The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  A Grammar of Impressions

  What Obama said that day was true, but incomplete. Injustice is not simply a matter of perception, an instance in which blacks “feel” left behind or are subject to “different”—rather than inferior—brands of justice. The brute facts help explain why Ferguson combusted into shrieking anarchy: the decades of police aggression; the repeated killing of unarmed black people; the desperate poverty of black citizens; the entrenched bias in the criminal justice system and other institutions that are meant to help; the raging social inequality; the intended or inadvertent disenfranchisement of large swaths of the citizenry; and the dim prospects of upward mobility that grow bleaker by the day. A two-tiered system of justice operates for mainstream and minority communities. Blacks and other minorities often cannot get cops arrested when they are reasonably suspected of behaving unjustly, whether in Staten Island or Ferguson. They often cannot get their local municipalities to release autopsy reports and other pertinent information in a timely manner. And they often cannot make the local authorities treat their slaughtered loved ones like human beings, as they lie prostrate in the street for hours. Obama largely ignored these realities when he spoke from the White House the night of the Ferguson grand jury decision on November 24, 2014, about America as a nation of laws and said that we must respect the jury’s conclusion, even if we do not agree with it, and make progress by working together—not by throwing bottles, smashing car windows, or using anger as an excuse to vandalize property or hurt anyone.9

  The next day in Chicago, Obama doubled down on his indictment of “criminal acts” and declared, “I do not have any sympathy” for those who destroy “your own communities.”10 While he avoided saying so, it was clear that his remarks were directed at the black people who “looted” and “rioted” in Ferguson. But their criminal activity is the result of going unrecognized by the state for decades, a crime in itself. As for the plague of white cops killing unarmed black youth, the facts of which are tediously and sickeningly repetitive, and which impose a peculiar psychological tariff on black minds and exact a harmful toll on black bodies, the president was vague, halting, and sincerely noncommittal.

  Instead Obama lauded the racial progress that he said he had witnessed “in my own life,” substituting his body for our black bodies, his life for ours, and signaled again how his story of advancement was ours, suggesting, sadly, that the sum of our political fortunes in his presidency may be greater than the parts of our persistent suffering. As soon as Obama asserted that black folk are not delusional in saying they have big worries about the police, he reassured white America—he was not speaking to blacks, who need no such reassurance because most do not believe we have made it all up—that even though there are problems, that is not the norm. Even when he sidled up to the truth and nudged it gently—“these are real issues,” the president acknowledged—he slipped back into an emotional blandness that underplayed the searing divide, saying there was “an impression that folks have” about unjust policing, and “there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion.”

  Whose “impression” is it, though that word hardly captures the fierce facts of the case? Who feels it? Who is the subject? Who is the recipient of the action? Obama’s treacherous balancing act between white and black, left and right—“there are good people on all sides of this debate, as well as in both Republican and Democratic parties,” he said, which is true, but in what proportion he dared not say—posits a falsely equivalent relation that obscures the truth about who has held the power for the longest amount of time to make things the way they are. This is something, of course, that he can never admit, but which nevertheless leaves his words strained and turns an often eloquent word artist into a faltering, fumbling speaker. If language had hair and a face, Obama’s grammar would be gray and weary. But his exasperated syntax is hardly a match for the fear and anxiety that black folk feel in the face of the police.

  Policing the Black Body

  It is nearly impossible to convey the fear that strikes at the heart of black Americans every time a cop car pulls up, emotions barely fathomable to whites, who do not generally view police as purveyors of urban terror. When I was seventeen, my older brother Anthony and I and a childhood friend were pulled over by four Detroit cops in an unmarked police vehicle. This was in the mid-seventies, in the shadow of the infamous Detroit Police Department task force called STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), which was initiated after the 1967 riots. The unit lived up to its name and routinely targeted black folk. As we assumed the position against the car, I announced to one of the plainclothes officers that I was reaching into my back pocket to fish the car’s registration from my wallet. He brought the butt of his gun sharply across my back and knocked me to the ground, promising, with a racial epithet, that he would put a bullet through my head if I moved again. When I rose to my feet, cowering, showing complete deference, the officer permitted me to pull out the registration. When the cops ran the tags, they concluded what we already knew: the car was not stolen and we were not thieves. They sent us on our way without a hint of an apology.

