The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  In the style of the best black orators, Obama had gifted the audience with golden eggs of black rhetoric. But then, just as quickly, he crushed what he had delivered with profound disrespect. Some of the legends he addressed were getting their skulls cracked when Obama was an infant; many of them, when he was a youth, had resolved to carry black grievances to the powers that be. It was their job to confront authority and to demand that presidents address sky-high black unemployment, but Obama was now lashing back. While scolding black politicians for doing what they should be doing—which consisted, in part, of telling him what he should be doing—he got angry and told them not to do their jobs. Obama suggested that these stalwarts were somehow being disloyal to a tradition that he had rhetorically mastered but whose substance he had noticeably slighted.

  Obama, however, was the one, that night, who was disloyal to a tradition of critical engagement with power that he had just invoked. It is useful to remember that King criticized Lyndon Johnson even though he had been his friend and partner. Obama got angry at black leaders who simply wanted to hold him responsible in the same manner he sought to hold the black masses responsible. Obama’s rhetoric of rebuke was especially painful for black leaders to bear. Maxine Waters argued that Obama wouldn’t speak to any other group, such as Hispanics, Jews, or members of the gay and lesbian community, in such a disparaging way. “I found that language a bit curious,” she remarked, “because the president spoke to the Hispanic Caucus, and certainly they are pushing him on immigration . . . He’s appointed [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, [and] he has an office for excellence in Hispanic education right in the White House. They’re still pushing him, and he certainly didn’t tell them to stop complaining.”25

  Obama delivered a similarly dispiriting message when he gave the 2013 commencement address at Morehouse College. Obama scolded the proud black male graduates on a day meant to celebrate their singular achievement. “Too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices,” the president told them. “Growing up, I made a few myself. And I have to confess, sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down.” Obama threw down the gauntlet before these young black men: personal failure blamed on racial barriers is often a false charge made by black folk, he warned them. It was a dose of bad faith offered by a man too smart about race to talk that way, especially to a group of black males graduating from the venerable institution that produced Martin Luther King Jr. and the first black mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson. Obama hammered his point home:

  One of the things you’ve learned over the last four years is that there’s no longer any room for excuses. I understand that there’s a common fraternity creed here at Morehouse: “Excuses are tools of the incompetent, used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness.”

  We’ve got no time for excuses—not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they haven’t. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; that’s still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with a billion young people from China and India and Brazil entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned. And whatever hardships you may experience because of your race, they pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured—and overcame.26

  It was odd for Obama to scold young black men at an institution never known to court underachievement. To say “there’s no longer any room for excuses” implies that such excuses have been regularly made. To be sure, all young folk at one time or another make excuses, regardless of the institution they attend, but that recognition challenges Obama’s racially specific claim, one he seems willing to offer only with generous amounts of scorn. Obama reaches even further into the bag of black digs by drawing a bizarre connection: he says that there is no tolerance for excuses, not because slavery, segregation, racism, and discrimination have gone away, but because competition in global labor markets makes getting something you did not earn impossible. If Obama had been a student of logic, he would have failed miserably. If one were to chart this argument in a syllogism, it might go as follows: Excuses by black folk are unacceptable. Global competition for resources precludes making excuses and receiving benefits you did not earn. Therefore black folk who cite racism are making excuses for demanding what they have not earned. In Obama’s fearful racial symmetry, claiming an unearned benefit on account of race is the same as making an excuse for failed performance. Beyond his twisted reasoning lies the truth that is the opposite of what Obama is saying: blacks and other minorities are often denied the goods and benefits that they would have earned were it not for racist restrictions and structural obstacles.

  It is odder still for a man who garnered an honorary degree—and thus was one of the few men receiving degrees that day who had not, strictly speaking, earned it—to begrudge honor to the men of Morehouse who took home diplomas won by blood, sweat, and tears. The president’s by now tired diatribe against contemporary black folk who don’t measure up to earlier black people (“And whatever hardships you may experience because of your race, they pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured—and overcame”) is a risky ploy for Obama. When he was told that neither he nor his race-averse political compatriots measured up to black leaders before them, he claimed to be part of the Joshua, not the Moses, generation, suggesting that the earlier group had its calling, and the younger cohort had one of its own. Yet Obama gives no such quarter to the generations trailing his. They may not face the obstacles of the sixties, but neither have they inherited the privileges of the Joshua generation. Obama fails to mention this crucial point: the Joshua generation may be the last black generation for a while to do better than their parents. This new generation also endures a challenge that earlier generations didn’t confront: public shaming by a black president.

