions. Such a claim is doubtful when we consider the role of class and legac
ies in school admissions. And knowing somebody who knows somebody often determines who gets the job—and most of those somebodies are white.24 Most black folk without these advantages have little choice but to adjust to things as they are and make the best of it. Others take the time to point to obvious flaws in such an arrangement and bear the stigma for having had the courage to say so. And many blacks do both.
It is clear that racial progress has been made in America when courageous blacks and their brave white allies defy the logic of the age to move forward. It is easily forgotten that common sense during the height of segregation counseled against black and white interaction. But the walls of separation fell when folk worked together to prove the unfairness of unearned white privilege and undeserved black suffering. It was terribly unpopular for blacks and whites to denounce the notion of black inferiority and oppose the belief that blacks deserved their lowly spot in the social order. Many blacks were afraid to speak and act on their own behalf; many whites preferred the strong, silent black who endured oppression without complaint.
Most people who identify with the Obama epoch think that, had they been alive at the peak of American apartheid, they would have been on the right side of history. Most blacks think they would have been bravely articulate and would have rebelled against the injustice around them. And most whites feel that they would have certainly cut blacks some slack and tried to do the right thing. It is easy to project our heroism into a past that is not invulnerable to revision. But the past is nevertheless not available to present efforts to change historical outcomes. We find it difficult to face up to the challenges of our present racial era and to determine just how much we should risk to uphold the ideals that got us this far.
Some blacks who have “made it” take refuge in a narrative of racial progress that dismisses the need to discuss race all that much. Obama cannot be spared here; in 2009 he scolded Attorney General Eric Holder for saying that we are a “nation of cowards” because we avoid honest talk about race. Obama said, “I think it’s fair to say that if I had been advising my attorney general, we would have used different language,” and offered, “I’m not somebody who believes that constantly talking about race somehow solves racial tensions.”25 This made little sense when Obama said it, and it was even less persuasive in the tense wake of two grand juries in Missouri and New York failing to indict police offers for killing unarmed blacks.
Some white liberals think that too much is made of race by black folk who refuse to admit that guilting white folk into line will not work. It is difficult to know the difference between legitimate complaints of too many bullhorns and marches, and white resentment of blacks who look now like pests but who may be seen in the future as prophets. Martin Luther King Jr. had the same kind of mud thrown at him when he walked the earth, yet after he died, he was replanted in the social landscape as a saint and martyred hero. But a big line in the sand has been drawn between those blacks who are willing to get over, and beyond, race and those who are viewed as stuck on race, and therefore stuck in the past. If we are to trust the moral arc of such a narrative, it is the difference between Barack Obama and his Joshua generation of leaders, and Jesse Jackson and his cohort in the Moses generation. If Jackson’s generation is bitterly hitched to the race post, then Obama’s generation is supposed to be blithely post-race.
Old Heads and New Thoughts
No group of blacks at first proved more cantankerous or troubled by Obama’s new blackness and the politics it gave rise to than leaders from the civil rights era. If Obama hailed from the self-proclaimed Joshua generation, the elders from the Moses generation were not yet ready to pass the torch or vacate the scene. And yet it is the Moses generation that has given Obama the fire to embrace blackness and to resist the post-racial myth. This fire is evident in Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, when he—apple of the post-racial eye—goes sour grapes on the notion of a post-race America:
When I hear commentators interpreting my [2004 Democratic Convention] speech to mean that we have arrived at a “postracial politics” or that we already live in a colorblind society, I have to offer a word of caution. To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longer matters—that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minorities face in this country today are largely self-inflicted. We know the statistics: On almost every single socioeconomic indicator, from infant mortality to life expectancy to employment to home ownership, black and Latino Americans in particular continue to lag far behind their white counterparts. In corporate boardrooms across America, minorities are grossly underrepresented; in the United States Senate, there are only three Latinos and two Asian members (both from Hawaii), and as I write today I am the chamber’s sole African American. To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in these disparities is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience—and to relieve ourselves of the responsibility to make things right.26
An older generation of black leaders was shoved into Barack Obama’s shadow as the spotlight flooded the new best-selling author and political phenomenon. When shafts of light occasionally fell across their grim faces, only their warts stood out. They had helped black folk survive by their redeeming actions and heroic sacrifices. They had urged black folk to fight back against a society that stole their black humanity and made blacks believe they were not even worth the fight to reclaim it. But now many were distracted by a nagging selfishness; others were plagued by a tendency to define their struggles as “the people’s” struggles. Like hip hop artist Kanye West, they let their egos balloon as they did great work. And they could be petty and insanely jealous in scuffling with one another to be Head Negro in Charge.
