The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  If Haley and Graham had to confess their guilt about the flag, Obama had fences to mend, too, for having dispensed to black people too much tough love and not enough tender loving care. It was important for the nation to see him loving black people without hesitation or apology. There is political import to such displays, for they highlight elements of black culture that are usually ignored until crisis comes. Just as Obama took pains to insist that most Americans are decent people, it is equally true that most black folk are loving and forgiving people. It may be true that those qualities—like survivors forgiving a white racist his evil deed even before their loved ones found their final resting place—shine brightest in catastrophe. But they beam, too, in everyday acts of valor, particularly in what blacks refuse to do: hate all police because of instances of egregious brutality, or make violent attempts to undo a criminal justice system that unfairly punishes black people. It is a wonder that black goodness, and sanity, survive the hidden injuries of race: the daily denials of opportunities; the withholding of resources, goods, and services; and the relentless assaults, both subtle and vocal, on the humanity of black folk. Obama knew better and should have said so more often, more publicly, more loudly. Now was his chance to broadcast to the world the beauty of black humanity.

  When Obama stepped into the pulpit, he was greeted with organ chords and drumrolls, and a sea of royal purple behind him as the majesty of the AME bishopric engulfed him. The Baptist and Methodist churches, with their loose organizational structures and their less formal educational standards, had historically been more open to black slaves and their style of worship.3 When they left to form their own colored congregations, black folk sought to expand their biblical literacy and to deepen their mastery of rhetoric. Among those on the stage behind Obama was Vashti McKenzie, the first female bishop of the AME Church and one of the most gifted preachers in the nation. In the vast congregation of six thousand stretched out before him at the College of Charleston were Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, past masters of black sacred speech. Obama was surrounded by black rhetorical genius and the greatness of black music, and had every reason to tap both veins in his performance.

  “Giving all praise and honor to God,” Obama began. Right off the bat he was signaling that he would not operate, at least not exclusively, as a politician, or even as president, but as preacher, with the phrase that accompanies many testimonies, speeches, and sermons in black churches—with a slight emendation: “Giving all praise and honor to God, who is the head of my life.”4 Obama need not go that far, to claim God as the head of his life, since that dependent clause might signal for some a personal claim that would make him vulnerable to rebuff—“Really? God is the head of your life as you conduct war and send drones?”—or unkind parody. The phrase as it stood drew applause and verbal affirmation from the audience.

  “The Bible,” Obama said next, leaving no doubt as to his rhetorical anchor, following the Spirit with the Word of God, “calls us to hope. To persevere, and have faith in things not seen.” He didn’t have to mention that it was the same kind of hope he often spoke of, an audacious hope, a hope for which he named his second book as a way to capture his political vision. Obama read his scripture, as preachers are wont to do, except, unlike most of them, he didn’t tell us the source of his words, which in this case are from the eleventh chapter of the New Testament Book of Hebrews, a book that famously details the substance of faith and hope. We sensed there was something monumental about to happen, since only the epic can match the tragedy of what had occurred; it was being presaged in his announcing “scripture,” but not a particular scripture. The universal was hovering low, about to claim the eulogy as a conduit for the sort of truth that no one scripture can contain, but which reflects the whole of the book itself—the very idea of God’s word.

  “We are here today to remember a man of God who lived by faith. A man who believed in things not seen. A man who believed there were better days ahead, off in the distance. A man of service who persevered, knowing full well he would not receive all those things he was promised, because he believed his efforts would deliver a better life for those who followed.”

  After acknowledging Pinckney’s widow and daughters (how personal and painful that must have been, as Obama—in the presence of his own beautiful wife, Michelle, with their two precious daughters, Sasha and Malia, back home in Washington—saw before him the reflection of his own family and possible fate), Obama foreshadowed his theme of grace: “The first thing I noticed was his graciousness, his smile, his reassuring baritone, his deceptive sense of humor—all qualities that helped him wear so effortlessly a heavy burden of expectation.” Could not these words be spoken of the eulogist himself? His voice may have been an octave higher, his skin less chocolate, but they shared the same smile and humor. Black men so bright and accomplished so rarely offer love and recognition to one another in public, except, perhaps, on a hardwood court or at a music or movie awards show, and it is a shame that it is too often in death that compliments are bestowed.