  The lack of white empathy for black terror at the hands of the police came up at a meeting of black leaders with New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton that I attended in 2014 at the home of Citibank global banking head Ray McGuire and his wife, author Crystal McCrary. CBS This Morning co-anchor Gayle King reminded Bratton that “all black parents have had the conversation with their sons about being stopped by the police and how they have to manage the police’s potential biases” against them. I pressed Bratton about the stop-and-frisk methods he had instituted twenty years earlier, and which continue today, despite their fueling racial disparities between “urban youth who get caught with roaches [the remains of a marijuana cigarette] in their pockets” and privileged college kids with “Breaking Bad meth labs in their dorm rooms.”11 The commissioner was far more receptive to our criticisms than the mayor who’d hired him to lead the city’s police department in the mid-nineties.

  My dustup in 2014 with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani on national television tapped a deep vein of racially charged perception. In a discussion on Meet the Press of Ferguson and its racial fallout, Giuliani steered the conversation down the path of a conservative shibboleth: that the real problem facing black communities is dying not at the hand of white cops but in the grip of black thugs.12 He cited the statistic that 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black people; I argued that these murderers often go to jail, unlike the white cops who kill blacks with the backing of the government. What I did not have time to say was that 84 percent of white homicide victims are killed by white people, and yet no language of condemnation exists to frame a white-on-white malady that begs relief by violent policing. This does not mean that black folk are not weary of death ravaging their communities. I witnessed it personally as I sat in a Detroit courtroom twenty-five years ago during the trial of my younger brother Everett for second-degree murder, and though I believe to this day that he is innocent, I watched him convicted by an all-black jury and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life. But when the deaths of blacks somehow grant legitimacy to cops in the killing of often unarmed black people with impunity, the scales of justice are twice weighted against black interests. What is called for is active intervention on behalf of blacks and other citizens of color by their government—the same government that licenses cops to police black and brown communities.

  In the face of it all, Obama did not offer public policies to address these ills, or the hope of politics based on true justice for all, but especially those hampered by race and class in their quest for that justice. Instead the president pivoted to the personal and suggested that his program to lift up black boys, My Brother’s Keeper, would work with the Justice Department in “local communities to inculcate more trust, more confidence in the criminal justice system.” But black youth do not need more trust;
the justice system needs fundamental transformation. Obama, in a second statement on Ferguson on August 18, 2014, just days after his first, and well before the grand jury decision in November, proceeded to knock black youth while they were down by directing his law-and-order spiel against their already over-policed and under-protected bodies: “There are young black men that commit crime” who “need to be prosecuted because every community has an interest in public safety.”13 That is true, but tremendously tone-deaf in light of the denial of justice and the unjust criminalization of black people that led to a national crisis—for which Obama’s most prominent answer was the recommendation of a social, not a political, program. Obama’s defenders often claim that he is a president, not an activist, yet he sounded like one in his comments, and a bad one at that. In one rhetorical swoop, Obama leveraged the authority of the state against black youth, played to stereotypes of their criminality, offered responsibility lectures in place of public policy, maintained an emotional distance from the desperation of a group of Americans who happen to be his people, and offered them moral lessons instead of official action.

  But these moral lessons, whether offered by Barack Obama or Rudy Giuliani, fall far short of the mark, substituting harsh reproof, false equivalence, and respectability politics in place of uplifting policy. Many whites who point to blacks killing blacks are moved less by concern for black communities than by a desire to fend off criticism of unjust white cops. They earnestly believe that they are offering new ideas to black folk about the peril they foment in their own neighborhoods.

  This brand of moralizing activism also found a champion in Bill Cosby, who for a decade had leveled moral charges against the black poor with an ugly intensity that was endorsed by white critics as tough love and by black journalists as homegrown conservatism. But Cosby’s put-downs were more pernicious than that: his indictment of black women’s lax morals and poor parenting skills was misogynistic. “Five, six children, same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever,” Cosby fumed. “Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t know who dis is; might be your grandmother.”14 Cosby’s Shakespearean fall from grace was attended by journalists who apologized for having earlier failed to consider claims against the comic. He was recast as a king who is more sinner than sinned against as the allegations of drugging and raping women piled up. But writers avoided mentioning their own sexist blinders that kept them from seeing how hateful Cosby was being toward black women long before he was accused of abusing mostly white women.

  Cosby didn’t invent the politics of respectability—the belief that good behavior and stern chiding will cure black ills, uplift black folk, and convince white people that blacks are human and worthy of respect. But he certainly gave it a vernacular swag that has since been polished by Barack Obama. The president has lectured blacks about their moral shortcomings before cheering audiences at college commencements and civil rights conventions. And yet his themes are shopworn and mix the innocuous with the insidious: pull your pants up, stop making racial excuses for failure, stop complaining about racism, turn off the television and the video games and study, do not feed your kids fried chicken for breakfast, be a good father.

