The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  The largest cluster of black political stars at first formed around Senator Hillary Clinton, including civil rights legend and Georgia congressman John Lewis and congresswomen Sheila Jackson Lee from Houston and Stephanie Tubbs Jones from Cleveland. In her 2008 presidential run Clinton had a special rapport with black female politicians, who bonded with the former first lady on concerns of race and gender. Clinton benefited from the considerable goodwill that her husband, Bill, had built among black folk. She also worked quickly to establish her own political footprint in black communities by addressing critical issues from racial profiling to funding for higher education. Hillary rapidly became the front-runner among blacks. She did not lose her lead until Bill Clinton unleashed a series of racially charged inferences during campaign appearances which eroded the Clintons’ standing with African Americans. Obama had already pulled off his miracle win in Iowa and was now attracting millions of blacks, forever changing the American political game.

  It is telling that Obama could shake the civil rights establishment to its core even though it is hardly a monolithic cast of characters. Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson are both great leaders who are quite different from each other: the former came out of the black middle class to fight the bloody war against inequality, while the latter rose from the ghetto to blunt racism’s reach. Yet both men seemed at loggerheads with Obama. Young, on a local Atlanta cable television show in late 2007, humorously handicapped his chances for the nation’s top political prize. “I want Barack Obama to be president,” Young said, adding, after a dramatic pause, “in 2016.” Young argued that Obama lacked the political network that the Clintons could call on to get elected. “There are more black people that Bill and Hillary lean on,” Young insisted. “You cannot be president alone . . . To put a brother in there by himself is to set him up for crucifixion. His time will come and the world will be ready for a visionary leadership.” Young said that Obama did not have the maturity to mix it up politically and to endure the battles that come with the turf. “It’s not a matter of being inexperienced,” Young stated. “It’s a matter of being young. There’s a certain level of maturity . . . you’ve got to learn to take a certain amount of shit.” Finally, in a notoriously bawdy assessment of Obama’s fitness for office, Young declared that “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.” Young issued a quick disclaimer: “I’m clowning.”27

  Young’s comments simmered with angst. Here was an aging freedom fighter apparently overwhelmed by how quickly the world of black politics could shift, with hardly any notice at all, not into a different gear but into a completely different orbit. It was intriguing to watch Young argue that Obama was too young to be president. Young cut his teeth in the movement alongside the most valiant freedom fighter ever, a young man who gained his first fame at twenty-six and violently gave up the ghost before he was forty. Martin Luther King strode toward freedom in a history-changing bus boycott as the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. He did not do so as head of First Baptist Church in Chattanooga only because, after tossing his hat in the ring to lead the congregation, he’d come up short, likely because that parish’s leaders deemed him too youthful.28 Young could not seem to make sense of Obama’s candidacy and did not seem to realize that he was betraying his own biography in order to make his objections ring true.

  There is no doubt that the Clintons had superior black connections at the time, except Young neglected to mention just how skillfully, and sometimes duplicitously, Bill Clinton had exploited that network, using it to great advantage when he needed to, or discarding it at the drop of a hat—or a Justice Department nomination, in Lani Guinier’s case. Using Jesse Jackson’s annual convention in 1992 to score a hat trick of racial demonology, Clinton crudely manipulated rapper and activist Sister Souljah’s words about the ’92 Los Angeles rebellion to make it appear that she was a racist urging the death of white Americans; he distanced himself from Jesse Jackson while ensuring the leader could no longer force white Democrats to bend to his will, thus doing to Jackson what Jackson later imagined doing to Obama—cutting off his power at its source; and he signaled to white suburbia that it mattered just as much as urban black America. His actions were at once crafty and cynical; they perfectly forecast Clinton’s stormy efforts to rain down his subversive magic on Obama on behalf of his wife in the 2008 campaign. (Times have changed: as gifted a racial alchemist as Clinton was, he became, during Obama’s first presidential run, wan and disposable among the masses of blacks he had once effortlessly charmed.)