  Obama would not, and did not, speak the same way when he addressed the Naval Academy or Notre Dame—or Barnard College, where Obama did not chide the female graduates for offering excuses because sexism in global markets might keep them from earning the same money as their male counterparts. The ready reply to criticism of Obama’s tough way of speaking to black folk is that one often speaks to one’s own group in ways that outsiders cannot. The caveat, however, is that one is responsible for speaking not simply to one’s group but for it as well. Obama has shirked that duty by declaring he is “not the president of black America”—as if African American voters were naïve enough to believe that he represented only black interests. Obama’s disclaimer cannot obscure an inarguable fact: he may not be the president of black America, but he is the president of black Americans. He owes blacks no more, but certainly no less, than he owes all citizens. Yet by endorsing the role of racial arbitrageur—one who trades in the meanings of race inside the group and criticizes it like no outsider can—Obama is also obligated to speak for the group in right measure and time, something he has rarely done. Instead, as Ta-Nehisi Coates argues, Obama routinely chews out black communities as “the scold of ‘black America.’”27

  Revisionist History and Selective Responsibility

  Obama mounted the rostrum at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the March on Washington on August 28, 2013, and let loose on black America again. I sat in the VIP section a few rows behind Al Sharpton to listen to Obama talk. Presidents Carter and Clinton had already spoken, and so had Congressman John Lewis, the only surviving speaker from that glorious day a half century ago. After acknowledging the progress and obstacles since the 1963 march, and taking pains to show that black folk’s quest for freedom was identical to the struggles of most Americans—Obama usually cheers exceptionalism when it waves an American flag, not when it boasts a black face—he gave in to the lust for black reproof:

  And then, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of
us, claiming to push for change, lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots.

  Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior. Racial politics could cut both ways as the transformative message of unity and brotherhood was drowned out by the language of recrimination. And what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead was too often framed as a mere desire for government support, as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself. All of that history is how progress stalled. That’s how hope was diverted. It’s how our country remained divided.28

  This is a remarkably disquieting passage for several reasons. The president trafficked in half truths during the commemoration of the most visible black mass mobilization of the sixties. Obama’s choleric speechifying tainted a day that should have celebrated the golden reach of King’s majestic oratory across the decades to embrace the present moment in its halo effect. Although he is a gifted intellectual who understands the epic sweep of black history and the paradoxes of American politics, Obama was that day a poor public historian and social analyst.

  It is perhaps boilerplate for any speech that takes note of the fits and starts of progress to argue that black folk lost their way in the perilous march to freedom. If Obama were to say the same thing to American Jews, or to the Daughters of the American Revolution, or to the marines, it would suggest that all social movements suffer from internal contradiction. Reserving such talk for black folk feels less general and more targeted, less descriptive and more punitive. Assassinations did lead to uprisings and rebellions—but so have athletic events led to drunken white men looting and rioting without commentary from the black White House. The public killing of black leaders was meant to quell social mobility and crush the desire for black progress. Assassinations sent the message that black folk should stay in their place and not share in the fruits of a democracy they helped to grow.

  The assassination of Medgar Evers was meant to discourage the black will to freedom and the right to vote. The assassination of Martin Luther King was meant to murder the movement for racial justice by slaying its most visible spokesman. It was fear that he might suffer the same fate as Medgar and Martin that kept some black folk from casting a ballot for Obama during his first presidential run. Only when Michelle Obama noted on the television news magazine 60 Minutes in February 2007 that, as a black man, her husband could be shot going to the gas station did some of those fears abate and black folk flock to Obama’s campaign. The assassinations of black leaders should illustrate the terror and rage they unleashed rather than figuring into a president’s effort to take black America to the woodshed.

  Beyond that Obama is historically off: many race riots in American history involve whites attacking blacks.29 As for minority participation in riots, the Kerner Commission report, which grappled with a number of rebellions that dotted the urban landscape in the sixties, concluded that riots were sparked by economic injustice, racism, police brutality, geographic isolation, and the exacerbation of class inequalities. Obama’s reluctance to confront law enforcement means that his brief acknowledgment of police brutality in this 2013 speech was important, though again, he quickly wipes it away with a focus on black excuse-making for criminal activity.30 The president is suggesting a link between legitimate grievances over police brutality and black criminal behavior, a link he fashions in the wake of current racial crises involving black folk and the police. But the president might as easily reprimand the police for using black outrage over police misconduct as an excuse to harass or harm American citizens.

