The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  For instance, at a black church rally, when asked by a black woman why he had not shown up since being elected, Bulworth confesses that he really did not care about blacks beyond getting their votes. Adding insult to injury, he claims that until black folk stop “drinking malt liquor” and “eating chicken wings,” and until they cease supporting “a running back who stabs his wife” (a reference to O. J. Simpson), they will never get rid of politicians like him. And at a Beverly Hills fund-raiser attended by rich Jews in the film industry, Bulworth offends them by assailing their moral hypocrisy in making sleazy movies. Insulting them even further by offering mocking appeasement, Bulworth, referring to a speech written for the occasion by his chief political aide, Dennis Murphy (played by Oliver Platt), says, “Murphy probably put something bad about Farrakhan in here for you.”4

  If one is a literalist, one might think Beatty, through his Bulworth character, is playing to stereotype and bigotry. One might also conclude that he’s in sync with the president, at least in speaking of black culture, since Obama has evinced a disturbing inclination to embrace stereotype in his black respectability sermons. But if one is alert to the satirical, it is clear that the function of such lines in Bulworth is to draw a contrast to the usual duplicity of public figures who mask their beliefs with impenetrable doublespeak. At the black church rally, Bulworth meets two “b-girls” from the hood who volunteer to help his campaign. Bulworth is unfazed until he lays eyes on Nina (played by Halle Berry), a beautiful woman whom the married senator immediately lusts for. Bulworth’s meeting with Nina proves fateful: it gives him a reason to live; it gives him a renewed sense of his political vocation; and it introduces him to the pleasures (whizzing around with the “b-girls” in his limo, partying until dawn, the intimate enjoyment of black slang, the freedom to celebrate life) and the pain (the plague of police brutality, the vagaries of drug addiction, the menace of black male hatred, returned in full by the senator) of urban black life. Although it debuted nearly twenty years ago, Bulworth is, in some ways, as relevant now as when it first appeared because of the racial and political forces the film exposes, forces that have again claimed center stage in the Age of Obama.

  After falling for Nina, Bulworth adopts a hip hop style of dress and speech to address his bewildered public and television audiences. “It’s just more fun if out of my middle-aged white body comes a young black protesting person,” Beatty told me, “even if he’s behaving in an adolescent way.” While Beatty disavows using “movies as propaganda,” he acknowledges, “There are times when a social agenda is compatible with a movie.”

  Rhyming on television and before white audiences, Bulworth sounds at times like Jesse Jackson on crack: a hyper-verbal politician turned public moralist whose cadences both mock and reinforce the culture he has appropriated and been influenced by. In the hands of a lesser artist, this might all collapse into an unintended parody of a white man failing to make sophisticated use of black culture because he fails to understand the difference between satire and minstrelsy. But Beatty gets it just right. As Bulworth’s star, director, and cowriter, Beatty uses gangsta rap’s erotically charged violence and vulgar speech, both literally and metaphorically, to reveal the corruption of electoral politics.

  “Clearly what I think is obscene is the disparity of wealth and inequality in the country,” Beatty stresses to me. “I don’t think words like ‘fuck,’ ‘motherfuck,’ ‘cocksucker’ are obscene. They are attention-getting words. The real obscenity black folks are living with is trying to believe a motherfucking word that Democrats and Republicans say.” In Bulworth, Beatty is not only flipping the script. He is unabashedly embracing an art form that has been scorned by white politicians and by the black bourgeoisie. In colorful and comedic terms, Bulworth shows how the social rituals and cultural conventions of gangstas and politicians are driven by the same goals: getting paid, getting pleasure, and getting props. (Obama certainly agrees with portions of Bulworth’s argument, especially about the corrupting influence of big money in politics, and has said so, but cannot speak in the blunt terms the film adopts.)5

  Equally effective in the film’s effort to tell the black truth is Nina, whose character crushes stereotypes and supplies the film’s intellectual and ideological heart. While she is being romantically pursued by Bulworth, Nina drops a brilliant explanation of how economic forces have devastated inner-city communities, robbing them of the hopefulness that produces strong black leadership. Nina’s mini-speech—coupled with a fiery morality tale from drug dealer L.D. (played by Don Cheadle) about the infusion of crack cocaine and other drugs into black communities, and the informal political economies that are supported by white negligence and black capitulation—gives Bulworth an added political function: it legitimates progressive and grassroots viewpoints about the scourge of drugs and criminality in black communities. Obama the community organizer may have sung a similar melody, but Obama the president could scarcely afford to hum that tune. There is little doubt that, because Beatty is a white male and a beloved American icon, he is able to present what have been considered paranoid conspiracy theories of the black fringe as reasonable expressions of political common sense.

  Bulworth’s unsparing indictment of the unjust concentration of capital and political resources in the hands of the very rich—especially, in this case, in the coffers of insurance companies—joins together the issues of race and wealth more successfully than most presidents are capable of doing. In fact, Senator Bulworth’s moral and political transformation at the hands of black culture—specifically, at the hands of hip hop culture, and gangsta rap at that, allegedly the most antipolitical of hip hop’s genres—gives him incentive to avoid the assassin’s treachery he has paid for. But what Bulworth does best is embrace black culture while telling the truth about America.

