by Obama Barack
It was probably the line most remembered from my 2004 convention speech. I’d intended it more as a statement of aspiration than a description of reality, but it was an aspiration I believed in and a reality I strove for. The idea that our common humanity mattered more than our differences was stitched into my DNA. It also described what I felt was a practical view of politics: In a democracy, you needed a majority to make big change, and in America that meant building coalitions across racial and ethnic lines.
Certainly that had been true for me in Iowa, where African Americans constituted less than 3 percent of the population. Day to day, our campaign didn’t consider this an obstacle, just a fact of life. Our organizers encountered pockets of racial animosity, at times voiced openly even by potential supporters (“Yeah, I’m thinking about voting for the nigger” was heard more than once). Every so often, though, the hostility went beyond a rude remark or a slammed door. One of our most beloved supporters had woken up the day before Christmas to find her yard strewn with torn-up OBAMA signs, her house vandalized and spray-painted with racial epithets. Obtuseness, rather than meanness, was more common, with our volunteers fielding the kinds of remarks that are familiar to any Black person who’s spent time in a largely white setting, a variation on the theme of “I don’t think of him as being Black, really….I mean, he’s so intelligent.”
For the most part, though, I found white voters across Iowa to be much like those I had courted just a few years earlier in downstate Illinois—friendly, thoughtful, and open to my candidacy, concerned less about my skin color or even my Muslim-sounding name than they were about my youth and lack of experience, my plans to create jobs or end the war in Iraq.
As far as my political advisors were concerned, our job was to keep it that way. It wasn’t that we ducked racial issues. Our website made my position clear on hot-button topics like immigration reform and civil rights. If asked in a town hall, I wouldn’t hesitate to explain the realities of racial profiling or job discrimination to a rural, all-white audience. Inside the campaign, Plouffe and Axe listened to the concerns of Black and Latino team members, whether someone wanted to tweak a television ad (“Can we include at least one Black face other than Barack’s?” Valerie gently asked at one point) or was reminding us to work harder to recruit more senior staff of color. (On this score, at least, the world of experienced, high-level political operatives wasn’t so different from that of other professions, in that young people of color consistently had less access to mentors and networks—and couldn’t afford to accept the unpaid internships that might put them on the fast track to run national campaigns. This was one thing I was determined to help change.) But Plouffe, Axe, and Gibbs made no apologies for de-emphasizing any topic that might be labeled a racial grievance, or split the electorate along racial lines, or do anything that would box me in as “the Black candidate.” To them, the immediate formula for racial progress was simple—we needed to win. And this meant gaining support not just from liberal white college kids but also from voters for whom the image of me in the White House involved a big psychological leap.
“Trust me,” Gibbs would wisecrack, “whatever else they know about you, people have noticed that you don’t look like the first forty-two presidents.”
Meanwhile, I’d felt no shortage of love from African Americans since my election to the U.S. Senate. Local NAACP chapters got in touch, wanting to give me awards. My photo regularly showed up in the pages of Ebony and Jet. Every Black woman of a certain age told me I reminded her of her son. And the love for Michelle was at a whole other level. With her professional credentials, sister-friend demeanor, and no-nonsense devotion to motherhood, she seemed to distill what so many Black families worked toward and hoped for their children.
Despite all this, Black attitudes toward my candidacy were complicated—driven in no small part by fear. Nothing in Black people’s experience told them that it might be possible for one of their own to win a major party nomination, much less the presidency of the United States. In the minds of many, what Michelle and I had accomplished was already something of a miracle. To aspire beyond that seemed foolish, a flight too close to the sun.
“I’m telling you, man,” Marty Nesbitt said to me shortly after I announced my candidacy, “my mother worries about you the same way she used to worry about me.” A successful entrepreneur, a former high school football star with the good looks of a young Jackie Robinson, married to a brilliant doctor and with five wonderful kids, Marty seemed the embodiment of the American Dream. He’d been raised by a single mom who worked as a nurse in Columbus, Ohio; it was only as a result of a special program designed to get more young people of color into prep schools and on to college that Marty had climbed the ladder out of his neighborhood, a place where most Black men could hope for little more than a lifetime on the assembly line. But when after college he decided to leave a stable job at General Motors for a riskier venture into real estate investments, his mother had fretted, afraid he might lose everything by reaching too far.
“She thought I was crazy to give up that kind of security,” Marty told me. “So imagine how my mom and her friends are feeling about you right now. Not just running for president, but actually believing you can be president!”
This mindset wasn’t restricted to the working class. Valerie’s mother—whose family had epitomized the Black professional elite of the forties and fifties—was the wife of a doctor and one of the guiding lights in the early childhood education movement. But she expressed the same skepticism toward my campaign at the start.
“She wants to protect you,” Valerie said.
“From what?” I asked.
“From disappointment,” she said, leaving unspoken her mother’s more specific fear that I might get myself killed.
