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3. Black Presidency, Black Rhetoric:
Pharaoh and Moses Speak
1. “Who Sings It Better: Al Green or Obama?,” Today, January 20, 2012, http://www.today.com/id/46069802/ns/today-today_news/t/who-sings-it-better-al-green-or-obama/#.Vem-xOvdVJ0. The site also reports that Al Green later said of Obama’s rendition that he “nailed it” and was “thrilled that the president even mentioned my name.” Also see “Video: President Obama Sings Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’ at NYC Fundraiser,” US Weekly, January 20, 2012, http://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/president-obama-croons-al-greens-lets-stay-together-at-nyc-fundraiser-2012201. During a 2013 White House concert that celebrated Memphis soul, President Obama joked that he was one of the nation’s premier impersonators of the soul legend. “Tonight, I am speaking not just as President, but as one of America’s best-known Al Green impersonators,” Obama said as the crowd laughed. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-im-one-of-americas-best-known-al-green-impersonators/article/2526759.
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2. “Transcript of Obama’s Remarks at the White House Correspondents Dinner,” Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/04/29/transcript-of-obamas-remarks-at-the-white-house-correspondents-dinner/.
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3. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Jeffrey K. Tullis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Martin J. Medhurst, ed., Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004); Thomas W. Benson, Writing JFK: Presidential Rhetoric and the Press in the Bay of Pigs Crisis (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003); Bill Clinton on Stump, State, and Stage: The Rhetorical Road to the White House,ed. Stephen A. Smith (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994); John M. Murphy, “Cunning, Rhetoric, and the Presidency of William Jefferson Clinton,” in The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership, ed. Leroy G. Dorsey (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), pp. 231–251; John Wilson, Talking with the President: The Pragmatics of Presidential Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 2105); Justin S. Vaughn and Jennifer R. Mercieca, eds., The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014).
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4. Elaine B. Richardson and Ronald L. Jackson II, eds., African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007); Keith Gilyard, True to the Language Game: African American Discourse, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2011).
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5. Barack Obama in Sumter, S.C., YouTube, January 24, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh69Zi2rV-U; also Ben Smith, “An Unlikely Echo,” Politico, January 27, 2008, http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0108/An_unlikely_echo.html.
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6. Late into Obama’s second term, as he rode a crest of political successes, the Obama-Reagan comparisons, occasionally prompted by Obama himself in private conversation, appear far less troublesome, and instead potentially place him within shouting distance of the sort of transformative presidencies he said in January 2008 that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton lacked. See Linda Feldmann, “Is Obama the Democrats’ Reagan?,” Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2105, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2015/0906/Is-Obama-the-Democrats-Reagan.
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7. Excerpt from Malcolm X (1992), directed by Spike Lee, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV7yx2y3TtY.
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8. New Yorker editor David Remnick defended the cover artwork by Barry Blitt as satire: “Our cover ‘The Politics of Fear’ combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are. The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall—all of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that’s the spirit of this cover.” See Tobin Harshaw, “Obama’s Cover Flap,” New York Times, July 14, 2008, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/obamas-cover-flap/comment-page-5/. Blitt briefly responded as well: “I think the idea that the Obamas are branded as unpatriotic [let alone as terrorists] in certain sectors is preposterous. It seemed to me that depicting the concept would show it as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is.” See Nico Pitney, “Barry Blitt Defends His New Yorker Cover Art of Obama,” Huffington Post, July 21, 2008, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/13/barry-blitt-addresses-his_n_112432.html.
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9. “Conservative Outrage Builds over Obama’s ‘Race-Baiting’ Comments on Shooting of Unarmed Black Teen After President Obama Said, ‘If I Had a Son, He’d Look Like Trayvon,’” Daily Mail,March 23, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2119340/Trayvon-Martin-case-Newt-Gingrich-slams-Obamas-disgraceful-comments-shooting.html. Also see David Weigel, “‘If Obama Had a Son He Would Look Like Aaron Alexis,’” Slate, September 16, 2013, http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/09/16/navy_yard_shooting_suspect_aaron_alexis_is_black_so_obviously_twitter_jerks.html.
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10. Obama, Democratic National Convention Keynote Address.
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11. Barack Obama’s Iowa Caucus Speech, New York Times, January 3, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/us/politics/03obama-transcript.html?pagewanted=all.
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12. Barack Obama’s New Hampshire Primary Speech, New York Times, January 8, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/us/politics/08text-obama.html?pagewanted=all.
