The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Near the beginning of the engrossing 2014 film Selma there is an especially harrowing scene: four black girls, adorned in their 1963 Sunday best, and cloaked in the sweet innocence of youth, descend the staircase of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, before they are bombed to their heavenly reward far before their time. In that same city, in 1958, a dynamite bomb rocked the Bethel Baptist Church, led by the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a civil rights luminary. It would take more than two decades to bring the white supremacist perpetrator to justice. As the drive to register black voters heated up during Freedom Summer in 1964, nearly three dozen black churches in Mississippi were bombed or burned.

  The hatred of black sacred space didn’t end in the sixties. In July 1993, the FBI uncovered a plot to bomb the First AME Church in Los Angeles, wipe out its congregation with machine guns, and then assassinate Rodney King—the black motorist whose videotaped beating by four Los Angeles cops led to charges of assault with weapons and excessive force, of which the police were acquitted, sparking an urban rebellion in L.A.—in hopes of provoking a race war, much like Roof. In 1995, several men took sledgehammers to the pews and kitchens of black churches in Sumter County, Alabama. A year later, the Inner City Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, was bombarded with as many as eighteen Molotov cocktails as its back door was splashed with racist epithets. President Clinton appointed a task force in 1996 to investigate church fires, which by 1998 had singed the holy legacies of 225 black houses of worship. In November 2008, three white men set the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Massachusetts, ablaze hours after Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president. And six black churches across the South were burned down in June 2015.

  Roof’s terrorist massacre wasn’t the first time Emanuel AME Church faced racist violence. In 1818, black religious leader Morris Brown left a racially segregated church in Charleston and formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, which later became Emanuel AME Church. After Denmark Vesey, one of the church’s founding members, plotted a slave rebellion, and was foiled in the effort by a slave who betrayed his plans, Emanuel was burned to the ground by an angry white mob.

  Despite this history, black churches are generally open and affirming of whoever seeks to join their ranks—unlike white churches, which have often been rigidly divided along racial lines. The AME Church was born when founder Richard Allen spurned segregation in the white Methodist Church and sought to worship God free of crippling prejudice. Early church leaders took seriously the scripture of Acts 17:26, which claims of God, “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth,” even as they embraced the admonition in Hebrews 13:2, “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”

  That is how it is possible that the doors of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church were open to Roof, a young white participant, who, after an hour of prayer, raised a weapon and took nine lives. One of the survivors told Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of murdered pastor—and state senator—Reverend Clementa Pinckney, that Roof argued: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.” The vortex of racist mythology spun into a plan of racial carnage and terror.

  Roof’s maniacally worded manifesto articulated his rancid racist worldview. He admits that he wasn’t reared in a racist environment, but that he became racially aware after the Trayvon Martin case. “I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up,” Roof writes, reading “the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right.” Roof says he was prompted to “type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.” He was directed to the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, where he found “pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized something was very wrong.”13 Just as with perpetrators of terror in the political world, Roof was radicalized by his exposure to racist websites and their hateful pedagogy. They exacerbated Roof’s burgeoning antiblackness that led to the violent racist terror when he stepped into the Emanuel AME Church.

  The black church is a breeding ground for leaders and movements to quell the siege of white racist terror. From the start, black churches sought to amplify black grievance against racial injustice and to forge bonds with believers to resist oppression from the broader society. The church’s spiritual and political missions were always intertwined: to win the freedom of its people so that they could prove their devotion to God. Some critics see the black church as curator of moral quiet in the face of withering assault. Religious people are accused of being passive in the presence of social injustice—of seeking heavenly reward rather than earthly justice.

  In truth, the church at its best has nurtured theological and political resistance to the doctrine of white supremacy and the forces of antiblack hatred. The church has supplied leaders and blueprints for emancipation—whether in the preaching of Frederick Douglass or Prathia Hall or in the activism of Martin Luther King Jr. or Al Sharpton. But the church is also the place where black people are most vulnerable. Oddly, stereotypes of the sort that Roof nursed are unmasked in such a setting. It is not murderous venom that courses through black veins but the loving tolerance for the stranger that is the central moral imperative of the gospel.

  Adherence to the moral imperative to treat strangers kindly may have led to the black parishioners’ death in Charleston. Roof thus exploited the very kindness and humanity he found before him. The black folk gathered in that church were the proof that he was wrong; they were the living, breathing antithesis of the bigoted creeds cooked up in the racist fog he lived in. It was not their barbarity but the moral beauty of black people that let an angel of death shelter in their religious womb. Its openness and magnanimity are what make the black church vital in the quest for black self-regard.