  Life Imitating Art?

  One wonders what it might look or sound like if Obama had the opportunity, or perhaps the courage, to adroitly, and discreetly, sample the insights of hip hop, or Beatty’s film, in speaking to the masses. The spirit of Bulworth seemed to have briefly taken hold of Obama in June 2015 as he addressed the question of same-sex marriage in the East Room of the White House while a pro-immigration advocate interrupted his speech. Obama has in the past displayed remarkable forbearance with hecklers, but he was having none of it that day.

  “Hold on a sec,” Obama said to the heckler, later identified as Jennicet Gutiérrez, a transgender woman who called on the president to release all LGBTQ immigrants from detention and to stop all deportations.6

  “OK. You know what. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. No, no, no, no. Hey, listen, you’re in my house,” Obama said, pointing a finger at Gutiérrez as the audience cheered. “You’re not going to get a good response from me by interrupting me like this.”

  A chorus of boos went up.

  “No. Shame on you, you shouldn’t be doing this.”

  A chant of “Obama” echoed in the room as the president directed that Gutiérrez be removed from the audience. After she was escorted out, Obama got even feistier.

  “As a general rule, I am just fine with a few hecklers,” Obama said. “But not when I’m up in the house!” His casual resort to black vernacular was greeted with cheers and laughter. “My attitude is if you’re eating the hors d’oeuvres . . .”

  Obama wheeled around to look at Vice President Biden, who was smiling and nodding along with Obama while gripping the president’s shoulder.

  “You know what I’m sayin’?” Obama asked.

  “I know what you’re saying,” Biden shot back in a brief call-and-response with the president.

  “And drinkin’ the booze,” Obama continued, and then humorously offered a colloquial self-affirmation in the style of the black church: “I know that’s right!”

  Earlier in the year, Obama had eagerly embraced the mirthful pose of Bulworth to deliver some tart truths at the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. In his speech Obama alluded to his favorite
sport, basketball, and acknowledged being in “the fourth quarter of my presidency,” feeling “more loose and relaxed than ever before” and “determined to make the most of every moment I have left.”7 Obama quipped that after the midterm elections his advisers had asked if he had a bucket list. “Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list,” the president deadpanned as the audience erupted in laughter. “Take executive action on immigration? Bucket. New climate regulations? Bucket. It’s the right thing to do.”

  Obama also drew big laughs when Keegan-Michael Key, one half of a comic duo, joined him at the podium as “Luther”—the character he played on the hit Comedy Central show Key & Peele—who humorously acts out Obama’s (seldom otherwise visible) angry side. As Obama invited Luther to the stage, his anger translator offered a warning: “Hold on to your lily-white butts!” When Obama soberly intoned, “Despite our differences, we count on the press to shed light on the most important issues of the day,” Luther’s translation cut to the quick: “And we can count on Fox News to terrify old white people with some nonsense: ‘Sharia law is coming to Cleveland! Run for the damn hills!’ Y’all’s ridiculous!”

  Obama, through Luther, chided the press for its Ebola coverage and the Supreme Court for its support of excessive campaign financing. Luther also expressed Obama’s anger about the failure of Republicans to grasp the challenge, and science, of climate change, even as Obama, as part of his routine, went uncharacteristically off the rails to channel his own anger: “I mean, look at what’s happening right now. Every serious scientist says we need to act. The Pentagon says it’s a national security risk. Miami floods on a sunny day and instead of doing anything about it, we’ve got elected officials throwing snowballs in the Senate” (a reference to Oklahoma senator James Inhofe carrying a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that climate change is not real).

  Luther attempted to calm Obama in black vernacular: “Okay, I think they got it, bro.” But the president pressed on: “It is crazy! What about our kids? What kind of stupid, short-sighted, irresponsible bull—” Before Obama could finish the implied epithet, Luther interrupted. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” he chimed in. “What?” Obama said. “Hey!” Luther barked. For Luther it was the last straw; the anger translator was outdone by the anger of the man he spoke for: “All due respect, sir, you don’t need an anger translator. You need counseling. And I’m out of here, man. I ain’t trying to get into all this.” As he left the stage, Luther leaned over to audibly whisper to Michelle Obama, “He crazy.” There was little doubt that Luther, and now Obama’s own shtick, expressed precisely the kind of views the president voiced in private, out of the public spotlight.

  If it was rare for Obama to find the space to speak frankly about race and politics, another figure in his administration famously found his racial register while possibly channeling the president’s views.

