The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  All Black Lives Matter

  It is not just black sons who are threatened by or at risk of police brutality but black daughters and mothers as well. The horrifying spectacle, caught on cell phone video, of fifteen-year-old bikini-clad Dajerria Becton being violently manhandled by a white police officer, Eric Casebolt, at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, is a graphic example. After an earlier fight between white parents and black teens—the white parents allegedly made racist statements, including telling the youth to “return to Section 8 housing,” and slapped a black female party participant—police were called to the scene to calm any further disturbance. The video shows Police Corporal Casebolt cursing and screaming at Becton and her friends, ordering them to leave the area and later warning them not to “keep standing there running your mouths.” If the angry black male is a stock character in racist mythology, the sassy, loudmouthed, back-talking black woman is another staple. As Dajerria obeys Casebolt’s command, the officer inexplicably yells at her, chases her down, grabs her arm, and drags her from the pavement onto the grass.22

  Dajerria spoke later in a television interview, saying, “[Casebolt] told me to keep walking and I kept walking and then I’m guessing he thought we were saying rude stuff to him. He grabbed me and he like twisted my arm on the back of my back and he shoved me in the grass. He started pulling the back of my braids and I was like telling him that he can get off of me because my back was hurting really bad.”23 The video shows Casebolt violently slamming Dajerria to the ground and forcefully planting his knee in her back as she cries out for her mother while her friends plead with Casebolt to stop.

  Two of the teens witnessing Casebolt’s violent outburst move toward the officer; he suddenly ceases pressing Dajerria to the ground and jumps up, pulls out his revolver, and points it at the youths. After fellow officers restrain him, Casebolt returns to Dajerria and places her in handcuffs. No charges were filed against Dajerria, and Casebolt resigned a few days after the event, but the message the incident sent was no less chilling: black youth peaceably assembled in their suburban community are nevertheless the cause of undue suspicion and unwarranted harassment from both the police and the broader community. They are often subjected to a form of violent state response that was not displayed in April 2014 when white Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and fellow protesters brandished guns in a dispute with the federal government over unpaid grazing fees—or with the mostly white bikers in Waco who murdered nine members of rival gangs.

  Black girls and women of all sexual orientations have been erased from portrayals of both the slow and fast terror that black people endure, despite the enormous work they have done to amplify the voices of the unjustly aggrieved, symbolized in the important work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Columbia law professor and co-author with Andrea J. Ritchie of the report “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women,”24 and the Black Lives Matter movement begun by two black queer women, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, and by Opal Tometti. The Say Her Name protests in 2015 in several cities across America were fashioned by activists to highlight the countless black women who have been harassed, harmed, and even murdered by the police.

  Perhaps no other figure has symbolized the complicated status of black women in America, and the micro-aggressions and the slow and fast terror to which they are subjected, more prominently than First Lady Michelle Obama. Many observers initially cast her as the angry black woman, while others framed her as the castrating shrew to her famous husband, Barack—reinforcing black female stereotypes that found sociological sway in the Moynihan Report on the black family. Michelle Obama spoke about these visions of her, and the pain they evoked, in a remarkable passage from a commencement address she delivered in 2015 at Tuskegee University:

  Back when my husband first started campaigning for President, folks had all sorts of questions of me: What kind of First Lady would I be? What kinds of issues would I take on? Would I be more like Laura Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Reagan? And the truth is, those same questions would have been posed to any candidate’s spouse. That’s just the way the process works. But, as potentially the first African American First Lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?

  Then there was the first time I was on a magazine cover—it was a cartoon drawing of me with a huge Afro and machine gun. Now, yeah, it was satire, but if I’m really being honest, it knocked me back a bit. It made me wonder, just how are people seeing me.

  Or you might remember the on-stage celebratory fist bump between me and my husband after a primary win that was referred to as a “terrorist fist jab.” And over the years, folks have used plenty of interesting words to describe me. One said I exhibited “a little bit of uppity-ism.” Another noted that I was one of my husband’s “cronies of color.” Cable news once charmingly referred to me as “Obama’s Baby Mama.”

  And of course, Barack has endured his fair share of insults and slights. Even today, there are still folks questioning his citizenship.

