The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Obama’s claim that it is black folk who have stalled progress, diverted hope, and divided our country is an astonishing endorsement of the notion that blacks are their own worst enemies, that their actions have blocked their own path to progress, that their bad behaviors are the biggest threat to black flourishing. This lets the broader society off the hook for anything it has done to hamper black progress, or the things it has failed to do to enable black thriving. By blaming blacks, Obama doesn’t have to come to grips with the persistence of racial disparities that he has largely relegated to the sixties. Most telling, Obama’s presidency, made possible by the progress forged in the crucible of black hope, a hope that united progressive elements for critical moments in the nation’s history, repudiates the logic and tenor of his comments.

  Obama is forced to exaggerate black responsibility because he must always underplay white responsibility. He once tried to assail white folk as a presidential candidate when he declared to a tony San Francisco fund-raiser that “it’s not surprising” when whites in Pennsylvania facing tough economic times “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.”32 All those who believed that because Obama is half-white he could be even half-critical of whites in flashing the same tough love he routinely shows to blacks got a rude awakening. Beating up on your own works only when you are perceived as a member of the group; despite newfound pride among many whites in his biracial roots, Obama was generally seen as the black man whom he’d been phenotypically profiled as for most of his life. That sort of tough love is neither expected nor well tolerated among most whites, at least not in public. When Obama ambushed black fathers at the Chicago church, it was Jesse Jackson who had to apologize for wanting to slice crudely into him for his clumsy characterizations of these men. Obama wasn’t nearly as tough on white folk from Pennsylvania; there was far more empathy in his tone and his remarks, but it was he who got beaten down in the press before being forced to apologize. He learned again that one gets loud kudos for bravery when one thumps poor black folk in the face. But when one leans into the metaphoric chests of whites, one gets pilloried as an elitist, or even as a racist.

  Obama was reminded that even occasional expressions of empathy for black life risked being painted as unjust favor for his own tribe. The case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teen killed in Florida by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman—in self-defense, he claimed—seared the nation’s conscience.33 It also brought front and center the rage and fear of black folk at being racially profiled, and being subject to deep cultural suspicion. When Zimmerman had yet to be arrested and charged with a crime, a fact that outraged black communities and tore at the scab of unpunished crimes against black people, Obama, taking measure of the profound suffering and dissatisfaction in black America, weighed in on it in very personal terms—but only after being pressured by black critics to speak up.

  “I can only imagine what these parents are going through,” Obama remarked, when asked about the Martin case at a press conference in the Rose Garden to announce his nomination of Jim Yong Kim for president of the World Bank. “And when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. And I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together—federal, state and local—to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.” Obama moved from the universal to the particular in expressing empathy for Martin’s mother and father and all black parents. “But my main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said. “I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are gonna take this with the seriousness it deserves and that we’re gonna get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”34

  Obama was predictably lambasted by the right wing. Sports journalist and cultural critic Bernard Goldberg complained that “there was no good reason for the president to say if he had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin,” charging Obama with “needlessly implying that it’s dangerous being a black kid in America when white people with guns are around.” Goldberg even fantasized about how Obama might revise the speech he offered the nation in the aftermath of Zimmerman’s being found not guilty. Instead of criticizing white folk for clutching their purses in elevators when young black men enter, or locking their car doors when black kids get too close, Obama should have said, according to Goldberg: “I implied that their only ‘crime’ was being black. What I should have added is that there’s a good reason for all of that. People—and not just whites—are suspicious of young black men because young black men give them plenty of reason to be suspicious.”35

  Obama would incur even greater criticism as he confronted black outrage over a rash of killings of unarmed black people by mostly white police.

  ★| 6 |★

  Dying to Speak of Race

  Policing Black America

  “The Gates situation was interesting,” President Obama said to me in the Oval Office. He was referring to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the furious debate about race and policing that it provoked, especially after Obama was quizzed about the arrest at the close of a 2009 press conference on health coverage legislation.

  “I was responding in shorthand to a question that was posed during the press conference, and when you respond in shorthand on issues of race, it poses a great danger. The reason my speech in Philadelphia [addressing the fallout over Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” comments that came to light in the 2008 presidential campaign] was successful was because I was able to round out the issues. But in the prism of twenty-four/seven cable news, you don’t get to round out things. So you’ve got the Gates affair; I make a comment, and suddenly everyone was traveling all the well-worn arguments that had been developed since the sixties about police and African American males.”

  It would hardly be the last time Obama commented on a hostile encounter between black folk and the police, but compared to the incidents that followed, the Gates debacle was surely the least deadly. By conjuring the phrase “well-worn arguments” from the sixties, Obama was signaling once again that he preferred conciliation to confrontation in racial debates.