  Young was plain wrong that Obama had not built a network, or at least was not quickly doing so, not just among black folk but among as broad a sweep of Americans, from crabgrass communities to cyberspace outposts, as any black, or for that matter any American, politician had ever canvassed. Obama roped in millions of young black folk even as older blacks increasingly heard his siren call. If Young could be forgiven for not knowing that these people would support Obama, he and other black politicians probably could not forgive themselves for having failed to inspire such a voter-rich demographic to come out to the polls for the first time.

  Young’s contention that Bill was as black as Barack really says more than it seems to on the surface. To say that a white man is as black as a black man is to say that the black man is not as black as the white man, since the black man should have been blacker than the white man because he got a head start at birth. In the addled game of racial authenticity, there is no such thing as a black man winning by merely tying a white man. The tie goes to the runner, and while Obama was just stepping up to the plate and taking a swing at being black in public, Clinton had been on base for a while with blacks. According to Young, he had been scoring as well with black women, which proved his blackness, though such a sexist measure of authenticity might seem more likely to spill from the lips of rapper Young Jeezy than from Andrew Young. It may have been a sly and sexually denigrating way of calling a spade less than a spade; Obama did not get the benefit of racial doubt because of his political pedigree. And whether Young intended it or not, Obama’s biracial roots, or at the very least his complicated racial journey, was in question.

  Young’s painfully adolescent words could not quite be believed as mere comic bluster. As the old black folk say, one can be “crackin’ but factin’”; in other words, jokes do not completely disguise the truth. At times Obama did not take such not-black-enough accusations lying down, as when he rebuked those who challenged his role in black politics during his first Selma speech in 2007 at Brown Chapel: “So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.” The simple truth is, there was a new sheriff in town, and neither Young nor his fading gerontocracy had grandfathered him in. Young and company lost their bearings; old racial landmarks receded, and up sprang cyber-links that heralded a new black political energy and a true rainbow coalition.

  One might think that the rainbow sign would endear Obama to fellow Chicagoan Jesse Jackson, but from the start there seemed to be an uneasy alliance between Jackson’s Obi-Wan Kenobi and Obama’s Luke Skywalker. The Force was immortally summoned by Jackson’s historic presidential campaigns in ’84 and ’88. Jackson made the very idea of a black president reasonable in many quarters where the belief had barely existed at all. Jackson tirelessly evangelized the nation with his circuit-riding defense of poor blacks and whites, correcting the myopia that segregated politics by pigment. Jackson built bridges into Latino communities and energized a flagging labor movement to fuel the most viable progressive movement in a generation. His unforeseen success in 1984, along with the Democratic Party’s drubbing at the polls that year, and Jackson’s insistence on greater transparency in the nominating process, led to rule changes that linked delegate count and electoral strength. Convention delegates would now be awarded according to a candidate’s share of the popular vote in state primaries. While Jackson got only 20 percent of the
popular vote in ’84, the change of rules he inspired doubled his percentage of delegates in ’88. That change, along with the creation of majority-minority legislative districts that owed a debt to Jackson’s relentless voter registration drives, opened the way for Obama’s victory twenty years later.29

  Jackson endorsed Obama early enough, but he had little choice to do otherwise. If he had not signed on, he would have been viewed as a “hater” who could not stomach being eclipsed by the first black candidate with a superb chance of taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Jackson had been cordial to Obama as he gained momentum on the local scene. Obama at first was appropriately deferential to Jackson as black America’s Big Kahuna. Jackson felt the tug of his own blood to pitch camp with Obama. Jackson’s daughter Santita was a close friend of Obama’s wife, Michelle, and godmother to the Obamas’ older daughter, Malia, and Jackson’s congressman son Jesse Jr. and Obama shared a brand of politics more subtle than Jackson’s brash tactics of confrontation. Jackson fils had been appreciative of his father’s pioneering path, but he barely attempted to disguise his frustration with the lack of accountability he spotted in old-style black leadership. This view brought the younger Jackson and Obama into rough sync; Jesse Jr. served as a national co-chair of Obama’s presidential campaign. Congressman Jackson admonished and cajoled his colleagues to Obama’s side in getting out the black vote.

