The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Obama was also wrong in his belief that the flow of foreign investment was contingent on good governance. South Africa flourished even under the brutal regime of apartheid. And Angola and Nigeria received aid because they offered a bounty of oil in return.44 African nations that are rich in oil also offer gas and minerals to Western corporations, banks, and governments—and plenty of opportunity to exploit weak or nonexistent democracy, corrupt government, unjust labor practices, and perpetual civil war.45 Western governments depend upon the creation of internal turmoil and civil chaos—and unprincipled and bribable leaders in Nigeria, Angola, South Africa, Kenya, Cameroon, and Congo—to reap the biggest payoffs from their investments. Far more of Africa’s wealth and natural resources flow from the impoverished continent into the coffers of rich countries and corporations than is returned to it through Western aid, investment, and trade. Good governance has too often translated into free market imperatives of the West: privatizing essential services such as telecommunications, water, and power as well as crucial social services like health and education, while taking subsidies away from small farmers and dispensing with import controls. All of these measures benefit Western governments and businesses.46

  Obama’s argument that colonialism and Western dominance have not continued to haunt Africa over the last couple of decades can be made only by someone who is willing to ignore the vast evidence of neocolonialism’s present ills. True enough, the slave trade, more than a century of colonial rule, the rise of French and American neocolonialism, and the use of Africa as a pawn in the Cold War are in the past, but they are prologue to more recent practices: American and French governments bankrolled African dictators and despots and supplied arms for the vicious internal conflicts and wars that have long ravaged the continent. The rise of neoliberalism in the World Bank and IMF was tailored perfectly to the demands of a neocolonial world for more subtle policies that failed to promote growth while encouraging radical inequality. This extended the West’s clear dominance.47 Obama’s trip to Ghana simply buttressed the belief that America seeks relations with Africa in order to exploit its natural resources, especially oil and gas; to use Africa as a strategic front and major battlefield in the global war on terror; and to offer America a leg up in the global competition with China for economic and political supremacy. The fact that a good number of the world’s shipping lanes hug African shores make it that much more attractive.

  The apparent aim of Africa policy under Obama is to reassert American superiority in light of increased competition from Europe, India, and China. European colonial powers have long been rivals in the “scramble for Africa”;48 both France and England have strong interests and colonial ties in West Africa. But upstart China has upped the ante: trade between Africa and China amounted to $10 billion in 2001; in 2008 it had increased to $107 billion, and by 2012 it surpassed $200 billion. Obama and American business followed suit on a much smaller scale in 2014 at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, where U.S. companies pledged to invest $14 billion in Africa. But Obama could not resist sticking his thumb in Africa’s eye when he said that the continent’s nations should turn inward to solve their economic ills and stop making excuses based on a history of colonization and dependence. Obama said that “as powerful as history is, and you need to know that history, at some point, you have to look to the future and say, ‘OK, we didn’t get a good deal then, but let’s make sure that we’re not making excuses for not going forward.’”49

  Obama once again denied American and Western responsibility for Africa’s economic predicament while renewing America’s bid for hegemony on both economic and military fronts. A troubling formula prevails: the less aid is offered, the more the United States must rely on its military to control Africa. America’s aims are achieved through direct intervention or through the supply of arms to clients under the umbrella of AFRICOM, a relatively new independent military command that oversees all U.S. military activities on the continent—including arms sales, military training, military exercises, naval operations in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, and air raids.50 Only Liberia has signed on so far. America must therefore tighten the noose on Africa and cherry-pick among nations most likely to accede to its wishes. That rationale explains why Obama chose to visit Ghana in 2009 and not his father’s Kenyan homeland, which is ruled by corrupt leaders, although he belatedly journeyed to his father’s native soil in 2015. Ghana was targeted because it features a relatively stable democracy and offers for Obama’s purpose a far better picture of good governance—that is, after the nation recovered from the CIA-backed 1966 coup that overthrew Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah. Ghana, however, is not without corruption either. Obama chose Senegal in West Africa, South Africa in southern Africa, and Tanzania in East Africa on his 2013 trip to sub-Saharan Africa. He avoided Nigeria and Kenya a second time because of corruption and failed democracy while refusing to acknowledge Western colonialism’s long shadow there. If America’s and the West’s present tenure, and lingering influence, in Africa cannot be defined as neocolonialism proper, it is certainly neocolonialism lite.

