The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Even when one takes into account the unprecedented congressional obstruction Obama has faced—some of his proposed legislation would certainly have aided minority communities—the universal approach must be seen as a failure. With the shining exception of the Justice Department under Eric Holder, who left office in April 2015, Obama’s approach limited the usefulness of his administration in combating racial inequality, which, in addition to the forces I have already mentioned, include higher rates of school punishment and expulsion for black kids; the disproportionate incarceration of black people; the targeting of black prisoners for capital punishment; the unequal access to high wage labor—from pipefitting and plumbing to construction work—because of the legacy of segregated unions; the stubborn resegregation of public schools; and persistent discrimination in many forms of employment, education, housing, and health care. These ugly realities expose the ineffectiveness of race-neutral policies.

  Obama’s failure to grapple forthrightly with race underscores a historical irony: while the first black president has sought to avoid the subject, nearly all of his predecessors have had to deal with “the Negro question.”17 Every president from Washington to Lincoln had to wrestle with slavery. Every president from Andrew Johnson to Cleveland had to deal with Reconstruction. Every president from McKinley to Lyndon Johnson had to address in some manner Jim Crow and legal segregation. And every president from Nixon to George W. Bush had to face racial and economic inequality. Some presidents even became great because they wrestled heroically with race: Lincoln helped to free slaves and thus freed America from its bondage to bigotry; and Lyndon Johnson clipped Jim Crow’s wings with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and helped blacks and the nation to soar. Neither of these men was black, and yet they triumphed over the demons of race. Obama wishes to be treated like a president regardless of color; that cannot be so as long as he seeks exemption from the demand to address race like every occupant of the Oval Office before him. It is unfortunate that our nation’s first black president has been for most of his two terms uncomfortable dealing with race; it is even more unfortunate that he could not, for the most part, openly embrace, in the course of his duties, the vital issues of the group whose struggle blazed his path to the White House.

  The Bullying Pulpit

  As we’ve seen, Obama has, in the worst way possible, targeted black people, not for support but instead for moral reproach. Even if one buys Obama’s bleak version of racial uplift, there is trouble: It not only draws from the defective belief that white Americans simply will no longer accept racial victimization, a bad enough interpretation of our complicated racial situation. It also reinforces white innocence by failing to acknowledge or analyze how white society has caused and benefited from black suffering. Obama has concluded that since we are past the expiration date of white accountability—an idea that the president and millions of others confuse with the notion of white guilt—it makes no sense to keep demanding its return. That is a galling instance of racial fatalism. A wrong has been done, but we are unwilling to say who stands to gain or lose from its commission because doing so will provoke anger in its powerful perpetrators. That is not only poor social analysis and poor moral reasoning but, tragically, it is also poor presidential leadership. Obama’s grating lectures, however, echo in contradiction. Even as he disavowed racial solidarity to garner votes and to govern, black pride in his presidency spared Obama the sort of lashing he routinely gives black America. Obama’s bad chidings are not to be confused with a noble black moral art: pitiless self-examination which also takes the time to criticize a society that will not let black life breathe.

  Obama began chastising black folk even before he found the bully’s pulpit in the Oval Office. During his first campaign for the presidency, Senator Obama spoke on Father’s Day in 2008 at the Apostolic Church of God, a black congregation on Chicago’s South Side. When Obama assailed absent fathers for the suffering they brought black communities, he sought to gain a couple of political advantages for the price of one. He embraced a complicated tradition of social thought which says that black families are largely responsible for their own troubles. And he was seen in a black church not railing at racism but rebuking his own race—thus making a strong appeal to social conservatives. Obama’s words may have been spoken to black folk, but they were also aimed at those whites still on the fence about who to send to the White House.

  The modern belief that black families are mired in self-imposed trauma stems from Harvard social scientist and Johnson administration official Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous 1965 report on the black family. Moynihan argued that the black family was a “tangle of pathology” whose destruction by slavery festered in female-headed households, absent fathers, and high illegitimacy rates. Interestingly, Martin Luther King was one of the few Negro leaders who refused to condemn the future New York senator’s report when it leaked out. If one thinks Obama was hard on black families—he said, “We need families to raise our children” and “fathers to recognize that responsibility doesn’t just end at conception”—King’s words might sound downright inflammatory.18 “The shattering blows on the Negro family have made it fragile, deprived and often psychopathic,” King said in conjuring a depressing image to convey his beliefs about the domestic suffering of black folk. “Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty and backwardness.” But King insisted that Moynihan’s report offered both “dangers and opportunities,” the latter including the chance to gain support and resources for the black family. The danger was that “problems will be attributed to innate Negro weakness and used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.”19

  The last fifty years of sociological diagnosis of the black family suggest that the dangers have won—and ignorance, too. A 2007 study by Boston College social psychologist Rebekah Levine Coley concludes that black fathers not living at home are more likely to keep in contact with their children than fathers of any other ethnic or racial group.20 Coley offers a more complex and less stereotypical view of low-income, low-skilled absent black fathers than does Obama. She finds that stunted economic and educational opportunities, and with them the failure to live up to the expectation to provide for their families, drives poor black men into despair and away from their families. Such findings render arguments about black fathers’ inherent pathology and moral lassitude highly untenable. These men need jobs, not political jabs.