  As big a fan as he is of respectability politics, Obama is the most eloquent reminder that they do not work, that no matter how smart or sophisticated or upstanding one is, and no matter how much chastising black people pleases white ears, the suspicions about black identity persist. Despite his accomplishments and charisma, he is for millions the unalterable “other” of national life, the opposite of what they mean when they think of America. Barack Obama, like Michael Brown, is changed before our eyes into a monstrous thing that lacks humanity: a monkey, a cipher, a terrorist. One might expect the ultimate target of those who fear black otherness to have sympathy for their lesser targets, for people who have lesser standing and less protection, like the folk in Ferguson, in Cleveland, in New York, in Florida, in Baltimore, and all around the country, who cannot keep their unarmed children from being cut down in the street by callous cops who leave their slumped bodies to stiffen into rigor mortis in the presence of horrified onlookers.

  Perhaps a measure of empathy lay behind Obama’s sending Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson, though he should surely have gone himself, just as he went to Sandy Hook and to the areas struck by Hurricane Sandy. Sending Eric Holder to Ferguson was critical, but bringing Ferguson’s blacks, and millions more like them, into Obama’s presidential view, and into the folds of judicial fairness, would have been far more important. Obama, of course, is acutely aware of the tortured relations between law enforcement and black communities, which he has at times effectively recalled, as he did in his celebrated race speech in Philadelphia and in other pronouncements before he became president. Making such observations as president could help combat ignorance about the black plight in the criminal justice system, demonstrate healing compassion for black victims of police misconduct, and perhaps soften harsh attitudes toward black youth. This is a crucial role of the presidential bully pulpit—to speak with the authority of the office to tip the scales of moral fairness in favor of those who have been treated unjustly. Where Obama failed, his attorney general succeeded. Although Holder was not president, he certainly looked like one as he reached out to a bruised constituency, shook hands and kissed babies, promised fairness and the backing of the state to achieve justice, and reassured a demoralized population that their government cares for them. For all his lectures about responsibility to black audiences across the land, the president could have used a good dose of it himself.

  Obama warned the unruly black elements in Ferguson that the nation is built on the rule of law. That is not entirely true. Obama’s life, and his career, too, are the products of broken laws: his parents would have been committing a crime in many states at the time of their interracial union, and without Martin Luther King Jr. breaking what he deemed to be unjust laws, Obama would not be president today. Barack Obama is the ultimate paradox: the culmination of a churning assault on the realm of power that he now represents. No wonder he turns to his own body and story and life to narrate black bodies, black stories, and black lives. The problem is that the ordinary black person possesses neither Obama’s protections against peril nor his triumphant trajectory that will continue long after he leaves office. And Obama’s narrative does not answer a haunting question: If America can treat him as badly as it does, and he is as bright and affable as the best Americans, what will it do to the masses of Michael Browns in black communities? It should be remembered that Obama might have been Brown or one of the millions of black youth harassed by police and thrown into jail had he been busted for his youthful foray into drugs. That recognition sparked his My Brother’s Keeper initiative. But that is only half the equation. What he must address somehow, with a fire that matches his condemnation of blacks murdering blacks, is my brother’s killer, especially when the killer wears a badge and carries a gun on behalf of the country Obama embodies.

  Fast and Slow Terror

  The cruel reality is that nothing black people could say or do can change the minds of the white people who believe that black folks are a threat to them. They will neither love blacks nor leave them alone. Black people cannot be smart enough, good enough, or humble enough to please those who despise them, especially when they find legal cover for their animus behind a badge and a gun. Not even the election of a black president could unseat that stubborn fact. The murder of unarmed black motorist Walter Scott by white officer Michael Slager in South Carolina in April 2015 sheds light on political and social realities that surround similar cases of lethal force against black people. Americans have been forced to lower their expectations for racial justice and now measure racial progress in painfully minimal terms. The tragedy also brings into focus the optics of race—how black people are seen on camera and in history, revealing how black life is valued or degraded. And the spectacle of Scott’
s death highlights the fast terror that stalks black life even as it obscures the slow terror that blacks routinely confront in the Age of Obama.

  There was great relief in black communities and beyond when Slager was quickly arrested and charged with the murder of Scott. The deadliest moment of their brief encounter was caught on cell phone video: Slager drew his pistol and took aim at the fleeing Scott, unloading eight rounds and striking him dead. The video provided enough evidence to warrant an arrest, which is rare in police-involved shootings. Slager’s jailing took place amidst the national outrage over a rash of unarmed black people like Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island dying at the hands of the police. During a recent seven-year stretch, a white police officer killed a black person nearly twice a week in America, underscoring the belief among blacks that they are targets of racial profiling and its violent twin, police brutality.15 Many outside the black community think that the exercise of lethal force is warranted in most cases involving blacks and the cops.