The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Holder’s broader point is that black history is American history, and that we do further injustice to the unduly neglected contributions of our black citizens to the common good if we continue to revel in historical ignorance, or avoid addressing the racial trauma that makes the study of black history necessary. Holder understands that the heroic efforts of black activists and intellectuals in the past forced America to clarify its ideals in the crucible of struggle that helped to define the American character. From slavery to the civil rights movement, black social action offered the nation the opportunity—and template—to transform democratic rhetoric into uplifting deeds that brought America closer to its founding principles. It is that history that shaped Holder personally, and intellectually, too, and formed his beliefs about how he should conduct himself as the nation’s first black attorney general.

  “We’re all products of our upbringing and the experiences that we’ve had,” Holder said to me. “I was a black kid raised in New York City during the civil rights movement, although I didn’t get to participate in it. I was a little young. But I certainly observed it. And being married to the sister [Sharon Malone] of one of the great warriors in that struggle, Vivian Malone [one of the first two black students in 1963 to enroll in the University of Alabama, where Governor George Wallace infamously blocked her path], my sensibility is going to be different than a white person raised in California who did not have to deal with what it means to be a black man. And it doesn’t mean that I had to be discriminated against myself. Doesn’t mean that I had to have my home firebombed. When I was a kid and I watched those kids in Birmingham being hosed and being attacked by dogs, that had an impact on me in a way that it would not have had, I think, on my white counterparts in New York City watching the same footage.” Holder said that he brought “that sensibility to the job” of attorney general. It was “this notion of social justice, this notion that looking at things racial from a different perspective matters. And it’s natural, given who I am, and the experiences that I’ve had, and given the way African Americans have had to deal in this country for the last three, four hundred years.”

  Holder in his Black History Month speech also argued that other movements for social change—the feminist and antiwar movements most notably—took their cue from the noble efforts of often unsung black Americans who gave their lives unselfishly to improve the lot of their brothers and sisters, and thus the lot of the nation. Holder was not interested in a one-way conversation; he admitted that there is legitimate space in the culture to debate the nuances and complexities of affirmative action. But without telling the truth about the bloody history that made affirmative action necessary, we can hardly debate its finer points of application or abuse. In making such arguments, Holder insisted that black history is not only good for black Americans but also vital for the entire country. Unlike others who lament black history’s segregation into a month, and therefore seek to get rid of the celebration, Holder saw the need for weaving black history into the fabric of ordinary American life and offering our citizens a critical tool of self-inventory, while broadening the horizon of our nation’s self-awareness around racial issues.

  Holder understands that America’s segregation of its history reflects its history—and its present practice—of segregating its people. The attorney general offered an alert and truthful account of how American social interaction follows patterns established some fifty years ago, when the nation suffered the effects of Jim Crow, with its mandate for legal separation of the races. Now that official restraints have been loosened, Americans nonetheless retreat into “race-protected cocoons” and rely on clichés, stereotypes, and familiar habits of ethnic and racial congregation, instead of opening ourselves to the uncomfortable but rewarding prospect of facing one another across the chasm of learned behaviors and inherited reflexes.

  Race Man and a Race’s Man

  Holder’s fair and tough-minded speech on race called attention to the comparatively tame race rhetoric of his black boss in the Oval Office. Holder’s reputation as an attorney general who carried out his duties while tending to his racial roots cast him in a more favorable light, in some black quarters, than President Obama. Holder fought vigilantly to protect the Voting Rights Act even after the Supreme Court in 2013 had profoundly weakened it in Shelby County v. Holder. “We moved all the resources that we had in Section Five cases [the part of the Voting Rights Act that explains how the requirement for federal approval of changes to election laws—called preclearance—works] to Section Two [which prohibits discrimination in voting practices or procedures] of the Voting Rights Act,” Holder told me, “and worked with members of Congress to, in essence, reverse the Supreme Court’s very flawed decision and put together coalitions to give life again to Section Four.” (Section Four established a formula to identify which areas of the country—nearly all in the South—were most likely to experience racial discrimination in voting; this section was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder.)10

  Holder fought to reduce the racial disparity in sentencing for nonviolent drug offenses as well, a chasm opened up by a former boss, Bill Clinton, in his hugely detrimental 1994 crime bill. Holder also sued states like Texas and North Carolina over discrimination against blacks in their voter ID laws. And he visited black communities, like Ferguson, Missouri, that faced the consequences of poor policing, while forcing its police department, like many more throughout the nation, to address its racist practices. Cultural critic Rich Benjamin colorfully dubbed Holder Obama’s “Dark Doppelganger,” his “Inner Nigger”—arguing that Holder could say and do black things that Obama could scarcely imagine the freedom to say and do.11

  “I’m not his Inner Nigger,” Holder insisted to me. “We’re two black men who happen to share a worldview.” Holder made a surprising observation about what things might have looked like if he and Obama had switched political places. “If he were attorney general of the United States, he would be an attorney general in my mold. And I think if I were president—and that’s a frightening thought—I’d probably be a president like him.” That seems to fly in the face of the evidence that Holder is far more conscientious about drinking from the roots of his black identity than the much more reluctant Obama. But Holder insists that is not true, defending Obama’s sparse race rhetoric since becoming president.