  Obama saluted Pinckney’s preacherly pedigree, telling us that he came from a long line of ministers who “spread God’s word, a family of protesters who sowed change to expand voting rights and desegregate the South. Clem heard their instruction, and he did not forsake their teaching.” Obama tied together Pinckney’s political and religious vocations, calling him an “anointed” man. Obama, of course, had grown to appreciate great preaching under the tutelage of Jeremiah Wright; this was an ode, indirectly, likely unintentionally, but no less effectively, to the spiritual side of Wright, the man who shaped Obama’s religious identity, a fact that gained little notice in their bitter contretemps. Obama spoke of Pinckney’s political work in representing “a sprawling swath of the Lowcountry, a place that has long been one of the most neglected in America. A place still wracked by poverty and inadequate schools; a place where children can still go hungry and the sick can go without treatment. A place that needed somebody like Clem.”

  What he didn’t say, perhaps felt no need to say in light of the massacre, is that the problems of blacks in South Carolina run far deeper than bad schools, hunger, poverty, and poor health care. Black folks had waged perennial war against white supremacy from the day they set foot on South Carolina soil.5 Blacks had been rebelling against, and running away from, the brutal oppression of slavery and its punishing subtropical clime at least since September 9, 1739, the day of the infamous Stono Rebellion near Charleston, where forty-four black people, and twenty-one whites, were killed. It was the largest slave rebellion in the history of the British mainland colonies, though of course there were larger insurrections in the Caribbean and South America. The blacks in South Carolina were trying to get to Florida, which was then under Spanish rule; the British controlled Carolina. The king of Spain had issued an edict announcing that any slave who made it across St. Mary’s River in Florida would be free. Black folk made every effort on land and sea to get to St. Mary’s and secure their freedom. Those who made it created the first free black town in North America, Fort Mose, in Florida.

  It should be remembered that 48 percent of all of the black people who entered the colonies, and the United States after 1776, until 1808, when the slave trade was outlawed, came to America through Charleston. It was so identifiably black that even the white people called it “Negro Country.”6 There is little wonder that Charleston is such a contested site for racist diehards and is ground zero in the history of tortured race relations in America. This history cannot be ignored in grappling with the Confederate flag and its relationship to the animus that flashed in deadly manner at Emanuel. Antiblack racism flows like a vicious current under the floorboards of American history; but under the floorboards of South Carolina, it rushes like a flood. Black people fought back in South Carolina; they risked their lives, and took the lives of their oppressors, to be free, and that terror—festering for nearly three hundred years—is just one of the motivations for the virulent racism that flowed thro
ugh Dylann Roof into the lives of Charleston and indeed the nation.

  The theme of grace played on Obama’s lips, especially as he contrasted grace to fallen humanity; the killer, Obama declared, was blind to grace in all the ways it shone during and after his fatal act.

  Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group—the light of love that shone as they opened the church doors and invited a stranger to join in their prayer circle. The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court—in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness. He couldn’t imagine that.

  The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston, under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley[,] . . . how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond—not merely with revulsion at his evil act, but with big-hearted generosity and, more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life.

  Obama explicitly embraced his theme as he acknowledged that for the “whole week, I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace.” Obama spoke of the grace of the families left behind by the massacre, and said that grace was a topic Pinckney had often preached about. Obama recited lines from one of his favorite hymns: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind but now I see.” Obama brilliantly played on the blindness that plagues the American soul—blindness to the pain unfurled in waving the Confederate flag; blindness to how the harm of the past, in slavery and Jim Crow, caught up to the present in mass incarceration, tension and mistrust between cops and blacks, and the attack on voting rights—and how, with incredible grace, with God’s grace, black folk overcame.

  Like any good preacher, Obama had a working theological definition of grace as he encouraged the congregation to forge ahead and find the meaning of God’s grace in their hearts and in neighborhoods across the land:

  According to the Christian tradition, grace is not earned. Grace is not merited. It’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace. As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other—but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace. But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift.