  Obama is on shakier ground when he argues that racial politics consists primarily of the message of unity and brotherhood. The black freedom struggle pushed for social justice and radical democracy, and for a greater share in the nation’s goods and resources, and its privileges, too, for which black folk had been willing to die in foreign wars, and in the struggle of America’s better half against its worst in the Civil War. The push for justice often requires broad disagreement with the status quo, and hence a productive disunity that points the way to true social transformation. The unity Obama envisions cannot rest on the suppression of difference as the price of cheap togetherness or false brotherhood. True unity emerged in our nation when we came to grips with competing claims of justice and changed both the law and the array of social habits that feed democracy. Laying the burden of reconciliation at the feet of black victims of injustice is already wrongheaded; but blasting blacks for defending themselves against deadly assault is intellectually dishonest. Obama’s charge of black recrimination in the face of withering attack sounds like the president evoking the angry black bogeyman as the foil of his suspect racial narrative.

  Obama’s next argument in his March on Washington anniversary speech is particularly dumbfounding and no less insidious. He says that the quest for equal opportunity, which he sees as the chance to work hard and get ahead, became a ruse to secure government support while denying black people agency in their own liberation. This led to black folk making poverty an excuse to neglect their children and bigotry a reason to doubt themselves. Obama has insisted that access to the American dream rides on the willingness to work hard. But this permits the president to sidestep a larger problem: the systematic exploitation during 250 years of slavery of black workers, who then became victims of peonage from Reconstruction well into the Jim Crow era.31 Exploitation of black labor continued into the sixties, when black workers were unfairly paid lower wages than whites for doing comparable work. Martin Luther King Jr., in fact, died struggling for a living wage with striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Obama, in offering his interpretation of opportunity that day, had to willfully ignore the brutal history of hardworking black Americans’ being denied what was justly theirs by the government that he now headed.

  Obama’s vision of opportunity is historically awkward as well. The president unjustly lays into black failure by focusing on equality of opportunity—a code word in the affirmative action debates about whether opportunity or outcomes should be guaranteed. Conservatives often stress the former; liberals often favor the latter. Obama thus slights the racist denial of opportunity to black folk that fueled the black freedom struggle. He reinforces stereotypes of the supposed black unwillingness to work hard and the desire to live on the dole by suggesting the exploitation of government support. To do this, Obama must choose to overlook the history and effect of black agency that has been critical to black progress.

  In his famed race speech in 2008, Obama lashed out at blacks for being unwilling to work with whites to enliven their social agency. One may disagree with black nationalists who seek to end black suffering by their own striving, but the lack of agency is not a claim one can reasonably make of them. Black agency is often the only viable means to bring about black liberation; long before the state was an ally, and was instead an enemy of black interests, black folk exercised individual and collective agency to shape their destinies and realize their social ambitions. The attack on black agency has often led to unearned and unjust white opportunity in the mainstream; the suppression of the black ability to work, to own property, and to prosper financially engendered white resentment of black agency where it did manage to arise. That resentment took flame in the white torching of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early twentieth century, and burned in other forms of terror to punish blacks for their success. Whites routinely rioted against blacks, a fact that Obama dares not mention.

  Obama leans heavily on conservative arguments when he claims that black folk use poverty as an excuse not to raise their children properly. Obama overlooks the difficulties that poor parents confront in rearing their offspring: they often work multiple jobs and therefore cannot make every parent-teacher conference; they cannot spend as much time helping with homework because th
ey must labor to keep the family together. So they suffer lower rates of educational attainment; and they experience depressed wages, inadequate health care, and other forms of social distress.

  It is odd, too, that Obama says confronting bigotry is no reason to give up on oneself when the oppressed are often encouraged to dislike themselves in a culture that has already done the same. Black youth face enormous hurdles in holding fast to vibrant self-confidence in an environment that is continuously eroding black self-esteem and the opportunity that feeds it. The selves that young black folk shape in the mirror of a society that fears and despises them are selves that are tutored to surrender hope in themselves. Those selves must also combat the notion that blackness is all pathology and disease, while confronting a pressure to achieve that is especially cruel for growing youth who often lack the resources to effectively reach for success—something their parents and elders have not always attained. When black self-confidence flares in dramatic, even exaggerated measure, blacks, whether in the boardroom or on the gridiron, are deemed cocky. Outside of sports, where a cocksure attitude is often rewarded, black self-confidence can be deadly when police, who have long ago given up on presuming the innocence of black youth, put bullets in their backs or brains.