The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  After telling the story of his biracial roots, applauding the aspirations of ordinary Americans, and praising the virtues of democracy, all in measured tones, he built steadily and rhythmically, with shifting cadences and varied registers, to a climax that exploded in lines of warning to cynics who would divide the country into blue and red states, thinking that they had color-coded the country’s ideological divorce: “Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States”—a slight pause, on beat, for more emphasis still—“of America.” (I have questioned the motives behind Obama’s “not a black America and a white America” assertion, but there’s no questioning his delivery.) Obama capped his oration with a device often used by black preachers in backwoods and urban pulpits alike: anaphora, or repeating the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive sentences. “I believe that we can give our middle class relief . . . I believe we can provide jobs for the jobless . . . I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs.”

  Martin Luther King Jr. relied heavily on anaphora, especially in the “I have a dream” refrain of his most famous speech. Obama used it to brilliant effect after he won a surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses against Hillary Rodham Clinton: “They said this day would never come. They said”—this time he stretched the word in sweet glissando, as one effortlessly glides from one pitch to another, which in Obama’s case was higher, but in other famous cases is lower, as with boxing announcer Michael Buffer saluting a heavyweight champion of the world, scaling invariably down on the word “world” as if he were sliding on the ropes from a knockout punch—“our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided.”11 But of course it was not, because a black man had pulled off an unlikely upset in a nearly all-white state.

  Like King, Obama can be heard reversing the strategy of anaphora and instead milking the pleasures of epistrophe, in which a speaker repeats the same word or phrase at the end of successive sentences. A mere five days after his win in the Iowa caucus, after barely losing the New Hampshire primary to a surging Clinton, Obama rallied his troops and thrilled the nation. It all came down to a bit of verbal alchemy conjured by his young speechwriter Jon Favreau, in a phrase pinched from United Farm Workers leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta that Obama trumpeted with stirring, even defiant confidence at the end of several serial clauses: “Yes we can.” Obama argued that this creed “was written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.” On he went for several more sentences, and then ended with “three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can.”12

  This is not to say that Obama has mastered every type of public communication. He beat John McCain in debates leading up to the 2008 general election, but Hillary Clinton often bested Obama and his male colleagues in their Democratic primary debates. Moreover, Obama’s speech is sprinkled with hiccups and hitches, “ahs” and “ums”—a verbal tic encouraged, no doubt, in academe, where one learns to be extremely cautious, reluctant to offer sweeping statements without justification, and where arguments sometimes die the death of a thousand qualifications.

  But there may be more to Obama’s “ahs” than meets the ear. Obama’s speech, like that of other blacks, may be pressured by his awareness that what he says will be nearly infinitely parsed. To be sure, that is true for most politicians. But it is even truer for a black politician, even one who, like Obama, has gained fame for his ability to talk. We all found this out when, at the end of a press conference on health care reform early in his first term, President Obama let on that he thought the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates in his home. Those two words ignited a week’s worth of national controversy and conversation on race.

  We got a glimpse of the surprise at black verbal facility in 2007, when presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden made his gaffe about Obama being “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”13 It was not the fact that Biden called out Obama’s ability to talk that raised eyebrows among blacks; it was the fact that in his view, and perhaps that of millions more, Obama was the first “articulate” and bright African American to chase the presidency. Behind his praise of Obama was an assumption concerning the vices of black speech, a suspicion of its ability to be eloquent or analytical.

  Obama took no offense at Biden’s words—after all, he later chose Biden to be his running mate—but called them “historically inaccurate.” Black presidential candidates including Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Al Sharpton, he said, had given “a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”14 Obama understood that his gifts made him an extension of, not an exception to, the group. I explore later in this book how much Obama’s insight about speech translates to the world of politics.

  Obama’s speechmaking and oral signifying reflect the beauty and power of black rhetoric—its peculiar rules and regulations, its sites and sounds, its labyrinth of complicated meanings, its bedazzling linguistic variety, its undulating cadences, and its irreverent challenges to “proper” grammar. As linguists Geneva Smitherman and H. Samy Alim cogently argue, Obama would not be president of the United States of America without being a past master of black (American) rhetoric.15

  To say that he spoke his way into office is not to reduce Obama’s achievement to his ability to speak “standard” English. It is a lot more complicated than that. Language is as big as politics, as large as the geography that encompasses the American populace and the demographics that dot the national landscape. Obama’s achievement, likewise, is bigger than adding up the parts of speech he uses. It is also about understanding the cultural traditions that feed and shape his linguistic appetites. It is about knowing the racial practices against which that speech is pitched. It is about engaging the racial environments in which speech is formed. It is about knowing that black speech is always about much more than what things are said but about how those things are said. And how those things are said involves, of course, the mechanics of grammar, the intonations, the pace, and the flow of black rhetoric, but it includes as well the political and social realities that weigh on the tongue as mightily as the local dialects and accents that rumble in the mouths of citizens.