  No one was fiercer in defending Obama against the black old guard than Jesse Jr., although it grew increasingly uncomfortable to see him sparring publicly with his father. When Jackson père chastised all the presidential candidates other than John Edwards in a newspaper column for failing to address the plight of black America, including the Jena Six—a group of black teens charged with attempted murder in Jena, Louisiana, for beating up a white student after three nooses were found hanging from a tree on school grounds in 2006—Jesse Jr. responded with a letter published in the Chicago Sun-Times titled “You’re Wrong on Obama, Dad.” Claiming to have witnessed “Obama’s powerful, consistent and effective advocacy for African Americans,” Jesse Jr. argued that Obama “is deeply rooted in the black community, having fought for social justice and economic inclusion throughout his life.” He said that on the campaign trail, as in the U.S. Senate, and in the Illinois state legislature before that, “Obama has addressed many of the issues facing African Americans out of personal conviction, rather than political calculation.”30 The last phrase of the last sentence no doubt stung a bit more because it took aim at his father’s perceived opportunism. It did not help that a South Carolina newspaper reporter alleged that Jackson père had accused Obama of “acting like he’s white” when Obama offered a tepid written response to the charges against the Jena Six by saying simply that they were “inappropriate.”31

  The ugliest blow of all came when Jesse Jr. responded angrily after the elder Jackson, ticked because he believed Obama had offered moral lectures to black folk while extending hope and promises to other communities, uncorked his disgust at Obama’s appearance on Father’s Day in 2008 at a black church in Chicago where the presidential candidate took black fathers to task in a widely cited campaign speech. Before he went on air at Fox News Channel to discuss health care with fellow panelist Reed V. Tuckson, a health executive, a rolling camera and live microphone recorded the elder Jackson’s whispered desire to “cut [Obama’s] nuts off” for “talking down to black people” while also capturing the slicing gesture that accompanied his wounding words. Fox host Bill O’Reilly broke the story a few days later and then covered it on his evening broadcast. Jesse Jr. was irate, knowing that whatever negative thing his namesake did reflected poorly on him.

  “I’m deeply outraged and disappointed in Reverend Jackson’s reckless statements about Senator Barack Obama,” Jesse Jr. said in a press statement. “Reverend Jackson is my dad and I’ll always love him. He should know how hard that I’ve worked for the last year and a half as a national co-chair of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. So, I thoroughly reject and repudiate his ugly rhetoric. He should keep hope alive and any personal attacks and insults to himself.”32 It was an instance of a proud but aging king of the jungle having to hear the roar of a new pride of lions. Sadly, Jesse Jr.’s ferocious defense of Obama did not ultimately reap much dividend for the younger Jackson. It could even be said that Obama hung Jesse Jr. out to dry at a critical juncture in Jackson’s career. Not only was Jesse Jr.’s name not on a list of suitable candidates to fill out president-elect Obama’s Senate term, but also Obama failed to offer a single note of public consolation to Jesse Jr., or to vouch for him in any way, when he faced severe legal questioning about his role in seeking to replace Obama in the Senate. Obama remained silent during the younger Jackson’s legal ordeal, which eventually led to his 2013 conviction for wire and mail fraud and a thirty-month federal prison sentence.33

  Obama realized that the fallout over the senior Jackson’s slashing statement was a big win for him. Some younger black politicians and activists viewed Jackson as still valuable, if also hopelessly old-school. Many whites viewed him as part of the problem rather than the solution to the race issue, although a number admired him. The Obama camp could not afford to write him off; criticizing Jackson in public would be disrespectful and costly among those who highly regarded Jackson as well as Obama. Jackson’s intemperate remarks gave Obama and his campaign the cover they needed. Clearly they could not put him to work on the campaign trail now lest he go off and say something that did not capture Obama’s nouveau black politics or represent his foreign policy views.

