All of these kinds of blackness are, of course, not mutually exclusive, and are abundantly elastic and malleable. But they are worth enumerating to understand the broader tension that Obama plays into: the long-running debate, and often battle, over versions of blackness in America. There is the symbolic blackness that the president perfectly embodies. By this I mean the representative sort, in which his blackness is the blackness of the masses; his lean body carried the weight of the race, and the words of James Baldwin meet those of pioneering scholar Anna Julia Cooper. To paraphrase Cooper, when and where Obama enters, black folk automatically enter with him, as he bears what Baldwin termed the “burden of representation.” Like other symbolic blacks before him, Obama has no choice in the matter—one fittingly symbolized in nonnegotiable terms of existence that are nearly Cartesian: he is, therefore we are.
There is, too, substitute blackness, in which luminaries like Michelle Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder supply the blackness—the resonant cultural tropes, the signifying gestures, the explicit mention of race in context—that a figure like Obama, bound on all sides by demands and constraints, can barely acknowledge, much less embrace. Historical contingency and political necessity meld to determine Obama’s role versus that of substitute blacks when it comes to speaking about race: he can’t, but they can.
Then there is surplus blackness, which is too much blackness for many outside the race, and for some inside it as well. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are some of its most noted examples, figures whose blackness is never in question, even if the use and force of it depend on the situation at hand or the need of the group at the moment. If substitute blackness is a conditional stand-in for blackness, surplus blackness is the display of blackness—in fact, blackness as display. The nearly exclusive imperative of surplus blackness is to stand up for black folk in public, whether at the moment of the police killing of an innocent black or the neighbor-to-neighbor murder or the cry for racial justice in the courts. Obama’s symbolic blackness also sometimes defends black folk but more often judges them. When it comes to defending black people: he won’t, but they will.
Finally, there is subversive blackness, glimpsed most recently in the activism of Black Lives Matter, where the meanings of blackness compete and collide, where blackness is at once self-subverting and self-regenerating. Subversive blackness glances sideways at symbolic, substitute, and surplus blackness, preferring instead to grasp what’s been left out of the official narratives of blackness and to fill in the blanks. It is perhaps summed up in Kanye West’s credo, “Everything I’m not made me everything I am,” which nicely captures the irreverence that Obama spurns but subversive blackness embraces: he isn’t, but they are.
Obama coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with substitute blackness; picked and chose among instances of surplus blackness; and, toward the end of his presidency, after being forced into it by blood and renewed protests in the streets, came to a truce with subversive blackness. But for much of his presidency he preferred, and personified, symbolic blackness: His very success—embodied in the sight of him and his gifted and beautiful black family in the nation’s most stellar public housing—was sufficient to signify black progress, many thought. He could make black folk proud by casually descending the stairs of Air Force One, or by inviting black icons like Jay Z and Beyoncé to the White House. Black swag at its best. And something that white Americans who had voted Obama into office could cheer, too, while desperately hoping to be finally done with the tiring and unsolvable conundrum of race.
But that swag, and the thousand more subtle ways his presidency symbolized the resolve of the nation to move beyond its painful past, didn’t quell racist passions or redeem the systems and institutions that make black life vulnerable, if not disposable, while reinforcing naked inequality. Instead, Obama’s embrace of symbolic blackness allowed him to recuse himself from acknowledging the messier truth: that the bilious race-based opposition to him was rooted in similar feelings of revulsion toward black folk in general.