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13. At the time of Biden’s comment, I told the New York Times that “historically, [the word “articulate”] was meant to signal the exceptional Negro. The implication is that most black people do not have the capacity to engage in articulate speech, when white people are automatically assumed to be articulate.” See Lynette Clemetson, “The Racial Politics of Speaking Well,” New York Times, February 4, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/weekinreview/04clemetson.html?gwt=pay.
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14. “Biden’s Description of Obama Draws Scrutiny,” CNN, February 9, 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama/.
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15. H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
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16. Philip Elliott, “Harry Reid ‘Negro’ Comment: Reid Apologizes for ‘No Negro Dialect’ Comment,” Huffington Post, March, 18, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/09/harry-reid-negro-comment-_n_417406.html.
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17. Dr. Frederick G. Sampson was noted by Ebony magazine as one of the fifteen greatest black preachers in America in 1984 and again in 1993. Ebony cited Sampson for his “depth of exegetical insight, brilliance of illustrations and captivating style of communication,” adding that Sampson “laces his sermons with moving, real-life illustrations and is highly dramatic with respect to both language and gestures.” See “The 15 Greatest Black Preachers,” Ebony, November 1993, p. 168.
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18. Wright, according to Ebony, represents “the first generation of African-American preachers who blend a Pentecostal flavor with social concerns in their pulpit discourse.” Wright “gives a contemporary, African-American, Afrocentric flavor to the traditional Black shout.” A Wright sermon “is a four-course meal: spiritual, biblical, cultural, prophetic.” Ibid., p. 157.
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19. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986; repr., New York: Perennial Classics, 2004), p. 622.
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20. I made this point on Meet the Press in 2008 in a discussion of King’s legacy with
the host, the late, great Tim Russert, and fellow guests, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and Ambassador Andrew Young. I spoke about how King’s rhetoric in the black church was dramatically different from—and far more radical than—his messages for white America: “When you heard Jeremiah Wright, what you heard was the latter-day Martin Luther King Jr. When you hear Barack Obama, you hear Dr. King up to 1965. In black churches, Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘We have been subject to American genocide.’ He also went on to say that he didn’t want to be treated the same way the Japanese brothers and sisters [were] when they were put in the concentration camps. And the sermon he was going to deliver, Tim, the next Sunday, were he to live, found in the effects after he was murdered, was a sermon called ‘Why America May Go to Hell.’ That’s the Martin Luther King Jr. with which the broad swath of America is not familiar, and they don’t understand, within the black church, the articulation of a theological tradition that responds to hatred, doesn’t respond in hate but prophetic anger and then, ultimately, love—love enough to speak justice to the nation. Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public, and Martin Luther King Jr. did this when he talked specifically to black churches.” “MLK’s Impact on the World,” Meet the Press, April 6, 2008, http://www.nbcnews.com/video/meet-the-press/23981403#23981403.
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21. Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (2000; repr., New York: Touchstone, 2001), pp. 87–88.
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22. James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1986; repr., New York: HarperOne, 2003), pp. 264–265.
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23. Dyson, I May Not, p. 40.
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24. Ibid., pp. 38–39.
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25. Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Word That Moved America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 159.
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26. Ibid., p. 158.
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27. Brian Ross and Rehab El-Buri, “Obama’s Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11,” ABC News, March 13, 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/DemocraticDebate/story?id=4443788. Also see Kumarini Silva, “Browning Our Way to Post-Race: Identity, Identification, Securitization of Brown,” in American Identity in the Age of Obama, ed. Amilcar Antonio Barreto and Richard L. O’Bryant (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 140.
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28. Obama, Dreams, p. 294.
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29. For a brilliant reading of the broader context to which Obama was hardly able to allude, see Obery M. Hendricks Jr., “A More Perfect (High-Tech) Lynching: Obama, the Press, and Jeremiah Wright,” in Sharpley-Whiting, The Speech, pp. 155–183.
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30. “Barack Obama Interview on March 16, 2008,” Chicago Tribune, March 16, 2008, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-obamafullwebmar16-archive-story.html#page=9.
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31. For a convincing argument about how Martin Luther King Jr. channeled in his oratory the subversive meanings of the dream metaphor expressed in the poetry of Langston Hughes, see W. Jason Miller, Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015).
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32. Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” pp. 237–251.
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33. Katharine Q. Seelye and Julie Bosman, “Ferraro’s Obama Remarks Become Talk of Campaign,” New York Times,March 12, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/us/politics/12campaign.html.