  “I’d husband my racial capital,” Holder says. “Spend too much and you devalue it. Spend it not sparingly, but wisely, and you increase its worth.” Holder defends Obama’s approach, saying that he as attorney general had greater latitude to express himself, while Obama faced different constraints. “I’m not the president of the United States. Every word of every conversation that he has is looked at, dissected, criticized, praised. And so he’s got to be careful. He cannot be seen as a polarizing figure. That would not serve him or the country well.”

  What of the need for presidents to speak courageously about race? “I think there is a responsibility of any president—not just him—to speak truth. And I don’t think that the criticism that he’s been reluctant to do that is justified.” Holder’s argument might be difficult to defend if we examine the frequency or efficacy of Obama’s racial discourse. Still, Holder says that it was Obama who supported him while he was the nation’s chief lawyer.

  “When I asked for all of these resources to do the civil rights enforcement, some people gave me a great deal of credit. Well, guess what? He’s got to make all these decisions about how he’s going to use the resources that he has. ‘Am I going to put them in HUD, am I going to put them in Defense, Education?’ He gave me in that first year the largest increase in the history of the Civil Rights Division, in terms of lawyers and money,” says Holder, “which enabled us to do the things we’ve done on voting rights and police misconduct cases. We filed record numbers of cases as a direct result of him saying, ‘I’m going to make that a priority.’ He doesn’t run the Justice Department. But he enabled me to do what I did. I t
hink people are a little naïve to think that Eric Holder was out there operating as a free agent, not tied to Barack Obama.”

  Obama’s relentless chiding of black America didn’t bother Holder either, though he argued that balance is the key to making such speeches effective. “I think that those speeches where you take black people to task are appropriate. And the notion of personal responsibility is something that I’ve talked about—as long as you couple that with the notion of societal responsibility. Everybody has got to play a role, but the nation has a role to play as well. There are institutional barriers that have to be taken down. There are attitudinal things that have to be changed, coupled with the notion of individual responsibility.” Ultimately, he says, “I think that you have to make it an inclusive conversation, where you’re giving tough love to the African American audience but at the same time you’re doing the same thing to the society in which we all live.”

  While others have pointed to the glaring absence of such balance in Obama’s speeches, Holder argued that the president’s nod to structural forces was not nearly as newsworthy or sensational. “I think the balance is there, but that’s not a sexy thing. That part of the speech doesn’t get reported on; [it] doesn’t get commented on. The thing where the black president says tough things to the black community, that’s the headline. It was the same with my talk; it’s known as the ‘nation of cowards’ speech. That was the fourth, fifth, sixth line in the speech. But it’s far more nuanced than that. It’s far more optimistic. But it’s not sexy. It’s easy to say, ‘Attorney General says America is a nation of cowards.’”

  The big difference, of course, is that Holder was emphasizing a societal deficit in calling for the collective responsibility of the country, and he was, at least in part, holding white people accountable for lacking the courage to confront race, strikingly dissimilar in tone and approach to the president. Obama gently rebuked Holder for his comments, yet the former attorney general insists that Obama shifted to holding white people accountable in his Trayvon Martin speech.

  “When he talked about ‘White America, you need to understand where we are coming from,’” Obama was, Holder says, making a demand for the broader culture to engage black America and understand its plight. “That was the thing that was different about that speech. He was not speaking about the black community; he was the spokesman for the black community. Which was, I think, a little different.” This time Obama “was taking white America to task, to say, ‘Look, this is why we see the Zimmerman verdict the way that we do. And you’ve got to understand that. This is where we are coming from. The lens that we use in viewing the world is different than the lens that you have. Not right, or wrong—it’s different. You need to understand the pain that we feel. What it’s like to be a man who is humiliated, made to feel like less than a man when you are viewed as a criminal. When you’re stopped for no reason.”

  It was indeed a stretch for Obama to defend rather than assault black folk, but in his Trayvon Martin speech, undeniably poignant, he did not take white America to task in the same fashion in which he has lambasted black communities. Holder is satisfied that his personal knowledge of the president offers a far more nuanced and complicated portrait of a man who takes pride in his identity.

  “People don’t know the president the way I know the president,” Holder protests. “He’s a person comfortable in his skin and conscious of the history of this nation, and determined to change it. He’s a proud black man. He doesn’t shrink from that. He sees that he has a special responsibility, being the first. I felt that on a much smaller scale.” As president, Obama “feels a special responsibility to make sure that he represents our people in the best tradition of firsts, like Jackie Robinson. People tend to forget: Jackie Robinson, in the early part of his career, difficult as it was, just took it. Probably resulted in his early death—all the stuff that he had to put up with. And I know that the president takes a lot of stuff in a political way. When you question basic things about him, like where was he born, with the birthers. He just takes it. And that, I think, is a sign of strength.”