  Race Holder

  Eric Holder was a favorite target of the far right from the moment he stepped onto the national stage as the nation’s first black attorney general. Although he did not adopt the cadence and inflections of black street discourse, to many of his opponents Holder might as well have been a gangsta rapper spouting outrageous verbiage. In remarks delivered to the Justice Department to commemorate Black History Month in February 2009, two weeks after taking office, Holder offered one of the most courageous and honest speeches on race in America by a political figure in quite some time. Holder’s remarks were predictably quoted out of context and thus easily misrepresented and misinterpreted. His comment that, despite considering themselves a melting pot, Americans are “essentially a nation of cowards” when it comes to race provoked ire and outrage.8 Part of the backlash against Holder’s words had to do with the national self-image he so brilliantly mocked with a provocative turn of phrase.

  “As I said in that speech, people come from their race-protected cocoons, where they feel safe,” Holder told me in an interview. “Given the history of race in this country—the slavery experience, the segregation experience, the Jim Crow experience, the violence that’s associated with all of those experiences—it’s a hard thing. We’ve got to ask what we can draw from those experiences, and how they affect present-day life. Some people say it’s best not discussed,” he acknowledged. “They say, ‘Let’s just deal with the things that we see in front of us in the twenty-first century and go from here.’ And I think we do a great disservice by crafting solutions without being cognizant of the history that led us to the place where we are, both in terms of how that history has had an impact on African Americans and other people of color—but also the impact that it’s had on white folks in this nation. It’s crippled both groups, I think, in a variety of ways.”

  Holder’s critics missed a vital link: by calling attention to America’s racial cowardice, Holder, by implication, was praising the nation’s ability to be courageous on other fronts—in creating one of the greatest democracies ever, for instance, and in taking the lead in aiding the world’s poor, or in electing the nation’s first black president. It is precisely because America has been so great at other tasks that we must point to its comparatively dismal record on race. When it comes to advances in scientific research, for example, we have been heroic. When it comes to racial dialogue and honesty, we have been timid and unimaginative; we have been cowards. That Holder’s remarks caused such disgruntlement among the privileged chattering classes, and among some of the masses as well, points up the difficulty of the task at hand—getting Americans to talk openly and forthrightly about race—while underscoring just how fragile is the American racial ego.

  Holder told me that he understood how white people could be hesitant to speak openly about race because they might be portrayed as bigots: “I think there’s a fear, even among well-intentioned, good people, that if you speak about something that is heartfelt, but perhaps not politically correct, that you will be labeled a racist.” Holder noted that black people “talk about race all the time,” adding: “I don’t know if white people talk about it all the time. I’m not there when they have those conversations. But I suspect they do talk about it more than they do when there are blacks and whites mixed, because it’s a difficult thing.

  “If you’re white,” he continued, “you don’t want to be seen as some Neanderthal—even by the questions that you might ask. Even if you legitimately want to know, ‘Well, I don’t understand, why do you feel that way?’ You then can be perceived, at best, as naïve, and at worst as insensitive-slash-racist. Blacks may feel tempted to ask, ‘How could you not understand that?’” But, said Holder, “the reality is, they don’t. They’re white. They may say: ‘I’ve never lived that. I don’t know what it’s like to be seen in that way. I don’t understand the pain that you talk about. I don’t understand the anger that you feel. So share that with me.’”

  Holder pointed to the controversial article by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, penned in July 2013 in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman not-guilty verdict, arguing that—despite not liking what Zimmerman did and hating that Trayvon was dead—he could “understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize.” That uniform is the hoodie, and what it symbolizes is “the reality of urban crime in the United States.” Except, one might note, when it’s worn by millions of Americans who never commit crimes, including, most famously, a figure like white New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. Cohen complained that he was “tired of politicians and others” claiming that his views made him a racist. “Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males?”9

  Holder contends that Cohen’s words have a place in a robust and frank conversation on race. “I think his views are what we have to be prepared to say is okay to be part of the dialogue. I don’t agree with what he said. But I don’t think he should be labeled a racist and dismissed.” Holder argues that the expression of vie
ws like Cohen’s should be encouraged in the interest of healthy dialogue and countered with fact, not emotion. “That’s an attitude that’s got to be confronted, that’s got to be dealt with, that’s got to be disproved if we want to make progress. You have to have an environment in which people feel empowered to say the kinds of things that he said, but that help promote the dialogue. If we are dismissive of him, we are ignoring a feeling that I suspect many people feel—and, interestingly enough, I suspect it’s one that many black people feel.”

  Holder argues that Cohen’s perception of black crime is part of a “new euphemism” springing up among conservatives about so-called “black-on-black crime.” Holder maintains that it is misguided and deceptive to underscore crime among black folk “to the exclusion of everything else,” as many conservatives do. “And, yes, there is a problem with the fact that ninety-four percent of all the black people who are murdered in this country are murdered by other black people. But about eighty-five percent of all the white people who are murdered in this country are murdered by white people. So we get white-on-white crime, black-on-black crime, I suppose. On the other hand, you could just look at it as a question of crime. And that’s a part of the conversation. The focus on one, to the exclusion of the other, just does not make a great deal of sense, and is not the way progress is ultimately made.”