In the last few years of his presidency, Obama contended with—conceded—the need for substitute, surplus, and even subversive blackness. He sent Eric Holder to Ferguson; he listened to Al Sharpton and others’ pleas for the Justice Department’s intervention in Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, and several other cities; and he largely bolstered the legitimacy of the Black Lives Matter movement as something we “have to take seriously.” Obama had made a shift and was now openly using the power of his pulpit to showcase the racial divides that plague the country, from backdrops such as the storied Ninth Ward in New Orleans, a federal prison, and a meeting with Black Lives Matter activists. And yet the administration remained steady in their resentment of black criticism. Obama and his inner circle bristled at black efforts to hold him accountable on race. They showed little talent in distinguishing loving and thoughtful criticism from unprincipled attack. This approach signaled admirers to view even reasonable dissent as racial treason. One example: It led many blacks to question the legitimacy of leaders like Jesse Jackson, who have heroically served black America. Jackson’s vocal and graphic criticism of Obama in 2008 understandably angered the future president. Yet Obama quickly forgave the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee Senator Joe Lieberman for campaigning with Obama’s 2008 Republican opponent John McCain. It seems petty and vindictive that Obama didn’t bring Jesse Jackson in from the political cold in a face-to-face meeting at the White House.
The Obama administration’s resentment of black criticism didn’t keep it from tapping the deep well of black solidarity while refusing to publicly acknowledge the sane black voices demanding greater accountability. Thus it was a one-way street: black folk should never bother as a group to request that Obama be held accountable as a black man, yet the Obama administration from the start skillfully exploited the always-deep support for the president. If the president might have reasonably fended off some criticism by claiming that Congress tied his hands when it came to race—it blocked legislation that might have helped black folk—it was distressing to see what he made of the resources that fell within his bailiwick: cabinet appointments, Supreme Court nominations, and the opportunity to spotlight black suffering.
Obama did not feel pressed to reflect the breadth of black talent across his administration. It is true that he brought us the first black attorney general, Eric Holder, but he largely skimped on black cabinet appointments until pressured by black politicians to appoint more African Americans in his second term. Besides Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx and Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt, Obama later added Secretary of Education John King, Jeh Johnson as head of Homeland Security, and Loretta Lynch as Attorney General, to replace the departed Holder. It was a respectable tally, but it didn’t break any of his predecessor’s records.
The president justly boasted of his record of diverse appointments to the federal bench. On the Supreme Court, however, he passed up three opportunities to right the scales of justice by nominating a black woman to the highest court. Such a gesture would have also rewarded Obama’s most loyal constituency. “But at no point did I say: ‘Oh, you know what? I need a black lesbian from Skokie in that slot. Can you find me one?’” Obama said, referring to the hometown of Merrick Garland, his latest, and stalled, nominee to the Supreme Court. “Yeah, he’s a white guy, but he’s a really outstanding jurist. I’m sorry. I mean, you know, I think that’s important.” Diversity appears to be set off against quality in Obama’s thinking, a common mistake also made by the notion’s opponents.
Obama’s choice reflects a profound political miscalculation as well. By deeming Garland impossible to reject by the Republican Senate because he is a moderate jurist with impeccable credentials, Obama ignored the fact that politics shape our perception of qualification and excellence. Further, a Senate whose priority has been to resist Obama’s mandate and choice—really, to rebut his presidency—won’t conduct an impartial investigation of Garland’s merits. Su
ch investigations are always charged with partisanship. Obama missed the opportunity to nominate a black woman who admittedly, like Garland, would have been denied a fair hearing. But should Hillary Clinton become president, she would have a far better chance of seeing a black woman through the nomination process, since key Republicans claimed they wanted to leave the decision to the next—and from their view, hopefully Republican—president. As it stands now, if Clinton wins and honors Obama’s Supreme Court choice, the racial status quo of selecting the best white person for the job will prevail.
Obama’s hesitancy to spotlight black suffering is lamentable; he seemed capable of only being forced to do for black citizens what he willingly did for others. In Obama’s view, white folk get social service and executive orders; black folk get social science and executive lectures. Obama’s insistence that he was not black America’s president was a clever if cynical way of beating back the demand for the president to address black issues by making it appear that such demands cradled a selfish and myopic view of politics. Obama owed black people the same regard he had for all citizens. Obama rushed to New Jersey in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy to embrace Governor Chris Christie and hug citizens while offering the government’s help. He took months to make it to Flint, Michigan—even passing up the chance to go while visiting Detroit only an hour up the road—to address its contaminated drinking water crisis still affecting the lives of thousands of poor black folk with far less federal support.