  The president went on to say: “So folks in the African American community are thinking back to all the stories they heard from their grandpa, uncles, fathers . . . of being stopped [by the police]. Old folks who identified with the police officer are thinking of the dangers that police officers have to deal with and how the decline in order in cities and rising crime rates [forced] their families [to] move out. So it tracked these old arguments, and it wasn’t going to illuminate. What it was going to do was just dig everybody in.”

  Obama drew a false racial equivalence between white fear and black suffering: police brutality, which has stalked black folk for a century, is hardly a relic of the sixties; and white flight is driven more by the perennial goad of revulsion to sharing social space with blacks than the fear of black crime.

  Obama elaborated on his regret over not having embraced a format that would have yielded more insight about police and race in the Gates affair: “Rather than just give a quick two-line answer at a press conference, maybe I would’ve said, ‘Let me get out the facts.’ Once all the facts were out, then maybe I’d make a twenty-minute speech on it, or a half-hour discussion with some students that was televised. And that might’ve been a better way to do it.” Obama felt obligated to continually seek “opportunities to talk about [race] where it doesn’t look stilted, it doesn’t look artificial, but it doesn’t also just become some media feeding frenzy where there’s a lot of sound and fury but it doesn’t signify anything.”

  The Gates case touched an extremely sensitive nerve in the country, one that snakes through black communities and the largely white police forces that serve them, and at times scare and terrorize them too. Gates
is one of the nation’s most famous scholars, but his case offers an example in microcosm of many encounters—often lethal—between ordinary black citizens and the police, starting with the conflicting narratives of how the event unfolded. Sergeant James Crowley claims that he arrived at Gates’s house and asked Gates to step outside, and Gates refused, at which point he entered the home and requested Gates’s ID, which he did not initially produce, and that finally he was forced to arrest Gates when the professor followed him outside, “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior.” Gates allegedly shouted, “Is this how you treat a black man in America?” and “You don’t know who you’re messing with.” Gates says that he showed the officer his ID, demanded that the officer identify himself, which he did not do, and that he then followed the officer outside to get the policeman’s name and badge, at which point he was arrested by the gaggle of police who had gathered.1

  Several features of the story suggest lingering bias. A black man in a tony neighborhood simply seems out of place, even to his neighbors. Had a white professor trying to get inside his home called on his driver to help him jimmy his door open, he might not as readily have aroused suspicion. And when police arrived to check out the premises, they probably wouldn’t have been nearly as quick to believe the worst about a white occupant clearly not engaged in a criminal act. Whatever one believes about what happened, Gates did not receive the benefit of the doubt, a reasonable expectation, since he posed no visible threat. Gates also seemed to be the victim of a police mentality that chafes at a challenge to implicit police authority, especially if that challenge comes from a person of color. How dare black folk believe that, regardless of their station or privilege, they have permission to speak back—or, as the arresting officer, Sergeant Crowley, saw it, to speak “black”—to state-enforced authority?

  The Gates incident might have nudged Obama to renew his campaign pledge to get rid of racial profiling—or to puncture the illusion that his success represented a post-racial America. But his comments about the Gates affair at the press conference reaped a whirlwind of controversy. Obama said: “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”2

  The police got upset, supposedly because Obama had spoken out against law enforcement instead of helping cover their flanks, but also because, subconsciously, it is perhaps awfully tough to hear a black man, even the president, describe a white man as acting stupidly. Obama himself has been racially profiled by bigots and assorted right-wingers for PWB—Presiding While Black. And yet the political takeaway for Obama, still early in his first term, seems to have been a studied racial caution, when not violently forced out of it. Obama eventually invited Gates and Crowley for what was dubbed a “beer summit” at the White House to calm tensions.

  But little the president did could quell the toxic situation that was seething between the police and black citizens in cities across the nation. As he lamented in 2015, a fatal interaction between blacks and the police “comes up, it seems like, once a week now, or once every couple of weeks.”3 Playing a game of racial catch-up—mirroring Obama’s foreign policy doctrine of “leading from behind”—makes the president more reactor than leader, more racial barometer than thermostat. Jelani Cobb argues that the “man who once told us that there was no black America or white America but only the United States of America has become a President whose statements on unpunished racial injustices are a genre unto themselves.”4 That genre teems with hesitations and hiccups, as much as it contains insight and gravitas, and reveals Obama’s tortuous evolution on race during his years in the Oval Office.

