The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  Free at Last?

  When President Obama took the podium in July 2015 at the annual convention of the NAACP in Philadelphia, it sounded as if Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, and Eric Holder had hacked his computer and collaborated on his speech.19 It may not have been a full-on Bulworth moment, but it was decidedly closer than the one-off racial epithet of his WTF interview. “By just about every measure, the life chances for black and Hispanic youth still lag far behind those of their white peers,” Obama said in his address on criminal justice reform.20 He pointed to “a legacy of hundreds of years of slavery and segregation, and structural inequalities that compounded over generations. It did not happen by accident.” After underscoring the ill effects of bigotry in employment, schools, and housing, Obama argued that the criminal justice system “remains particularly skewed by race and by wealth.” Blacks and Latinos “make up 30 percent of our population; they make up 60 percent of our inmates.” Obama spoke of how one in thirty-five black men, and one of every eighty-eight Latino men, is serving time, while the number is only one in 214 for white men. “The bottom line is that in too many places, black boys and black men, Latino boys and Latino men experience being treated differently under the law.”

  By this point President Obama had not simply changed his tune of avoiding race; he seemed to be singing in a far more comfortable register. Not only was he speaking out on the racial disparities that cripple the justice system. He also helped to clarify the definition of rape when asked a question about beleaguered entertainer Bill Cosby at a July 2015 press conference, thereby implicitly criticizing the comedian, who allegedly administered drugs to more than thirty women and had sex with them over a forty-year period.21 Obama also sought to aggressively enforce legal bans on residential discrimination, making cities and localities accountable for the use of federal housing funds to reduce racial disparities, or else face penalties if they failed to comply. This was part of Obama’s effort to ensure that the civil rights–era dream of fair housing came to pass.

  The president also finally became more willing to grant pardons to prisoners who were often unjustly saddled with life sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Obama dramatized their plight by becoming the first sitting president to visit a federal prison. He restored diplomatic ties with Cuba, a historic achievement that thawed relations between the two countries after fifty-four years of antagonism. Obama also stood in the storied black Ninth Ward of New Orleans on the tenth anniversary of Katrina, and instead of arguing, as he had a decade earlier, that the government’s criminally slow response to the disaster was a matter of color-blind ineptitude, Obama acknowledged in an anniversary speech that New Orleans “had for too long been plagued by structural inequalities that left too many people, especially poor people of color, without good jobs or affordable health care or decent housing.”22 He restored the Alaskan native name for North America’s tallest peak when he changed it from Mount McKinley to Denali, thereby, according to one scholar, engaging in “an act of decolonization.”23 And he even partially redeemed his first trip to Africa as president with a 2015 visit to Ethiopia and his paternal homeland of Kenya—where Obama publicly performed an African dance, stood up for LGBTQ Africans, criticized genital mutilation, encouraged African leaders to adopt term limits, embraced his African kin, and proudly proclaimed, “I’m the first Kenyan-American to be president of the United States,” a statement that would have been unthinkable before his 2012 reelection, and was a not-so-subtle needling of the birthers who viciously trafficked in conspiracy theories about his Kenyan birth.24

  Obama’s racial renaissance was sparked, in large part, by the vagaries of history and the play of contingent elements that reveal, even force, a president’s hand, rushing him to the bully pulpit in ways that only a few months before might have been inconceivable. The siege of black death across the land was key, too—police killings of unarmed black citizens, the vicious lash of white terror at churches and gas stations. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the streets also pushed the president in the right direction, along with a steady undercurrent of principled black criticism. Of course, the toxic racial atmosphere when Obama first came into office put the first black president in an untenable position: if he paid too much attention to the racist attacks, he looked weak and ill-prepared for the predictable racial blowback.

  “I am subject to constant criticism all day long,” the president told me in our Oval Office discussion. “And some of it may be legitimate; much of it may be illegitimate. Some of it may be sincere; some of it may be entirely politically motivated. If I spent all my time thinking about it, I’d be paralyzed. And frankly, the voters would justifiably say, ‘I need somebody who’s focused on giving me a job, not whether his feelings are hurt.’” Obama’s racial stoicism does not mean that he hasn’t borne the brunt of racist feelings that spread throughout the land, especially those that unfurled under the banner of the Tea Party. Obama acknowledged to me that a great deal of the resistance he faced from the Tea Party had more to do with antigovernment emotions than with strictly racial animus, even though he understood how the two intertwined. “Are there probably elements within that movement that focus on my race? I think that’s probably the case. I don’t remember any other president who was challenged about where he was born despite having a birth certificate.”

  If the political resistance to Obama has often been racially driven, plausible deniability has also run high as right-wing politicians claimed that ideology more than race motivated their bitter fulminations against Obama’s policies. This often felt to black people like a thin disguise for old-school racial demonology. The remnants of barely suppressed racial hostility cluttered the political and cultural landscape for many black witnesses of Obama’s racially captive presidency. It was a painful paradox: the most powerful man in the world hindered by a thousand cords of racial resentment strung by elected officials and right-wing media. He was a black Gulliver to their Lilliputian whiteness. Obama therefore often practiced the politics of racial sublimation: he took the energy of race and redistributed it over the political landscape in a kind of racial détente that forged an uneasy alliance of racial amnesia and racial avoidance. Still, no matter the calm on the surface, racial tensions percolated beneath. When they finally erupted in police killings and racial terror and black resistance, Obama’s path to public proclamation was cleared.