Obama is an extraordinary figure who has done some good things in bad times, and some great things under impossible circumstances. As the first black president, he faced enormous challenges and had to weather a steady downpour of bad faith from the right wing and racist resistance from bigoted quarters of the country. Obama was torn between America’s noble ideals of democracy and its cruel realities of race—a tension he rode into office, and one that occasionally defeated his desire to reconcile the best and worst halves of the nation he governed.
Obama had to endure a degree of animus that tested the durability of the American dream. His presence in office reflected our most hopeful embrace of change, even as it threw light on the deeply entrenched bigotry that would reverse such change. Obama was reluctant to speak about race and hesitant to champion the causes of a valuable, if vulnerable, black constituency. He was not always free to relax into his blackness, out of fear it would frighten white America. There was a lot he couldn’t do. But because of what he did do, the road will undoubtedly be easier for the next black president. And the nation will owe Barack Obama profound thanks for paving the way.
★ | ★
Acknowledgments
This book began the night Barack Obama won the presidency on November 4, 2008, when I witnessed the nation’s first black president embrace a version of American exceptionalism and echo the immortal Sam Cooke: “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”
I had first met Barack Obama when the two of us served on a black history panel in the suburbs of Chicago in the very early nineties. I made an impassioned plea for Obama’s U.S. Senate candidacy in 2003 at a local Chicago black radio expo, and introduced him to the crowd to say a few words before my keynote address that afternoon. After his Senate victory, I’d see Obama here and there—at the annual Christmas party thrown by Ebony magazine owner Linda Johnson Rice, on the Amtrak Acela train between D.C. and Philadelphia—and we’d visit and have cordial conversations.
After he announced his presidential bid, I served as an informal advisor and official surrogate for Obama, traveling to Iowa before the first caucus, to Florida a few days before the 2008 election, and many places in between, touting his virtues. I notified him directly when I made an exception to my rule as a surrogate never to criticize him publicly as I penned an essay for Time magazine that took issue with his attack on black fathers in his famous July 2008 Father’s Day address at Chicago’s Apostolic Church.
The day after Obama’s pioneering win, I was slated to deliver the prestigious W.E.B. Du Bois lectures at Harvard University, where Henry Louis Gates Jr. had invited me to hold forth on a subject of my choosing. I settled on rap icon Jay Z and came up with an ambitious title to match his outsized talent—“From Homer to ’Hova: Hustling, Religion, and Guerilla Literacy in the Pavement Poetry of Jay Z.” But Obama stole the show. I scrapped my lectures on Jay Z, and for the next three days I wrestled out loud, an exercise in improvisational cultural criticism, with Barack Obama’s monumental victory and how it might shape our ideas of politics and color. I am grateful to TV One and to Professor Gates and the Harvard community for giving me this rewarding opportunity to work out my initial ideas about President Obama and race in America.
My Du Bois lectures became the basis for my “Barack Obama and Race” seminar at Georgetown University, which draws some of Georgetown’s most driven students who yearn to explore the political and racial contexts of their nation’s first black presidency.
My Obama seminar lies at the nexus of our nation’s racial anxieties and confusions—and our possibilities too. My class is a challenging space. We wage war against our own fears and ignorance, chasing racial fantasies out of the rabbit holes of culture in which they have sought cowardly refuge. No meaning of race is safe from our scrutiny, no consequence of race is closed to our consideration, no cherished truth of tribe or tradition is immune to our rigorous doubt. We try as best we can to see and tell the truth about Obama: he deserves to go down as one of the most important and consequential presidents in our history, and yet, when it came to race, he often stumbled.