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34. Ben Smith, “A Ferraro Flashback,” Politico, March 11, 2008, http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/03/a-ferraro-flashback-006934.
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35. See “Malcolm X at Harvard University,” March 18, 1964, http://malcolmxfiles.blogspot.com/2013/06/malcolm-x-at-harvard-university-march.html. For a sophisticated psycho-biographical study of Malcolm X, see Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (1981; repr., New York: Guilford Press, 1993).
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36. Jeremiah Wright, “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall” (partial transcript), The Guardian, March 27, 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/mar/27/thedayofjerusalemsfall.
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37. James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1993).
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38. Trymaine Lee, “Tavis Smiley: ‘I Don’t Get Intimidated by Haters,’” Huffington Post, August 12, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/12/tavis-smiley-i-dont-get-i_n_925920.html.
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39. For my take on the black prophetic tradition, see my article “The Ghost of Cornel West,” The New Republic, May 2015, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121550/cornel-wests-rise-fall-our-most-exciting-black-scholar-ghost.
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40. For the single best essay I’ve read on the frustration over the lack of positive outcomes from black faces in high political places, see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “In Baltimore and Across the Country, Black Faces in High Places Haven’t Helped Average Black People,” In These Times, April 29, 2015, http://inthesetimes.com/article/17888/baltimore_riots_black_politicians.
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41. “Obama Interview on March 16, 2008.”
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42. Wright seems to have understood the principle of forgiveness knowledge when he recalled, in a question after his speech before the National Press Club on April 28, 2008: “Several of my white friends and several of my white, Jewish friends have written me and said to me. They’ve said, ‘You’re a Christian. You understand forgiveness. We both know that, if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.” Also, when asked how he felt about Obama’s distancing himself from him, Wright responded: “He didn’t distance himself. He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American.” “Reverend Wright at the National Press Club, April 28, 2008,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/us/politics/28text-wright.html?pagewanted=all.
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43. Thomas Beaumont, “Up-Close Obama Urges Compassion in Mideast: He Backs Loosening of Restrictions on Palestinian Aid,” Des Moines Register, March 12, 2007, http://www.factcheck.org/2007/04/democratic-candidates-debate/. Later, at the first full Democratic presidential debate of the 2008 campaign on the campus of South Carolina State University in Orangeburg on April 26, 2007, moderator Brian Williams asked Obama if he stood by the remark. Obama replied: “Well, keep in mind what the remark actually, if you had the whole thing, said. And what I said is nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel, to renounce violence, and to get serious about negotiating peace and security for the region.” The Des Moines Register, however, quotes Obama as attributing Palestinian suffering to “the stalled peace efforts with Israel” and not to lapses in Palestinian leadership. The report reads: “Obama told the Muscatine-area party activists that he supports relaxing restrictions on aid to the Palestinian people. He said they have suffered the most as a result of stalled peace efforts with Israel. ‘Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people,’ Obama said while on the final leg of his weekend trip to eastern Iowa.”
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44. For a brilliant discussion of the history, themes, disputes, arguments, politics, and moral trajectories of black power and black self-determination—and the effort to improve black life with black hands—see Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (2006; repr., New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2007).
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45. “Transcript of the Keynote Address by Ann Richards, the Texas Treasurer,” New York Times, July 19, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/19/us/transcript-of-the-keynote-address-by-ann-richards-the-texas-treasurer.html.
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46. Dyson, I May Not, p. 12.
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47. “Reverend Wright at the National Press Club, April 28, 2008.”
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48. Transcript, Bill Moyers Journal, April 25, 2008, http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04252008/transcript1.html.
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49. “Transcript of Jeremiah Wright’s Speech to NAACP,” CNN, April 28, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/28/wright.transcript/.
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50. As theologian Paul Tillich argues, modern languages “have only one word for ‘time.’ The Greeks had two words, chronos and kairos. Chronos is clock time, time which is measured, as we have it in words like “chronology” and “chronometer.” Kairos is not the quantitative time of the clock, but the qualitative time of the occasion, the right time . . . There are things that happen when the right time, the kairos, has not yet come. Kairos is the time which indicates that something has happened which makes an action possible or impossible. We all experience moments in our lives when we feel that now is the right time to do something, now we are mature enough, now we can make the decision. This is the kairos.” Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, ed. Carl E. Braaten (New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1972), p. 1.
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