  Bracing racial rhetoric, in tandem with targeted public policy, can make a big difference in how race is lived, a lesson Obama seems to have learned afresh in the last quarter of his presidency. The president’s push for prison reform was one example, as he argued that instead of devoting $80 billion to incarceration, we should invest in pre-K education and jobs for teenagers, both of which would repay the investment far more grandly than a life diminished behind bars. He also argued, as others have done, including Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, that we should interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. Obama argued for vast improvement in prison conditions. It seemed that his urge for reform could be aided by a complementary push to restore educational alternatives for prisoners and to beef up training programs that integrate ex-offenders into society. In light of the hostilities between communities of color and the police, Obama summoned a group to make recommendations, some of which he adopted, such as the demand for police body cameras.

  Each effort was commendable, and in some ways overdue. But something bigger is called for: we need a new Kerner Commission report that is updated for our day, paying special attention to how black folk are viciously targeted by unethical police practices. It is true that calling for a commission might not seem like the most systematic fix, but a serious investment in assessing the state of inequality and ingrained racism in America will show us clearly what work remains. It will be harder to ignore, less ephemeral than mourning or protests.

  In our conversation in the Oval Office, the president told me that he aimed to speak about universal values. �
��If I’m going to prophesy, I want it to be about values that everybody can rally around,” Obama said. “And I think that’s always been the strength of the African American movement. At its base, what’s always been strongest about the civil rights movement has been when it said, yes, there is a unique problem here that arises out of race and slavery and segregation. But when you lock us up, you’re imprisoning yourself in some fashion. When you deprive that child of opportunity, you’re weakening yourself.”

  Obama’s revived racial rhetoric felt like a Bulworth moment—in fact, plenty of them—and a balm to those who yearned for his presidential leadership. In November 2014 the nation witnessed the spectacle of a black president holding a news conference on one side of a television split screen while in Ferguson, tear gas and sirens swirled around a crowd protesting the failure of a grand jury to indict a police officer in the death of an unarmed black teenager. Obama was stern, disciplined, his handsome face strained by the remorseless thrum of events—events that possessed a punishing repetitiveness, a relentless logic of black suffering as their end. The president appeared to be, as he had often stated, not the president of black America, but instead the president of the United States of America, now disuniting as he spoke, his words metaphorically met by ringlets of smoke escaping the fires that raged in place of understanding and hope.

  In the year following Ferguson, a seismic event that fractured the nation’s racial landscape, Obama found a way to be the president of all America while also speaking with special urgency for black Americans. That was a crucial development. Obama’s disclaimer of not being the president of black America meant that a significant segment of the population didn’t feel his state-sanctioned concern. Of course it is true that it is not just in the official exercise of power that representation matters; it matters as well, for black people at least, in the signifying gestures of support that a president can offer. It is undeniable that presidential attention to a population and its issues can buttress the belief that democracy is for all Americans. It is, for black people, part of the folklore of presidential favor from which they have often been excluded; such favor is delivered in the gritty interstices of the machinery of politics, in the grooves and treads where race has worn down democracy, and where the grease of small accommodation, or minor concession, oils the operation of trust and investment, particularly for those against whom the machine has been historically poised.

  “That moral force is not just a matter of who’s getting what,” the president said to me in our Oval Office conversation, “but it’s rather: ‘Is everybody, as part of the American family, sitting at the table?’ And that naturally means that, as we now sit at the table, we don’t forget where we came from, and we don’t forget that long narrative that’s developed, and our particular insight into both the blessings but also the more painful parts of our past.”

  What if the president might be seen and felt discussing, clearly, in one place, at one time, the painful parts of our past: that slavery was wrong, that Jim Crow was wrong, that white terror was wrong, and that those Americans who held, recalcitrantly, to the murderous pledge of allegiance to a kingdom of hate under a banner of bigotry were just wrong? And what if he managed to accentuate the blessings that occasionally, through tragedy, come to clarify the nation’s moral trust with its darker kin even as their suffering redeems the nation’s political ideals? That might be a grace too amazing to imagine.

  ★| 8 |★

  Amazing Grace

  Obama’s African American Theology

  The last week of June 2015 had been the greatest week of Obama’s presidency, and one of the greatest weeks any president had ever had.1 The Supreme Court had delivered surprising victories for the president by upholding Obamacare’s nationwide insurance subsidies on Thursday, and legalizing same-sex marriage across America the next day. Although it wasn’t as loudly touted, the nation’s highest court on Thursday also upheld a central legal argument put forth by the Obama administration: that claims of racial discrimination in housing shouldn’t be limited by questions of intent but should be determined by discriminatory effect. Obama had begun the week with a big victory on his Pacific Rim trade deal by receiving a green light from the Senate to negotiate trade with eleven countries.