  When preachers like Clementa Pinckney stand in the house of God to deliver the Word, they embrace the redemption of black belief—a belief in self and community. In a country where black death is normal, even fiendishly familiar, black love is an unavoidably political gesture. And that is what happens in black churches. The unavoidably political act of black love—an act that seems to make black houses of worship a target of hate. It is a political act in this culture that must remind the nation, once again, as hate and terror level black communities, that black lives matter.

  Déjà Vu All Over Again

  The Charleston massacre forced Obama to speak again, wearily, on race, though, as in many instances before, the situation seemed to strain him; his initial response was noteworthy for the sense of resignation glued to his face and weighing on his voice. Speaking in the White House on June 18, 2015, from the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room—an irony that should not be lost on us, since Brady too was shot, and permanently disabled, in the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981, and became a vigorous advocate for gun control—Obama made a bigger deal of gun violence than of race in his comments.

  “I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” the president said.14 “Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times . . . because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.” Obama continued, “This type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries . . . with this kind of frequency.” Obama said that the fact that the massacre happened in a black church “obviously raises questions about a dark part of our history.” He noted that this was “not the first time that black churches have been attacked,” but then quickly struck a universal chord in saying that “hatred across races and faiths poses a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals.”

  Near the end of his statement, the president let Dr. King speak for him as he quoted the civil rights leader
’s words of eulogy for the four little girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing: “They say to us that we must be concerned not merely with who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.” King nodded to a systematic oppression that Obama often has difficulty identifying and opposing.

  The next day, before a meeting in San Francisco of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Obama disputed the notion that he had appeared resigned to having no successful legislation for curbing gun violence, declaring, “I’m not resigned. I have faith we will eventually do the right thing,” because one “doesn’t see murder on this kind of scale, this kind of frequency in any other advanced country.” The president raised again the Newtown tragedy, which he has said was the worst moment of his presidency. Obama briefly acknowledged that “racism remains a blight we have to combat together,” and while the nation “has made great progress,” we “need to be vigilant, because it lingers . . . and it betrays our ideals and tears our democracy apart.”15

  Later that day Obama got racially unshackled. He may have been freed by the far more direct and extensive comments of 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state took to the podium after Obama and offered the mayors, and the country, a far more comprehensive engagement with the racial politics engulfing Charleston and the nation. Clinton anchored her comments in black history; she acknowledged that African Americans had celebrated, the day before her speech, Juneteenth, “a day of liberation and deliverance” when, as “President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation spread from town to town across the South, free men and women lifted their voices in song and prayer.”16 Clinton expressed confidence that the black folk in Charleston would draw on their faith and history to see them through: “Just as earlier generations threw off the chains of slavery and then segregation and Jim Crow, this generation will not be shackled by fear and hate.”

  Clinton addressed gun control too, but refused to separate the politics that prevent sensible and effective legislation from the swirling racial currents that flooded Charleston and the nation in the ugly sweep of violent animus—what Clinton later called “racist terror.” Clinton said in her speech that, tragically, despite our devotion to human rights and diversity, “bodies are once again being carried out of a black church,” and that, once again, “racist rhetoric has metastasized into racist violence.” Clinton argued that “it is tempting to dismiss a tragedy like this as an isolated incident, to believe that in today’s America, bigotry is largely behind us, that institutionalized racism no longer exists. But despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America’s long struggle with race is far from finished.” She acknowledged that race is a difficult issue to talk about and that “so many of us hoped by electing our first black president, we had turned the page on this chapter in our history,” and that “there are truths we don’t like to say out loud or discuss with our children,” but that “we have to” because it is “the only way we can possibly move forward together.”

  Clinton laid out the facts: blacks are nearly three times more likely than whites to be denied a mortgage; the median income of black families is $11,000, while for whites it is $134,000; nearly half of black families have lived in poor neighborhoods for two generations, compared to just 7 percent for whites; black men are more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than white men, 10 percent longer than white men for federal crimes; black students suffer from the vast re-segregation of American schools; and black children are 500 percent more likely to die from asthma than white children. Clinton lamented:

  More than half a century after Dr. King marched and Rosa Parks sat and John Lewis bled, after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and so much else, how can any of these things be true? But they are. And our problem is not all kooks and Klansmen. It’s also in the cruel joke that goes unchallenged. It’s in the off-hand comments about not wanting “those people” in the neighborhood. Let’s be honest: For a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear. And news reports about poverty and crime and discrimination evoke sympathy, even empathy, but too rarely do they spur us to action or prompt us to question our own assumptions and privilege. We can’t hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America. We have to name them and own them and change them.