  How black folk are heard makes a big difference in how black folk are perceived in the minds of those with the power to make decisions about their existence. Beliefs about blacks invariably get focused on what they are talking about, and how they are talking about it, and all of that is seen as an index of their intelligence and humanity, their stupidity and savagery. Language means that for other folk too, but just not as intensely, or with as much weight, as for blacks, at least in the United States. The social horizons of black people widen or narrow through words that flow from their mouths; their destinies are shaped by how those words are heard. Still, it is odd, even dispiriting, that the broad public remains largely ignorant of black oral and verbal performance.

  Even the most powerful man in the world cannot escape how black speech is heard and read. No matter how high Obama ascends, he is brought back down to the inescapable fact of his blackness and the way he speaks it fluently in white contexts not used to hearing blackness as much as exploiting it. No matter what others think of black language and its rudiments and permutations, in Obama’s mouth they have to hear it in their ears, on their televisions and radios, as black speech—as his black speech invades their politics, contaminates their legislative bodies, and is fidgeted over and parsed by the Supreme Court, whether it involves the Affordable Care Act or the Voting Rights Act. Obama’s black speech has now become America’s way of speaking and of being heard by the world. That may be why, in part, there is such resistance to Obama’s policies, bec
ause those policies are rooted in black speech: there is a lot of resistance to the uppity character of black speech, no matter how free it is of “Negro dialect,” as Senator Harry Reid memorably phrased it.16

  The far-right Tea Party and the conspiracy theorist birthers despise Obama so much that they want to banish him from Americanness. They want metaphoric sovereignty—well, perhaps they really want the sovereignty of metaphor—over Obama’s body: they want to unbirth his existence, uproot him from American soil, foreclose against his house of American identity and offer him a subprime loan of American political capital. The big problem is that Obama has set the terms, symbolically, and sometimes literally, for how America behaves (mind you, that is not a small problem for progressives, who accuse him of rubber-stamping imperialist agendas), and thus they must challenge his legitimacy to act in such an authoritative fashion. Despite the claim of the right wing that it is pro-life, it wants to retroactively abort Obama’s existence, purge him from the record as unofficial and illegitimate, remove his legislation from the books, repeal “Obamacare,” and wipe the record clean of his political speech. Wiping away his political words also means wiping away his cultural and racial words, the way his body and mouth have left their mark all over America. Obama beat his opponents, and not a few of his ideological allies, politically as well as culturally. He not only licked his opponents with his politics but also licked them with his tongue. The thought is just too ugly for most of them to abide.

  Obama must be heard, and understood, in a broader, blacker context, because that blacker context is both in a class by itself and American to the core, as American as Louis Armstrong and Michael Jordan, as American as Condoleezza Rice and Toni Morrison. That blackness is not limiting but freeing; not closed but open; not rigid but fluid. Obama fits along a continuum of black expression and, depending on the circumstance, slides easily from one end to the other, from vernacular to “proper” expression, from formal to informal, from high-tone to gutter-dense, from specifying to signifying in the blink of an “I.” Obama’s “I” is both black and biracial, both American and international. It is not the beginning of isolation but the start of a new quest for national identity joined to the long pilgrimage of global identity that borrows from centuries of speaking and existing. In the process, a lot of switches are being flipped: codes, styles, media, frames, cultures, and races.

  There are echoes in Obama of the rigors and ecstasies of the black speech of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and of course Martin Luther King Jr., all of which harken to the black church. But the complex signifying, verbal devices, oratorical talents, and rhetorical mastery taken for granted in the black church, for instance, are largely unknown outside it. Yet there is a linguistic trace in Obama’s speech that leads straight to the black pulpit.

  The Divided Legacy of a Prophet

  Obama’s “audacity of hope” is a phrase that my late, beloved pastor, Frederick Sampson, who ministered at Detroit’s Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, first uttered in a sermon many years ago, and that renowned Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright repeated in a sermon that Obama heard.17 Long before he was ambushed by right-wing ideologues and media hacks for his infamous rhetorical demand in a homily that “God damn America,” Wright offered Obama a compelling vision of Christian manhood and enjoyed a national reputation as a remarkable pulpit orator.