  And then on Friday afternoon, Barack Obama delivered the eulogy for fallen South Carolina state senator and Emanuel AME pastor Reverend Clementa Pinckney—arguably the most crucial speech of his presidency. The nation had been shocked by Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine souls at prayer at Emanuel. The president stepped into the pulpit to celebrate a martyr for black freedom, which has always meant, but never more clearly than now, the freedom of the nation to be its best.

  Obama knew the minister, but not well, a fact that had moral utility: Pinckney was a proxy for all those who had lost their lives in the recent siege of racial terror that was sweeping the nation. Roof claimed in his sick manifesto that black people were taking over, a delusion easily rebutted on the same Internet that fed the gunman’s twisted logic. No single person better embodied black progress, and therefore scared white terrorists more, than Barack Obama. Could it be that unarmed blacks who were dying across the nation were urban proxies for the black presidency and the change it had brought? Those who can’t aim a gun at Obama take whatever black lives they can. Roof is not, therefore, a lone wolf. A better way of saying this is that calling him a lone wolf hardly denies the hatred of the philosophical pack from which he separated; the evil he reflects is deeply entrenched in our culture. The banner he killed under did not go away when the Confederate flag—which should have come down long ago—was removed.2

  When Obama stood in the pulpit as president, he bore a guilt for which he was in no way individually responsible; it was instead a symbolic guilt as the shining emblem of black mobility that the killer found so offensive. It is a guilt that very few human beings can ever fully know or understand: Martin Luther King Jr. was wracked with guilt for being the centerpiece of a freedom movement that so many others participated in and died for. It was not simply a matter of knowing that many others deserved credit. It was understanding that his actions provoked, deliberately at times, the established order to deadly response: fire hoses washing away black bodies, police dogs tearing into black flesh, billy clubs lowered on black heads, bullets unloaded in black backs. Of course King was not responsible for a single death as leader of the movement; that responsibility lay in the belly of white terror that he agitated, and which spit up those black bodies in retching compensation for the pressure they put on the anatomy of white privilege. But King still felt guilt despite knowing that what he did was necessary if black people were to be free in a racist society that would deny their freedom as long as they were afraid to demand it or die for it. For King it wasn’t merely a matter of racial guilt, either, but a theological one as well. Every Christian minister is a stand-in for God, who, as Christ, grappled with death and bore the weight of sin, of human guilt, on his shoulders. The act of preaching is the ritual reenactment of that sacrifice, and of symbolically taking on guilt. Obama bore both theological and political guilt that day when he climbed the pulpit as our nation’s First Preacher.

  Obama’s body, again, was at a crossroads. He had often spoken of the benefits of his biracial biography; it was needed now more than ever, for the black and white elements that went into his making were at loggerheads, incessantly. Had his presidency put an end to racism or reignited its burning terror? Roof, of course, gave his answer, mad, literally, that black folk seem always to talk of race while whites hardly speak of it at all. Of course black folk spoke of the pain in their gut, the burr under their saddle, the weight around their neck, the invisible cloud that poured rain on their slow and forever-delayed parade to parity. Even whites who are not racists wonder the same thing: Why are blacks obsessed with race; why can’t they stop navel-gazing when the world lies before them for the taking; instead of moaning the blues, why can’t they make an honest go of it like whites had
to?

  Obama had tapped some of this sentiment in his speeches, especially his famed race address in Philadelphia. But now was not the time to lay into blacks, but to back them; an unforeseen opening had arrived when Governor Haley and Senator Graham of South Carolina both said that the Confederate flag should no longer wave its despotic message over their State House grounds. Like Obama, Haley and Graham bore a kind of symbolic guilt, too, for having vigorously defended a symbol of hate that masqueraded instead as a sign of southern heritage. Haley and Graham thus expiated their guilt, and the guilt of their fellow South Carolinians, by vigorously embracing an interpretation of the flag they would have disputed the day before Roof’s racist rampage.

  If ever there was doubt that Obama is the celebrated compromise between black assertion and white resistance, moments like this confirmed his value on either side of the divide, which, inevitably, left both sides hungry for more. He could never be white enough, given his brown skin; and his blackness had always to be contained, circumspect, signified, radiated, implicit—always threatening to flare at the wrong moment. Calling a white cop stupid. Saying a black boy in Florida killed by a rogue neighborhood watchman could have been his son. Obama had always to field demands from some blacks to be blacker, and the wish of many whites to whitewash the story of American race and politics. He was shadowed between the ideals and the realities of race and identity in America. But he had made it a productive tension, one that put him in office and thus increased the pressure on him to reconcile the two—a challenge he had often shirked, one from which he begged relief, one he sometimes denied being aware of. Obama had often had to be both Christ and Peter: the evidence of the resurrection of racial progress to come, and the denial of the suffering blackness through which it might emerge.