  Jackson’s and Obama’s clashing responses to the not-guilty verdict in the trial of white New York City policemen accused of murdering a black man, Sean Bell, the day before his November 2006 wedding in a hail of fifty bullets in New York is instructive about the former concern. Jackson called the shooting “a massacre” and said the verdicts were “a travesty of justice,” while Obama said, “The judge has made his ruling, and we’re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down.”34 As for the latter concern, when Jackson allegedly said in an interview that Obama would reverse decades of American foreign policy that put Israel’s interests first in the Middle East, the Obama camp shot back that Jackson was not a spokesman for the campaign and reassured Israel that its status would be supremely safe with Obama. Jackson was officially on the roster as an early endorser, but he was relegated to the injured reserve list, never seeing any playing time, a snub that chafed the civil rights superstar.

  Without lifting a finger, the Obama camp gained another advantage from the reverend’s cutting comments: Jackson’s public embarrassment almost guaranteed that he would tone down even his aboveboard criticisms of the candidate. If he had had the chance to criticize Obama openly without risking the wrath of black America, Jackson would not have had to whisper his disapproval. The presidential candidate got a boon in Jackson’s offer of a severed package: Obama need not publicly humiliate the wounded giant; he simply had to let him cook in his own juices. His gracious acceptance of Jackson’s apology for his “crude and hurtful” remarks was back-ended by Obama’s defiant insistence that he would continue to demand responsibility of black fathers. Jackson’s powerful criticism of Obama’s moral rampaging in black communities was smothered in the blizzard of bad press over Jackson’s ill-chosen words. Obama thus escaped responsibility for his one-sided demand for responsibility. It would hardly be the last time that Obama issued an imbalanced call for racial responsibility.

  If Obama only reluctantly and cagily tipped his hat at first to civil rights heavyweights like Jackson and Sharpton, he carefully choreographed a shrewd two-step: he leapfrogged past them to speak often of Martin Luther King Jr., channeling the dead hero’s oratorical optimism and embracing the inspiration behind the old guard leaders while avoiding association with their perceived stains or stunts. It was only after Sharpton offered surprising support to Obama’s campaign, largely by not becoming a liability and remaining relatively sile
nt on the sidelines, that he later became the president’s favorite black leader.

  Obama would not have made it to the mountaintop, however, if a great cloud of witnesses had not cheered him on, and if noble leaders and flawed emissaries of racial redemption and political change had not paved the way. In short, Obama weaved in and out of the same tradition that produced Jackson and Shirley Chisholm, and before them, figures like Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Mary McLeod Bethune, Elijah Muhammad, Dorothy Height, Malcolm X, and Dr. King. If Obama’s rise did not signal the end of these leaders’ importance, neither did his ascendance mean the problems they confronted had gone away. It quickly became clear that Obama’s election did not end racism, the civil rights movement, the struggle for black equality—or the careers of Jackson and Sharpton and thousands of other local and national leaders. Obama’s success was fueled in large measure by the freedom urges of black folk that were expressed, but not exhausted, in Obama’s victory. The post-racial ideal hardly encompassed black aspirations or Obama’s historic achievement.

  Post-Racial, Post-Racist, and the Fictions of Race

  A post-racial outlook seeks to ignore, or destroy, race; a post-racist outlook seeks to destroy racism. There is more than semantics in the balance. Race may be a fiction, but like all good fiction, say, Moby-Dick or The Color Purple, it may be true even when it is not real. To be sure, what is true or false about race is often determined by what is at moral and social stake for us; those interests shape what stories we tell ourselves about the condition and worth of our society. Race is intimately yoked to our values and self-image as a culture. The idea of race can be tracked up the mountain of philosophy, and traced into the depths of politics and power where fear and fantasy mingle.