  Through a Glass, Darkly

  The same conservatives who took issue with Obama’s apologies to Europe enthusiastically endorsed his criticisms of Africa. Obama’s arguments reflect a perspective that is favored by right-wing critics: take responsibility for your own country and stop blaming the West and the United States for your troubles. If you want American and Western aid, stop the corruption. The title of an essay by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal summed it up: “Obama Gets It Right on Africa.” Calling Obama’s speech “by far the best of his presidency,” Stephens argued that since “British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave his ‘Wind of Change’ speech (also in Ghana) nearly 50 years ago, Western policy toward Africa has been a matter of throwing money at a guilty conscience (or a client of convenience), no questions asked . . . Maybe it took a president unburdened by that kind of guilt to junk the policy.”51

  Perhaps Obama has too quickly got free of the burdens of a history that ought to weigh on him more. Obama’s blackness has cut both ways: he has been saddled with prejudices and stereotypes that unjustly hem him in while he has used his color to escape even reasonable racial obligations. The escape route is tracked in Obama’s callous dismissal of Africa and his refusal to extend to his darker kin the consolation he offered in Europe to the lighter limbs of his distant family tree. Obama’s blackness let him off the hook for comments that would get him accused of racial insensitivity if he were a white president. In Africa, Obama expressed ideas that undermine the progressive anti-imperialism of black activists like Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King. It quickly became clear that Obama’s presidency not only symbolizes the long-delayed aspirations of black folk to become fully American but forces those blacks as well to stare into the eyes of American empire and see a black face smiling back at them.

  Obama’s presidency may sadly mute the black criticism of American domestic and foreign policy that has been valuable in helping the nation clarify its democratic aspirations. If American imperialism was wrong when it had a white face, it is wrong now that its skin is black. A displacement effect looms: the critical love of America that black activists have shown has been largely forced underground now that the supreme symbol of the nation is black. Obama cannot be expected to express the contrapuntal character of black patriotism—of loving the nation through rigorous and sometimes trenchant criticism. But the nation needs now more than ever a black eye and an honest tongue on the rituals of American governance and citizenship. The Obama presidency exacts a high toll when progressive blacks cannot offer this necessary gift to the nation. Black people must continue the noble tradition of critical love because their democratic potential is far from being fully realized. Their criticisms are important, too, because they remind Obama that he ultimately owes his presidency to courageous blacks and their allies who fought mightily to gain full citizenship for black folk. Without them Obama could not have become presi
dent of the United States.

  Obama’s actions in Africa—and, as we shall later see, closer to home—suggest that he may have grasped a cynical lesson: he looked genuinely American when he criticized blacks in Africa and in this country too. Many immigrant populations and other citizens already knew that; they have despised blackness all the way to a fuller and richer American experience. Toni Morrison has argued persuasively that America is built “on the backs of blacks.”52 It seems true as well that citizenship is often forged when Americans find common ground in faulting blacks, the ultimate other.

  It may be the pressure to prove his patriotism that encouraged Obama to either ignore or scorn elements of black identity. Most ethnic groups had to fight the battle of loyalty to kin and tribe over love of country, slowly surrendering their ties to the motherland, whether Italy or Poland, and sinking roots in a country that eventually accepted them because it was proud to be a nation of immigrants. That happened when the immigrants came largely from eastern and western Europe; immigrants from Central and South America, and from the Caribbean and Africa, face greater barriers to acceptance. The promise of patriotism has burned far less brightly for African sons and daughters because their black identity was often opposed to and cut off from their American identities. The skin of Europeans promised them a relatively safe transition into American citizenship because they could slip easily into whiteness. African slaves who were brought to America in chains had a vastly different experience.

  White ethnics could melt into the white mainstream, while black people were rigidly segregated. Black citizenship was ruptured, black identity fragmented. W. E. B. Du Bois brilliantly captured the tense duality of American citizenship and black identity when he wrote:

  It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

  The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.53

  Obama has become the most prominent symbol yet of a man wishing to be both black and American; for the better part of his presidency, he appears to have mastered the American side of the equation better than he has learned how to engage a healthy blackness in public.

  ★| 5 |★

  The Scold of Black Folk

  The Bully Pulpit and Black Responsibility

  I was waiting outside the Oval Office to speak to President Obama. I’d had a tough time getting on his schedule, since race was not a subject the Obama White House had been eager to embrace. I’d used all my influence to talk to the president, reminding his trusted adviser Valerie Jarrett that I had twice served as a presidential surrogate for Obama and had known him for nearly twenty years. After I’d politely declined an offer to speak to the president for ten minutes, I eventually negotiated a twenty-minute interview that turned into half an hour.

  “My suspicion is that, more than anything, my election will have affected changes that have already taken place in society: different attitudes about race among a younger generation, greater comfort with diversity in positions of authority,” Obama said in reply to my question about how his election had changed race in America. “I think my election reflected those changes, rather than created them. I’d like to think that my election over time will help consolidate and further fuel greater acceptance of people’s differences—a greater appreciation of African American culture.”