  Obama’s tough talk on Father’s Day embraced the Moynihan Report’s admonition of absentee fathers. The presidential candidate noted in passing the need for more police and money for schools, for more afterschool programs and better teachers, and fewer guns flooding the community. But he laid most of the blame on black families and black fathers in blunt—and occasionally belittling—terms: “What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child. Any fool can have a child.” (It’s hard to imagine Obama similarly calling out the flaws of white fathers, much less calling them fools, especially with a vernacular spin.) “That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.” That kind of frank talk has been heard before; Obama’s speech is straight from the Jesse Jackson playbook of personal responsibility. “You’re not a man because you can make a baby,” Jackson preached in the seventies. “You’re only a man if you can raise a baby, protect a baby and provide for a baby.”21 But like King before him, Jackson understood that one must overcome barriers that thwart initiative and personal responsibility. Obama brilliantly quoted a Chris Rock comedic routine about black men expecting praise for things they were supposed to do, including staying out of jail and adequately taking care of their children. But Rock’s humor is effective because he is just as hard on whites as on blacks. That’s a part of the routine Obama still has not adopted.

  Of course that is a deliberate oversight. Obama’s stinging rebuff of black fathers and his firm insistence on personal responsibility were calculated to win over white s
ocial conservatives who were turned off by Jeremiah Wright’s tirades against persistent racism. The last thing Obama wanted to do was to go into a black church and say anything negative about whites or to highlight the diminished opportunities for struggling blacks. Such a gesture would have struck us as odd for a race-avoiding candidate. He most visibly got racial when criticizing black culture. Since Obama became president, little has changed.

  Obama’s harsh rebukes, especially the bead he draws on black fatherlessness, prompted criticism from political scientist and talk show host Melissa Harris-Perry. Obama visited Chicago in 2013 and gave a speech on gun violence and poverty in the wake of a rash of black murders in his adopted hometown, most notably the death of fifteen-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, killed a week after she performed at events in D.C. during the president’s second inauguration. Obama turned to a familiar theme of father absence to explain in part the problems of black communities. He lamented that for a “lot of young boys and young men in particular, they don’t see an example of fathers or grandfathers, uncles, who are in a position to support families and be held up in respect. And so that means that this is not just a gun issue; it’s also an issue of the kinds of communities that we’re building. When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child’s heart that government can’t fill. Only community and parents and teachers and clergy can fill that hole.”22

  Harris-Perry took issue with Obama’s “Daddy issues.” On social media, Harris-Perry tweeted: “Sigh . . . The Fatherhood thing is distressing to me President Obama. I know you don’t mean to say that single moms cause gun violence, but . . .” After she was leveled on Twitter, Harris-Perry took to the airwaves to clarify her position. She didn’t back down as she finished the sentence she’d begun on Twitter: “ . . . there are several reasons we need to be wary when policymakers evoke familial explanations for structural inequalities,” she said, offering three reasons to bolster her argument. First, policymakers “tend to be blind to the pathologies of the privileged,” while only the poor “are spectacles of concern for us.” The Newtown, Connecticut, mass murderer had a single mom, Harris-Perry said, but she was left wealthy after her divorce, and the Columbine shooters, and the shooter of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, too, were all reared in stable two-parent households. The correlation between fathers’ absence and violence is questionable. “The recipe to stopping gun violence is much more complicated than ‘Just add Dad,’” Harris-Perry insisted.23

  Second, “to the extent that fatherlessness is the problem, there is very little that the president can, or should, do to create a solution,” said Harris-Perry. Obama can’t “make men marry the mothers of their children,” and he doesn’t “have the power to make men be responsible parents.” And neither should we want him to, she added, in light of the frightening consequence of “giving the state carte blanche to muck around in the choices we make about how . . . to construct our families.”

  Third, if policymakers want to encourage stable families, especially in black and Latino communities, they could reform policies that fuel male absenteeism: “the war on drugs, the aggressive incarceration of young minority men, and the rules that bar them from voting, living in public housing, securing educational loans, or finding work long after they have served time for nonviolent drug offenses.” Harris-Perry argued that responsible single moms “are the ones raising sons and daughters every day,” yet 63 percent of the children who live in single-mother households live in poverty. “They are holding up their end of the American bargain that offers opportunity in exchange for effort,” she said, and “our government owes them more than hopes for a husband.”

  In a Chicago church, and later, in a Chicago community, Obama lost his moral balance by stressing personal responsibility while slighting the forces that harm black families: huge unemployment, racist mortgage practices, weakened family and child care support for poor mothers, the displacement of black labor by technology, the political assault on early childhood learning programs, and—until his 2015 efforts—the over-incarceration of black people. If we rightly expect more black fathers to stick around to rear their children, we have got to give them greater opportunity to stay home.