  It’s a dangerous prospect for a professional politician to wade into theological complexities and to offer his view of faith, but Obama garnered confidence in the preaching moment. He shows, too, the political utility of grace. There is a subtle rebuke to political self-portraits of romantic, rugged individualism that refashioned a do-it-yourself pragmatism into a mythology of the self-made man. We are all indebted, the president reminds us, to a grace we didn’t earn—and of course the nation has also benefited from so much black labor and black grace that it didn’t earn. Obama had earlier, in the 2012 campaign, during a stump speech in Virginia, got in trouble with conservatives when he claimed that “if you’ve got a business”—in the line that got yanked out of context and repeated—“you didn’t build that.” But the broader context and true meaning were deliberately missed:

  There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me—because they want to give something back . . . [I]f you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own . . . I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

  If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen . . .

  The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together . . . We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.7

  In the context of the funeral, the reminder of grace had a political and racial resonance that was hard to miss.

  If Obama had been, before, hesitant to embrace his blackness, and to call it by its name, allow it to name him, and to use it as a lens on America, the hesitation melted this day. In a remarkable passage Obama argues that America has been blind to how the past colors our present racial moment and therefore blind to how we have missed out on God’s grace:

  Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career. Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate. Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal justice system and leads us to make sure that that system is not infected with bias; that we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure. Maybe we now realize the way racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it, so that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs, but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal. So that we search our hearts when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote. By recognizing our common humanity[,] by treating every child as important, regardless of the color of their skin or the station into which they were born, and to do what’s necessary to make opportunity real for every American—by doing that, we express God’s grace.

  By insisting that Americans not harm black people by doing these unjust things to them, and telling us that the will to name, and undo, harm is an expression of God’s grace, Obama goes far beyond political arguments about resources and links the doing of justice to the moral order of the universe. If in the past Obama lagged far behind in insisting on the dignity of black identity—in acknowledging his own blackness and how it might have anything to do with how he thought or behaved as president—in his eulogy Obama leaped cosmic dimensions to compassionately embrace a broader, bigger, blacker notion of blackness than ever before. He was not merely preaching to the world, to the nation, to the congregation, or to the choir. He was also preaching to himself. As the Negro spiritual says, “Not my brother, nor my sister, but it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.”

  Obama had, before his endorsement of blackness, also punctured the self-image of the southern white who claimed that heritage, not hate, marched beneath the Confederate flag. Obama insisted that the flag represented a legacy of white supremacy that harmed black citizens,8 and that the grace that we claimed in the religious world must extend to politics as well:

  For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too many of our citizens. It’s true, a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge—including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise—as we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now.

  Removing the flag from this state’s capitol would not be an act of political correctness; it would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be an acknowledgment th
at the cause for which they fought—the cause of slavery—was wrong. The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong. It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history; a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds. It would be an expression of the amazing changes that have transformed this state and this country for the better, because of the work of so many people of goodwill, people of all races striving to form a more perfect union. By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace.

  Of course, Obama didn’t have the exegetical or expository room to tackle another prominent symbol that has also shielded a multitude of sins: the cross. In the same way that the Confederate flag has flown above bigotry, the cross has been raised, too, against black people in the name of white terror, and against women, and gay and lesbian folk, and against transgender people, too, in the name of sexual and moral purity. God’s grace was manifest, too, in the mingling of two victories on the same day: the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, and the Confederate flag receiving its most potent symbolic lowering in Obama’s speech. In the black religious setting where he metaphorically folded the Confederate flag, Obama let stand a contradiction he might have reasonably assailed on another occasion: how the black church often undercut its own glorious reach, its own universal sweep, by emulating the bigotry it despised, bigotry that had unjustly curtailed black life. Many black believers had recoiled when Obama came out in support of same-sex marriage, using scripture and tradition to hammer gays and lesbians the same way white bigots had used the Bible to strike against black humanity and civil rights. Many black believers even chafed at the suggestion of a parallel between race and sex, but of course, race hate and homophobia flow from the same river of repulsion. In truth, there were many confederacies of bigotry operating that day, not just the Confederacy; many flags were flying for blindness; many banners were hung and waved for disbelief in our essential togetherness and unity. Either all black lives mattered or none mattered at all.