  Obama believed that his presidency might positively affect the racial imagination of future generations. “Just having an African American president is something that young children, whether they’re white or black, now take for granted, and that will have a ripple effect, although you can’t measure something like that. It’s interesting how many teachers come to me and say, ‘After your election we were able to talk to a predominantly African American class differently about expectations and performance and achievement and what’s possible’ . . . Hopefully you add all that stuff together and it signals an improvement.”

  Obama is hardly naïve about the persistent features of racial inequality. “My election didn’t eliminate the structure of poverty among African Americans,” he continued. “It has not by itself closed the wealth gap, or the income gap between races, or the achievement gap in schools. All those require policies and long-term advocacy and determination. We haven’t seen the kinds of changes yet that we need to that will be fundamental in bringing about a more just America.”

  The rash of racial crises during his presidency—from the Henry Louis Gates affair in 2009 to the murders in June 2015 by a white supremacist of nine black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church—has led to calls for presidential leadership from the office’s famous bully pulpit, and yet Obama has often been slow to command the rostrum to address race. “I’ve found in this position that it’s not always true that an incident automatically triggers a useful dialogue,” he told me. “What you have to do is be able to create a place where people are willing to look at things in new ways and the media is willing to look at things in new ways. As president that means I’ve got to pick and choose my spots effectively.”

  Obama’s record of effectively picking and choosing his spots has been hit-or-miss; he has often sabotaged his own standards with rhetoric that is far from organic, or surprising, perhaps because it grows from controversies that compel him to react. It is understandable that Obama prefers being seen as the black president rather than the black president. But his refusal to address race except when he has no choice—a kind of racial procrastination—leaves him little control of the conversation. When he is boxed into a racial corner, often as a result of black social unrest sparked by claims of police brutality, Obama has been mostly uninspiring: he has warned (black) citizens to obey the law and affirmed the status quo.

  Yet Obama energetically peppers his words to blacks with talk of responsibility in one public scolding after another. When Obama upbraids black folk while barely mentioning the flaws of white America, he leaves the impression that race is the concern solely of black people, and that blackness is full of pathology. Obama’s reprimands of black folk also undercuts their moral standing, especially when his eager embrace of other minorities like gays and lesbians validates their push for justice. Obama is fond of saying that he is the president not of black America but of the entire nation. This reflects his faith in universal rather than targeted remedies for black suffering: blacks will thrive when America flourishes.

  Obama’s views on race feature three characteristics, in various combinations: strategic inadvertence, in which racial benefit is not the expressed intent but the consequence of policies geared to uplift all Americans, in the belief that they will also help blacks; the heroic explicit, whereby he carelessly attacks black moral failure and poor cultural habits; and the noble implicit, in which he avoids linking whites to social distress or pathology—or moral or political responsibility for black suffering—and speaks in the broadest terms possible, in grammar both tentative and tortured, about the problems we all confront. It’s an effort that, as we’ve seen with his famous race speech, draws false equivalencies between black and white experiences and mistakes racial effects for their causes.

  Targets of Missed Opportunity

  Wh
en he talks about race, Barack Obama blends the voices of Abraham Lincoln and Bill Cosby. He tackles the subject in largely moderate tones, and only when he must, a nod to the careful calculation of his bearded forerunner. And like the legendary comic—before his tragic fall from grace—both blacks and whites praise him for calling on blacks to stop playing the victim. Obama’s strategy of urging black, but not white, responsibility reflects his belief that white guilt is exhausted and that there will be few concessions to black demands. As Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “Even the most fair-minded of whites, those who would genuinely like to see racial inequality ended and poverty relieved, tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization—or race-specific claims based on the history of race discrimination in this country.”1 Obama has clearly frowned on using race-specific claims to establish racial justice.

  It makes sense for Obama to shrewdly avoid race to keep from being negatively “blackened” by his political opponents. The advantage of such an evasion—one that Obama doesn’t often extend to other blacks—is that it doesn’t see race as the problem of its historical victims. It’s as if he’s saying, “Race is your problem, not mine.” There is nobility to such avoidance. Yet such a strategy may lead us to conclude that race is not important, something Obama clearly does not believe. It also keeps the nation from learning as much as it can from Obama’s black presidency. Obama cannot have it both ways: he cannot benefit from King’s and the civil rights movement’s efforts but fail to add in some way to their legacy—and that cannot be done by pretending that we can get beyond race by ignoring it, as the case of Shirley Sherrod proves.2