  Reprimander in Chief

  Obama has targeted black moral failings in other high-profile appearances as well. In a 2011 speech to the Congressional Black Caucus, he offered a twist to his stale portrayal of deficient blackness, casting aspersions on black politicians whose job it is to point out Obama’s failure to pay attention to black issues. Obama deployed the familiar approach of expressing light empathy as a means to launch a heavy attack: “And I know at times that [keeping the dream alive for our children and facing things we’ve never seen in our lifetimes] gets folks discouraged. I know. I listen to some of you all.”24 The audience laughed at what was at once an acknowledgment of others’ complaints and an implicit presidential complaint about that black complaint, something Obama has done on occasion, but never as explicitly as he would that night.

  “I understand that. And nobody feels that burden more than I do. Because I know how much we have invested in making sure that we’re able to move this country forward. But you know, more than a lot of other folks in this country, we know about hard. The people in this room know about hard. And we don’t give in to discouragement.”

  Obama then moved from empathy with the plight of black folk to an identification that cut both ways: he identified with the black masses long enough to get them to identify with him. He was acknowledging black struggle, but only slightly and amorphously, as an extension of past hurt, and mostly implicitly, which is usually the only way he acknowledges black troubles in the present, rarely naming the forces that now plague black folk—whether unjust imprisonment and police brutality or the bleed-off of black wealth in the foreclosure crisis. The “hard” that Obama referred to resonated with the audience of black politicians who had spent decades on the battlefield for black freedom. Obama was gesturing toward the storied history of black political figures like John Conyers, Charles Rangel, Maxine Waters, and especially John Lewis, stalwarts of the struggle for civil rights and black equality. He tapped black empathy before he turned black loyalty to subversive use against black interests: “Throughout our history, change has often come slowly. Progress often takes time. We take a step forward; sometimes we take two steps back. Sometimes we get two steps forward and one step back. But it’s never a straight line. It’s never easy. And I never promised easy. Easy has never been promised to us. But we’ve had faith. We have had faith. We’ve had that good kind of crazy that says you can’t stop marching.”

  Obama further exploited the links between the black past and the black present, which he does, of course, when it’s to his advantage, by drawing a parallel between his presidency—including the obstacles he confronts, and the slowed pace of change that results from bruising political struggle—and the long quest for freedom. It took time to get where we are, Obama was suggesting, and it will take time to get where we want to go: “Even when folks are hitting you over the head, you can’t stop marching. Even when they’re turning the hoses on you, you can’t stop. Even when somebody fires you for speaking out, you can’t stop. Even when it looks like there’s no way, you find a way—you can’t stop. Through the mud and the muck and the driving rain, we don’t stop. Because we know the rightness of our cause—widening the circle of opportunity, standing up for everybody’s opportunities, increasing each other’s prosperity. We know our cause is just. It’s a righteous cause.”

  Obama’s words were punctuated several times by applause as he regaled his audience with rhetorical magic in the climax of his passionate oration. His direct appeal to black memory, and his acknowledgment of black suffering, while draping his political quest in the language of the movement, gave the president great traction with his black constituency. I wonder why, if it was this easy for him here, he could not evoke the same when it counted for black folk, and not for himself, his own career, his own po
litical fortunes?

  So in the face of troopers and teargas, folks stood unafraid. Led somebody like John Lewis to wake up after getting beaten within an inch of his life on Sunday—he wakes up on Monday: “We’re going to go march.” Dr. King once said: “Before we reach the majestic shores of the Promised Land, there is a frustrating and bewildering wilderness ahead. We must still face prodigious hilltops of opposition and gigantic mountains of resistance. But with patient and firm determination we will press on.” So I don’t know about you, CBC, but the future rewards those who press on. With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. I’m going to press on for equality. I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am going to press on.

  Obama explicitly embraced the civil rights legacy and identified with its ultimate symbol. The president derived further authority by quoting the only man who stands above him in black history, Martin Luther King Jr., while referring to his immortal “I Have a Dream” oration (although the quotation Obama cites is from King’s Nobel Prize lecture of 1964) with mention of “prodigious hilltops” and “gigantic mountains,” and then by referring to King’s legendary last lap around the oratorical gymnasium with his famous “I See the Promised Land” speech. Obama’s citing of one of the movement’s greatest living symbols, John Lewis, fused past and present and laid claim to the influence of two icons. It is surely presumptuous to lecture most black people about the need to press on and be patient, but enough people in this audience had given speeches to know how the moment can grab hold of you and yank you by your rhetorical collar and send you flying over the rafters of normal experience way into the upper bleachers of emotional catharsis. Plus the best black traditions of moral exhortation often call on black folk to remember their past and to push forward into their future. But then the boom was lowered and reason collapsed in Obama’s closing remarks: “I expect all of you to march with me and press on. Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do, CBC.”