Many blacks clamored for new blood and new thought. Martin Luther King had been dead for forty years, Jesse Jackson had run a valiant race, and Al Sharpton had pressed his way forward. (Sharpton is interesting because he straddles generations: only seven years Obama’s senior, he is a throwback to an earlier era of racial brinkmanship.) But some of the older men would not loosen their grip on resources, and put a vertical hold on emerging leaders. There can be little argument that black leadership has often been a patriarchal party where women and young people are expected to be wallflowers. While many blacks still hungered for the uplifting race advocacy they got from older leaders, whose unapologetic love for the people made blacks willing to tolerate their flaws, it is little wonder that new black leaders wanted to forsake the old ways, and the old men, and give greater account of themselves in running governments and organizations. If Obama was cut from a different cloth, many wondered if he could fit black needs into his pocket as he strode into the mainstream.
Obama was not the only leader to stoke the ire of civil rights stalwarts. Some of them disapproved of Newark mayor, now New Jersey senator, Cory Booker; Washington, D.C., mayor Adrian Fenty, another biracial political wonder; Alabama congressman Artur Davis; and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. The schism between old and new leaders is of course universal, but this iteration was made all the more dramatic by Obama’s unprecedented ascendance.
Questions about Obama’s blackness had obviously migrated from genetics and anthropology to politics: How would he stack up against the best black leaders of the past? Would Obama play ball for blacks when he seemed to be fielding offers from neoliberals and conservative centrists, among other teams? Many black folk gave Obama the thumbs-down at first because they did not want to splurge on another symbolic presidential candidacy. Commentators did not seem to understand that black people were tired of symbols and wanted a real win as much as the next citizen. Blacks had proved their reluctance to believe by their weak support for the 2004 presidential bids of Sharpton and former Illinois senator Carol Moseley Braun. Blacks were not sure at first whether white political forces that did not know black folk, or care about their interests, had propped up Obama.
The black old guard was especially hard to convince because most of them did not know Obama persona
lly. Some who did know him could not be sure that he would have the backs of blacks when it mattered. He had not shown much interest in fellowshipping with many black politicians. Obama sensed from the beginning that he would have more luck with the white mainstream if he was not seen as one of “them,” and here one can take one’s pick: angry apostle of black grievance, shrill rhetorician of black resentment, or advocate for “black” as opposed to “American” interests. Obama’s reading of the white mainstream proved the advantage of his half whiteness: he knew intimately the ways and desires, the fears and frustrations of white folk. His biracial background, as we have seen, made him a kind of racial arbiter who could move shrewdly among blacks and safely among whites, though not without controversy or glitches.
While other black politicians did not mind barking at the big dogs of American politics, Obama wanted to run with them before eventually leading the pack. To take the lead, he would have to zoom to the front of the political mainstream by gaining distance on traditional black politicians. He also needed to tap a natural black constituency that would be his to lose once he could convince it that he was worth the vote. First, he had to prove he had the backing of the white mainstream and could make whites stay with the (Democratic) party that he would lead with their support. Only then would black leaders, who wanted desperately to support a black winner, sign on.
The Black Presidency Page 7