In November 2015, Obama declared, “I am very proud that my presidency can help to galvanize and mobilize America on behalf of issues of racial disparity and racial justice. But, I do so hoping that my successor, who’s not African American, if he or she is not, that they’ll be just as concerned as I am, because this is part of what it means to perfect our union.” Obama made the statement as he sought to sign an executive order to combat job discrimination for ex-offenders. But neither his comments about race, nor his actions on ex-offenders (a disproportionate number of whom are black and brown) would have happened without significant social protest against racial injustice in the streets, and principled criticism of Obama from black quarters. My seminar has grappled with such untidy revelations, and I am grateful to my students for helping me to clarify my thinking about Obama and race over the last several years.
The Black Presidency is the elaboration of several years of teaching and reflects on the concerns and struggles of my students. I have also witnessed the great hunger beyond the ivory tower for the issues my students and I discuss every fall. As I discovered firsthand in esteemed lecture halls, prisons, public libraries, sanctuaries, and corporate boardrooms, my classroom is a vibrant microcosm of the concerns and struggles of the nation at large.
I want to thank the following people for supporting my efforts to understand and explain Obama over the years. Tanya McKinnon, my literary agent, is a towering intellectual presence whose relentless push for clarity and conceptual rigor made me come to terms with my thoughts in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise. Thank you for being sui generis, Tanya. Deanne Urmy is a prodigiously gifted editor whose broad vision and brilliant imagining with me of this book have made it far better than it would have been without her help. Thank you so much, Deanne, for working your magic and making me part of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt family.
I also want to thank Amanda Heller, who offered conscientious attention to the manuscript and made it much stronger. Thanks as well to Lori Glazer, director of publicity, Brian Moore (great jacket photo, sir!), Lisa Diercks (great layout, ma’am), Kelly Dubeau Smydra, Jill Lazer, Ayesha Mirza, Stephanie Kim, Barbara Jatkola, Donna Riggs, Giulana Fritz, and Jenny Xu. Nina Subin, thanks for a very nice author photograph on the dust jacket. And great thanks as well to Beth Burleigh Fuller, a wonderful production edito
r who helped me clean things up at the end!
Paul Farber, my former student and now a superb scholar and colleague, helped in the early days with research, as did the very talented Mishana Garschi in the later period of my work. I thank brilliant thinkers James Braxton Peterson, Salamishah Tillet, and Marc Lamont Hill for listening to my thoughts and offering me their own, and for their love and support as well.
I’m grateful to Phil Griffin, quick-witted MSNBC impresario and my brother from the Midwest, as well as to the sublime Yvette Miley for making me a viable member of the MSNBC family, where I got plenty of time to talk about politics and race on air. I greatly appreciate the generosity of my man Ed Schultz, and that of his former producer James Holm, and for wonderful shows hosted by media maven and brilliant force of nature Tamron Hall, sculptor of words Alex Wagner, journalist and edifying soldier of the Cross Martin Bashir, gifted scholar Melissa Harris-Perry, and Joy Reid, a formidable thinker and graceful writer whose countless conversations about Obama and race were very helpful. Big thanks to the Reverend Al Sharpton, on whose MSNBC show I vetted some of these ideas, and in whose debt I remain for his generous interview for this book—and for his brilliant and courageous leadership over the years.
Thanks as well to Eric Holder (and his equally gifted wife, Sharon Malone) for his great interview, and for his revival of the office of the Attorney General as a forum for racial justice and equality. And while she and her boss will surely disagree with some of what I say here, I’m grateful to Valerie Jarrett for arranging my interview with President Barack Obama—to whom I’m greatly indebted for an honest and insightful conversation for this book.
I am also grateful to my New York Times family, especially the very talented Sewell Chan; Jessica Lustig, my former student and now my uncommonly wise teacher in many ways; and Rachel Dry, my enormously gifted editor, who helped me understand what I thought about race and Obama. A big shout of gratitude as well to my New Republic family, including the illustrious trio of editor-in-chief Gabriel Snyder, features director Ted Ross, and senior editor Jamil Smith.
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