  And all of this used to really get to me. Back in those days, I had a lot of sleepless nights, worrying about what people thought of me, wondering if I might be hurting my husband’s chances of winning his election, fearing how my girls would feel if they found out what some people were saying about their mom.25

  It is her racial candor that distinguishes Michelle from her husband—a candor, in all fairness, denied to Barack because of the position he holds—and yet it underlines how much the nation misses when Barack Obama fails to do what he might reasonably be expected to do as an American president: tell the truth about race and make public policy yield to the democratic demand for just governance. Michelle Obama’s achingly honest remarks drew predictable criticism from right-wing quarters, but her forthright expression of the existential angst unleashed by a society not yet at peace with its racial past is precisely the sort of testimony the nation needs to hear from voices that matter.26 (The fact that, according to a former Secret Service agent, it was Michelle who privately pushed her husband to “side with blacks in racial controversies” only burnishes her reputation for being Barack’s black conscience.)27

  President Obama seemed to learn from his wife’s candor in the ongoing effort to counter the plague of lethal policing that has engulfed poor black communities since Ferguson. In an April 2015 joint press conference with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, Obama was as direct as he had ever been in finally acknowledging, “There’s some police who aren’t doing the right thing.”28 Obama argued that since “Ferguson . . . we have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals—primarily African American, often poor—in ways that have raised troubling questions.” Obama acknowledged the legitimacy of civil rights leaders’ and black parents’ thinking of the lethal interactions as a crisis—though in his words, it was a “slow-rolling crisis” that has been “going on for a long time . . . [W]e shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.” What was new, Obama suggested, was the broader public’s awareness, because of social media and cell phone video, of a catastrophe of police brutality that black folk have endured for decades.

  Obama avoided strategic inadvertence, and even resisted for a spell the call of the noble implicit, and argued that there were deeply rooted systemic issues that had to be confronted beyond a focus on cops. These include “impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty” to parents plagued by substance abuse problems, low levels of education, and high levels of incarceration, producing another generation whose “kids end up in jail or dead” rather than going to college. Obama spoke of poor communities with “no investment,” lost manufacturing, and the rise of a drug industry as the primary employer. “If we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the
dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change these communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem.” Obama warned that the failure to address these issues adequately means “we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual.”

  Obama made a passionate plea for society’s responsibility to address the crisis:

  If we are serious about solving this problem, then we’re going to not only have to help the police, we’re going to have to think about what we can do—the rest of us—to make sure that we’re providing early education to these kids; to make sure that we’re reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prisons; so that we’re not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a nonviolent drug offense; that we’re making investments so that they can get the training they need to find jobs . . .

  [I]f we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant—and that we don’t just pay attention to those communities when a CVS burns, and we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped. We’re paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they’re important. And they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence.

  This is Obama at his best: analyzing the broad sweep of social distress and accepting responsibility to address problems bigger than individual will and beyond the sway of personal accountability. In doing so, Obama serves the interests of a besieged black constituency, and therefore the interests of the country, far better than when he ignores race, denies white responsibility, or criticizes black culture. While all citizens have the responsibility to contribute to the common good, not all citizens are equally able to attend to their welfare and fend off suffering, especially when the state has had a big hand in creating their plight. Race has fatefully shaped the destinies of the nation’s black citizens. The greatest American presidents have memorably wrestled with the destructive legacies of racism to make the nation a true democracy for all its citizens.

  In our time, that includes the black girls and women whose needs and challenges Obama finally addressed in his 2015 speech to the annual gala of the Congressional Black Caucus, and in a White House Summit on women and girls of color later that year. It also embraces the youth of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose ideas and activists Obama validated in an October 2015 White House forum on criminal justice.

  “I think the reason that the organizers used the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ was not because they were suggesting nobody else’s lives matter,“ Obama said. “Rather, what they were suggesting was there is a special problem that’s happening in the African American community that’s not happening in other communities.

  “And that is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address.”

  Occurring late in his presidency, these statements—along with his declaration in October 2015 to the International Association of Chiefs of Police that earlier in his life he sometimes got tickets he didn’t deserve, and “that when you aggregate all the cases . . . there’s some racial bias in the system”—prove that Obama has struggled to find his voice in the face of race; as the nation’s first black president, he has been as much a victim of our poisonous racial compact as he has been the arbiter of the state’s response to racial tragedy and its commitment to racial justice. Finding the nerve to tell the truth about race could only deepen his considerable legacy.

  ★| 7 |★

  Going Bulworth

  Black Truth and White Terror in the Age of Obama

  In a 2013 New York Times article discussing President Obama’s frustrations with obstruction in Congress, policy problems in the Middle East, and accusations of the IRS targeting Tea Party members, all in the tender days of his second term, the commander in chief chafed at the limits of the presidency. Privately he wished to “go Bulworth,” referring to a 1998 Warren Beatty film about a senator who spurns caution and bluntly speaks his mind. As the Times article observed, while Beatty’s character “had neither the power nor the platform of a president, the metaphor highlights Mr. Obama’s desire to be liberated from what he sees as the hindrances on him.”1 Several journalists noted the president’s exasperation and projected what liberation might sound like, yet only a few considered how, or if, it meant that Obama might tell the truth about race.2 Obama’s legendary discipline on the subject had even shaped the fantasies of writers wondering what he might talk about if he were free to speak.