  The Fire This Time

  Obama faced one of his gravest racial tests when the fires of Ferguson, Missouri, roared after a grand jury failed to indict white police officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed black youth Michael Brown. From the start, most blacks were convinced that the case would not be fairly considered by Ferguson’s criminal justice system. There were doubts that the prosecution and defense were on different teams. The prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, looked as if he were coaching an intramural scrimmage, with the goal of keeping Officer Wilson from being tackled by indictment. The trove of documents released after the grand jury reached its decision included Officer Wilson’s four-hour testimony, in which the six-foot-four-inch, 210-pound cop said that his encounter with the six-foot-four-inch, 292-pound teenager left him feeling like “a five-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan.” Wilson betrayed the extent of his feeling for the slain youth’s humanity when he used the impersonal pronoun “it” in claiming that Michael Brown looked like a “demon” rushing him.5 To many blacks, Brown’s height and weight gave him a fighter’s chance of surviving a battle with a cop as big as Wilson. To the police officer and many whites, Brown was the black menace writ large, the terrorizing phantom that stalks the white imagination. These clashing perceptions underscore the physics of race, in which an observer effect operates: the instrument through which one perceives race—one’s culture, one’s experiences, one’s fears and fantasies—alters in crucial ways what it measures.

  The novelist Ann Petry vividly captures this observer effect in her 1946 novel The Street, in which the African American protagonist Lutie Johnson remarks that racial perceptions of blacks “depended on where you sat.” That is, if “you looked at them from inside the framework of a fat weekly salary, and you thought of colored people as naturally criminal, then you didn’t really see what any Negro looked like,” because “the Negro was never an individual” but “a threat, or an animal or a curse.” After a black man is killed in a failed robbery, she notes that a reporter “saw a dead Negro who had attempted to hold up a store, and so he couldn’t really see what the man lying on the sidewalk looked like.” Instead he saw “the picture he already had in his mind: a huge, brawny, blustering, ignorant, criminally disposed black man.”6 Our American culture’s fearful dehumanizing of black men materialized once again when Wilson saw Brown as a demonic force that had to be vanquished in a hail of bullets.

  If President Obama’s comments on race in the anguished aftermath of the not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial gleamed with light, his words on the rage that battered Ferguson, Missouri, were shrouded in darkness. They revealed a gifted leader whose palpable discomfort with race has made him a sometimes unreliable and distant narrator of black life. Obama’s twin strategy of the heroic explicit and the noble implicit was on display as he spoke twice in the aftermath of the Ferguson grand jury’s decision in November 2014. Earlier, when Obama gave his first statement on the cataclysm in Ferguson at a press conference on August 14, 2014, he’d been cautious to a fault. The president understandably did not want to fan the violence. But the pressure mounted for Obama to say something after the rage in Ferguson turned to fire. If Obama felt and looked weary at the prospect of repeating himself—“I’ve said this before,” he reminded us—it hardly matched the moral weariness of black victims witnessing history tragically repeat itself.7 Like a Hollywood film franchise, race in the United States, especially police violence against blacks, is haunted by sequels: the locations may change, the actors are different, but the story remains the same.

  Given Obama’s extraordinary talent for talking the nation through tough economic or political times, his remarks on Ferguson were extremely disappointing. Obama justified his reluctance to say too much by claiming he did not want to put his “thumb on the scales one way or the other.” The president was right about the need to let the Justice Department’s investigation run its course. To no one’s surprise, the DOJ eventually found that it couldn’t meet the high bar for bringing civil rights charges against Wilson, though it found plenty of fau
lt in the racist practices of the Ferguson Police Department. But one cannot ignore how badly the scales of justice have been tipped against the residents of Ferguson, and how Lady Justice has had her blindfold removed and discarded, and her impartiality along with it, as she eyes black people for harsher punishment than most. The neutrality and fairness that are the bedrock of justice for the larger society are like quicksand beneath the feet of too many blacks. They must use extraordinary measures, including protests in the streets, appearances in the media, and appeals to local and national leaders to amplify their grievances, just to end up where most white citizens start. The folk of Ferguson, and millions more across the nation, have a difficult time getting the state that Obama represents to work on their behalf. In psychoanalytic terms, that is why Ferguson, and Baltimore after it, blew its id.

  To his credit, Obama acknowledged that “a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement,” and that “too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear.”8 In one swift passage he spoke of “communities that feel left behind, who, as a consequence of tragic histories, often find themselves isolated, often find themselves without hope, without economic prospects,” while their young men “end up in jail or in the criminal justice system” rather than “in a good job or in college.” Later in his August 14 statement Obama briefly listed a set of “tends”: black and Latino youth tend to face higher rates of school suspension, tend to have far more frequent interactions with the law, and may be subject to “different” trials and sentencing. Like the president himself, the language was careful and qualified, cautious, and perhaps a tad too clinical—a language that hardly captures the fiery realities that burn in black bodies and communities.