  In a 1993 poll conducted by Ebony magazine naming the nation’s fifteen greatest black preachers, Wright was second only to legendary pulpiteer the Reverend Gardner Taylor.18 Wright’s preaching genius derives from a mix of numerous strengths. He is one of the most intellectually sophisticated and scholarly ministers in the land. He reads widely and thinks deeply about the pressing religious and social issues that cram his sermons. He possesses a musical voice with intonations brilliantly regulated during the course of his sermon delivery, rising and falling as emotion and circumstance dictate. His diction is flawless and his articulation is precise. Wright’s international range of reference reflects his command of several languages. Wright is not afraid to draw on black vernacular to clarify his prophetic point. He moves effortlessly from the streets to the sanctuary in illustrating the social sweep of the Christian gospel. And he is unparalleled in the pulpit in tying black theology to black culture to embody perfectly his former church’s motto: “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.” That is the Wright Obama loved and learned from, and refused to disown when he became a political liability, at least for a long time.

  There is little doubt that Obama heard many other masters of black sacred rhetoric at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ during his twenty-year membership there, including Sampson, Charles Adams, James Forbes, Vashti McKenzie, Frederick Haynes, Lance Watson, Rudolph McKissick, and Renita Weems. These ministers attract large followings, drawing thousands to hear them preach with educated zeal and verbal artistry, shaping words to sharpen minds, revive spirits, condemn social injustice, relieve the vulnerable, and uplift the downcast. When Obama opens his mouth, many of these same ideas flow out. But a great deal of the prophetic intensity that burns in small but significant quarters of the black church is lost in translation.

  When people yoke Obama and King, on white T-shirts or multicolored wall posters, they are linking the amiable politician to the conciliatory visionary who is exalted in annual King holiday celebrations. Of course it may not be in Obama’s best interests to highlight a side of King we would rather brush under the rug: the disturbing, challenging, and revolutionary shadow he cast on the social horizon in his later years. Wright blazed into infamy through fiery Internet excerpts from an old sermon that trumpeted a stunning political reversal—not “God bless America” but “God damn America” for its sins. Except for its blunt language, Wright’s denunciation is standard for biblical prophets who say that God will send a nation to hell for disobedience and corruption, a theme right-wing evangelicals have been hammering for years from the opposite ideological direction.

  King too said that God would judge America and find it wanting. The night he was murdered, found among King’s effects were the notes of a sermon he was to preach the next Sunday: “Why America May Go to Hell.”19 This surely is not the King Obama wishes to be identified with in the American imagination.20 But it is the King that Obama and others may have to confront if they are to embody and extend the great man’s enduring legacy. It is not true that Obama and Wright differ because one buys into King’s vision and the other does not; rather each man fixes on a different theme and time in King’s life: for Obama, the optimistic early King, for Wright the revolutionary later King. When Obama speaks, the later King is lost to memory, much the way King’s name got lost in his speeches the closer Obama got to the White House.

  Before 1965, King was upbeat and bright; he believed white America would change as its conscience was lovingly seared. That is the King Obama, and America, love. After 1965, King was darker and angrier. He did not think America would move forward without considerable coercion. King’s skepticism and anger were toned down when he spoke to white America. When he got before black audiences, King’s rawer feelings spilled over. His passionate oratory rang out against poverty, war, and racism in hundreds of sanctuaries and meeting halls across black America. King sadly concluded that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act “did very little to improve” northern ghettos or to “penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation.” In seeking to end black poverty, King told his largely black staff in 1966 that blacks “are now making demands that will cost the nation something . . . You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then.” What was King’s conclusion? “There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”21

  Exactly a year before he perished, King shared his opposition to the Vietnam War in front of a largely white audience at Riverside Church in New York. But he reserved perhaps his strongest antiwar language for sermons before
black congregations. In his own pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta two months before his death, King raged against America’s “bitter, colossal contest for supremacy.” He argued that God “didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world today,” preaching that “we are criminals in that war” and that we “have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world.” King insisted that God “has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, ‘Don’t play with me, Israel. Don’t play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I’m God. And if you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power.’”22 That is a kinder, gentler version of Wright’s “God damn America.”

  Perhaps nothing might surprise—or shock—white Americans more than to discover that King said in 1967, “I am sorry to have to say that the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously.”23 In a sermon to his congregation in 1968, King openly questioned whether blacks should celebrate the nation’s 1976 bicentennial. “You know why?” King asked. “Because [the Declaration of Independence] has never had any real meaning in terms of implementation in our lives.”24 In the same year, King bitterly suggested that black folk could not trust America, comparing blacks to the Japanese who had been interned in concentration camps during World War II: “And you know what, a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as they did in the ’40s . . . will put black people in a concentration camp. And I’m not interested in being in any concentration camp. I been on the reservation too long now.”25 Earlier, King had written that America “was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race.”26