  Clinton’s remarkable oration was steeped in black culture and charged with sophisticated analysis, and was a remarkably honest reckoning, by a major American politician, with both intimate and institutional racism—racism of the heart, and racism in the systems of society.

  Clinton’s speech was only one indication of the rapidly changing political atmosphere in the wake of Charleston. White politicians such as South Carolina’s Republican governor Nikki Haley and Republican senator Lindsey Graham called for the Confederate flag—the flag that Dylann Roof embraced as a symbol of his unquenchable hate—to be removed from the State House grounds. White southern politicians in Mississippi, Tennessee, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina also pledged to remove their Confederate flags, or to ban their depiction on license plates, part of an “emotional, nationwide movement to strip symbols of the Confederacy from public parks and buildings, license plates, Internet shopping sites and retail stores.”17 It was a stunning turn of events in southern culture and politics, and the death of nine black citizens was the reason for the change.

  Don’t Call It a Comeback

  The colossal sorrow that engulfed the nation when nine souls perished in a southern church may have emboldened Obama to engage race more honestly, and perhaps in a slightly more unguarded fashion. On the Friday of Clinton’s speech, as the nation endured a swift racial transition into an explicit confrontation with the symbols of hate in the form of the Confederate flag, Obama recorded an hour-long interview for comedian Marc Maron’s podcast series WTF. The podcast is usually taped in Maron’s Los Angeles home garage, nicknamed “the Cat Ranch.” Obama came to Maron’s garage for an interview that aired the following Monday and garnered a great deal of notice, primarily because of what he said about race.

  “I always tell young people in particular, ‘Do not say that nothing’s changed when it comes to race in America unless you lived through being a black man in the 1950s, or ’60s, or ’70s,’” Obama told Maron.18 “It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime and yours. And that opportunities have opened up, and that attitudes have changed. That is a fact. What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives—that casts a long shadow. And that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.”

  That is nothing Obama hadn’t said in a few of his commentaries on race. But what followed was something he had never said in public since becoming president, and it created a big controversy. “We are not cured of [racism]. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination.” Obama’s use of the racial epithet was brave; he meant to draw attention to the vicious legacies of racism that persist even when that epithet is not used. By using the real word instead of its abbreviated euphemism, “the N-word,” Obama conjured a visceral sense of history: he used the ugly term white supremacists often used when they lynched, castrated, or drowned black people. Dylann Roof used the word in his white terrorist manifesto. Obama offered a one-word lesson in the bitter history of race encapsulated in a single utterance that is widely considered, in America at least, the vilest term in the English language.

  Obama also underscored a racial lesson the nation routinely overlooks: the absence of the word “nigger” does not guarantee the presence of racial justice; refraining from pronouncing the word in public does not purge racist practices. Neither does the absence of overt discrimination suggest that the na
tion is free of racism. By risking the controversy he certainly knew that his use of the word would—and did—provoke, Obama appeared to welcome a racial bluntness that his advocates have hungered for, and that the nation has desperately needed. Some deemed Obama a perpetrator of racial insensitivity rather than racism’s critic. That misses a crucial point: many presidents have uttered the term, though rarely in public, and none with scare quotes around the word as Obama intended; they have mostly used it as white racists have deployed the term over the years, either as an explicitly derogatory term or, equally problematic, as a term of racist neutrality, a term meant to describe all black people.

  This appeared to be the beginning of a Bulworth moment when Obama might tell the truth and open the avenues of forthright racial conversation—when he might draw on Beatty, Holder, and even Hillary Clinton, or his wife, Michelle, in forging his analysis. It seemed that Obama was finally willing to forgo the politics of respectability that strictly forbade the utterance of the term “nigger,” even by a man who knew the revulsion the term evokes, and its taboos, and its conflicted use by blacks themselves, and who only said it a single time in public to emphasize his point. Yet as soon as he uttered the inflammatory and provocative word, he fell back into a far safer pattern of racial exposition in his WTF interview, proving that he was not yet ready to take the leap he secretly craved. Obama repeated familiar themes in the interview: that cops have a tough job and we can’t expect them to solve our racial problems; and that early education can break the poverty cycle. This is hardly a bold-speaking politician willing to tell truths that black people are often forced to learn but from which white Americans can easily escape. If this wasn’t Obama’s Bulworth moment, something far more promising was soon to come.