  But, Holder stresses, Barack Obama is “a person who’s conversant with the history of black people in this country, the history of Africans, the colonial experience. He’s not a person who is uncomfortable with his blackness. He understands who he is. He understands the symbolic importance of what he’s accomplished,” says Holder. “And I think he wants to be successful on his own, but also lay a foundation so that others might follow. Through his example he will make things better for those who will follow. And I don’t mean follow as president, but who follow him as a young black male. He wants to make the world a better place for black kids like my teenage son.”

  Domestic Terror in Obama’s America

  Making things better for black teens is far more urgent because of the charged climate for black folk in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when it is clearer than ever that black death is, once again, as it was for much of the twentieth century, both sport and lust—whether at the hands of the police or ordinary citizens like Michael Dunn, who killed unarmed Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida, or Dylann Roof, who massacred nine blacks in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. That these actions are occurring now underscores the paradox—and in some ways the predictability—of the resurgence of white terror during our first black presidency.

  Outraged motorist Dunn killed seventeen-year-old high school student Davis in 2012 at a gas station after a verbal altercation over loud music coming from the car in which the teen was sitting with three other black teenage males. There is a hoary tradition of violence in the nation to snuff out even the tiniest gesture of black defiance, whether a raised voice, an arched eyebrow, or an educated tongue. From this grew the Olympics of annihilation that prompted willing whites to compete for the honor of crushing black life. The bullets that racked Jordan’s body were set in motion long before they spun out of the barrel of Dunn’s gun in Florida. The reasons are as irrelevant as they are random for this murder, and for so many others like it: obscene couplets of rap music, suspicious clothing, and a threatening demeanor—troubling symptoms, it seems, of simply being black, an offense punishable by death.

  The loud music that shook the Dodge Durango in which Jordan was seated was no match for the dark racial sentiment that rattled the heart of his killer. Dunn’s prejudice stained the letters he sent from prison as he awaited trial, echoing a shopworn gripe that “gangster-rap, ghetto talking thug ‘culture’ that certain segments of society flock to is intolerable.” (Beatty found it irresistible; Dunn found it unforgivable.) Dunn let fly a bigoted tirade against his black fellow inmates, who “all act like thugs,” saying hatefully that “if more people would arm themselves and kill these [expletive] idiots when they’re threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior.”12

  It is sad, even tragic, that so many blacks believe they can get rid of the “thug” label by denouncing rap music, sagging pants, and the boorish behavior of a few wayward youth. (That is another reason why it is unfortunate when politicians like President Obama readily resort to the term “thug” to brand all participants in urban uprisings; it plays too easily into a history of demonizing black behavior and identity that reaches far beyond social resistance to black inequality on the streets of America.) The cold fact is that all blacks are in the same boat no matter their pedigree or performance. Nothing except self-erasure will satisfy those who despise blacks.

  Racists like Dunn have little interest in getting the facts right. They scarcely make the effort to tell one black person from the next. Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman was seen as a thug because he was brash and dramatically self-assertive in a postgame interview after the NFC Championship contest in 2014. His Stanford University degree did not spare him racist rants in social media. Even-tempered and fair-minded President Barack Obama has been called a “Chicago thug” by right-wing radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh. Professional g
olfer and former Ryder Cup captain Paul Azinger called basketball superstar LeBron James a thug for a bit of trash-talking (though the king of trash talk, Larry Bird, was never viewed as a thug during his playing days). And black teen Trayvon Martin was widely mislabeled a thug after his brutal killing by George Zimmerman, for whom a far more compelling case of being a thug could be made, particularly given the violent nature of his post-verdict behavior.

  Dunn called Jordan a thug without a shred of evidence, except, of course, for his blackness itself, a blackness Dunn deemed too loud and defiant, a blackness with the backtalk built in. In judging Jordan to be a thug, Dunn became a thug himself. But he forgave himself in advance by convincing himself of his righteousness and racial innocence. This is the infuriating irrationality brought on by unchecked racial aggression. Members of a dominant group often portray themselves as victims. They excuse their ethical lapses and appeal to their fears and anger to justify their hateful actions. They often project their moral flaws onto their victims and then target them for social or literal death.

  Dylann Roof was such a figure: the murderous rage of the lone-wolf white supremacist led him to unload his .45 pistol on June 17, 2015, on nine black souls in Charleston at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, seeking, he confessed, to provoke a race war. Roof’s act of race hate is a tragic monument in the landscape of white racial terror. Sites and spaces of black life have come under attack from racist forces since the nation’s founding, but the black church is a unique target. That is because of its enormous symbolic value: the black church is not just where black people gather but a space where the sacredness of black existence finds vocal affirmation. In too many other places, black self-worth is bludgeoned by bigotry or hijacked by self-hatred: the notion that black culture is too dumb, or black lives too worthless, to warrant the effort to combat black people’s enemies. The black sanctuary breathes in black humanity while the pulpit exhales unapologetic black love. For decades these sites of love have been magnets for hate and white terror.