  It is curious that race was barely mentioned in these discussions, since it occupies the heart of Beatty’s kinetic morality tale about the political and personal cost of telling the truth. Beatty found the rhymes and reason of gangsta rap an irresistible medium to broadcast brutal truths, smashing black respectability and white indifference in a single cinematic swoop.3 Perhaps Obama’s yen for a Bulworth reckoning is a sign of his racial unconscious coming clean, or at least getting loud and conscious. Obama’s attraction to Bulworth inspires a reckoning with the film’s message about race and black culture. Obama’s fantasy of free speech, however, need not have breathed through a fictional character; in his own administration, the first black attorney general managed to tell great truths about race while taking care of his broader responsibilities. Eric Holder’s outlook and approach to race may be more effective than Obama’s more cautious tack in countering the racial terror that targets black America—as in the brutal murders of nine black parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in June 2015 by white supremacist Dylann Roof. The massacre provoked in Obama a surprising willingness, no matter how late in his term, or how briefly, to speak bluntly about race, leading one to ask if Obama finally did achieve a fleeting Bulworth moment.

  White Skin, Black Masks

  Warren Beatty’s Bulworth offers a frenzied and rare mash-up of two of Barack Obama’s passionate constituencies: liberal politics and hip hop. Beatty grasped the cinematic force of rap music and its brilliant deconstruction of the thuggish hypocrisy of politics. Hip hop’s most provocative images have always come camera-ready. The music video, which hip hop grew up with, helped to forge a seamless flow of images from ear to eye, extending the music’s aesthetic function into full-length features. From low-tech Instamatic snapshots of an evolving art form (1985’s Krush Groove) to the zany attempt of artless talents to get paid (1993’s CB4)—and from the erudite quest of three Afro-Bohemians to find ’90s hip hop bliss amidst a twisted crime scheme (2015’s Dope) to the epic gangsta neorealism of artists facing terror on the streets and from the police (2015’s Straight Outta Compton)—the hip hop film has best succeeded when it captures the moral complexities of the music it emulates. This fact also made Rusty Cundieff’s 1994 film Fear of a Black Hat a dead-on parody of hardcore rap: it caricatures the desire of rappers to be thugs in order to satisfy fans whose desire for thugs is driven by the stories of hardcore rap.

  Hardcore rap has been swollen with gangster images plucked from the cinematic imaginations of directors Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, its hoods caramelized knockoffs of characters immortalized by actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It matters very little that black gangster films came first. After all, seventies blaxploitation flicks like Black Caesar, The Mack, and Superfly amply attest to the violent fantasies that crammed the urban imagination of many of that era’s artists. What does matter is that hardcore hip hop has reinvented the manner in which black gangsterism is conceived. Gangsta rap has, in a sense, birthed its predecessors by helping us understand why they were interesting and how they made sense. In the process, it rendered plausible what was only dimly and sporadically ackno
wledged about gangsterism in civil circles: that it pervades American culture, that its offenses are counted more heavily when its complexion is dark, and that its racial subtexts provide an unflattering mirror of national self-examination. In that way, the hip hop that President Obama likes, especially the music of Jay Z, whose lyrics teem with tales of hustling, may provide the soundtrack to his unspoken desire to tell grittier truths about politics and race.

  It may also explain the appeal to Obama of Bulworth, which, like the president’s biography, joins black and white elements in complicated, intriguing fashion. The film’s creation was certainly paradoxical: a wealthy, legendary white actor and lionized auteur, perhaps one of the last great movie stars, turned his attention to the ugly and inconvenient specificities of racial and economic inequality.

  “I paid my dues in politics,” Beatty told me in an interview. “So I knew at some point I would do a picture about contemporary politics.” Beatty admits, however, that “it was very hard to do it straight because [politics] is so ridiculous.” Bulworth is a political satire about a despondent white politician of the same name, played by Beatty, who, in a moment of extreme depression, contracts to have himself murdered so that his family can collect his multimillion-dollar insurance policy. Arranging to be killed by the end of the weekend, Senator Jay Billington Bulworth feels free to do what under normal circumstances would spell sure political death: tell the truth, even if it happens to be politically incorrect and, on the surface at least, highly offensive. (Given the bubble presidents live in, it’s understandable why the fantasy of plain talk would appeal to Obama).