We heard it again and again, especially during the first months of the campaign—a protective pessimism, a sense in the Black community that Hillary was a safer choice. With national figures like Jesse Jackson, Jr. (and a more grudging Jesse Sr.), behind us, we were able to get a good number of early endorsements from African American leaders, especially from younger ones. But many more chose to wait and see how I fared, and other Black politicians, businesspeople, and pastors—whether out of genuine loyalty toward the Clintons or an eagerness to back the prohibitive favorite—came out for Hillary before I’d even had a chance to make my case.
“The country’s not ready yet,” one congressman told me, “and the Clintons have a long memory.”
Meanwhile, there were activists and intellectuals who supported me but viewed my campaign in purely symbolic terms, akin to earlier races mounted by Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton, a useful if transitory platform from which to raise a prophetic voice against racial injustice. Unconvinced that victory was possible, they expected me to take the most uncompromising positions on everything from affirmative action to reparations and were continually on alert for any hints that I might be spending too much time and energy courting middle-of-the-road, less progressive white folks.
“Don’t be one of those so-called leaders who take the Black vote for granted,” a supporter told me. I was sensitive to the criticism, for it wasn’t entirely wrong. A lot of Democratic politicians did take Black voters for granted—at least since 1968, when Richard Nixon had determined that a politics of white racial resentment was the surest path to Republican victory, and thereby left Black voters with nowhere else to go. It was not only white Democrats who made this calculation. There wasn’t a Black elected official who relied on white votes to stay in office who wasn’t aware of what Axe, Plouffe, and Gibbs were at least implicitly warning against—that too much focus on civil rights, police misconduct, or other issues considered specific to Black people risked triggering suspicion, if not a backlash, from the broader electorate. You might decide to speak up anyway, as a matter of conscience, but you understood there’d be a price—that Blacks could practice the standard special-i
nterest politics of farmers, gun enthusiasts, or other ethnic groups only at their own peril.
Of course, that was part of the reason I was running, wasn’t it—to help us break free of such constraints? To reimagine what was possible? I wanted to be neither a supplicant, always on the periphery of power and seeking favor from liberal benefactors, nor a permanent protester, full of righteous anger as we waited for white America to expiate its guilt. Both paths were well trodden; both, at some fundamental level, were born of despair.
No, the point was to win. I wanted to prove to Blacks, to whites—to Americans of all colors—that we could transcend the old logic, that we could rally a working majority around a progressive agenda, that we could place issues like inequality or lack of educational opportunity at the very center of the national debate and then actually deliver the goods.
I knew that in order to accomplish that, I needed to use language that spoke to all Americans and propose policies that touched everyone—a topflight education for every child, quality healthcare for every American. I needed to embrace white people as allies rather than impediments to change, and to couch the African American struggle in terms of a broader struggle for a fair, just, and generous society.
I understood the risks. I heard the muted criticisms that came my way from not just rivals but friends. How an emphasis on universal programs often meant benefits were less directly targeted to those most in need. How appealing to common interests discounted the continuing effects of discrimination and allowed whites to avoid taking the full measure of the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and their own racial attitudes. How this left Black people with a psychic burden, expected as they were to constantly swallow legitimate anger and frustration in the name of some far-off ideal.
It was a lot to ask of Black folks, requiring a mixture of optimism and strategic patience. As I tried to lead voters and my own campaign through this uncharted territory, I was constantly reminded that this wasn’t an abstract exercise. I was bound to specific communities of flesh and blood, filled with men and women who had their own imperatives and their own personal histories—including a pastor who seemed to embody all the contradictory impulses I was attempting to corral.
* * *
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I FIRST MET Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., during my organizing days. His church, Trinity United Church of Christ, was one of the largest in Chicago. The son of a Baptist minister and a school administrator from Philadelphia, he had grown up steeped in Black church tradition while also attending the most prestigious—and largely white—schools in the city. Rather than go straight into the ministry, he left college to join the Marines and then the U.S. Navy, training as a cardiopulmonary technician and serving as part of the medical team caring for Lyndon Johnson after his 1966 surgery. In 1967, he enrolled at Howard University and, like many Blacks during those turbulent years, soaked up the forceful rhetoric of Black Power, an interest in all things African, and leftist critiques of the American social order. By the time he graduated from seminary, he’d also absorbed the Black liberation theology of James Cone—a view of Christianity that asserted the centrality of the Black experience, not because of any inherent racial superiority but because, Cone claimed, God sees the world through the eyes of those most oppressed.
That Reverend Wright came to pastor in an overwhelmingly white denomination gives some indication of his practical side; not only did the United Church of Christ value serious scholarship—something he emphasized every Sunday—but it had the money and infrastructure to help him build his congregation. What was once a staid church with fewer than one hundred members grew to six thousand during his tenure, a rollicking, bustling place containing the multitudes that make up Black Chicago: bankers and former gang members, kente robes and Brooks Brothers suits, a choir that could rock classic gospel and the “Hallelujah Chorus” in a single service. His sermons were full of pop references, slang, humor, and genuine religious insight that not only prompted cheers and shouts from his members but burnished his reputation as one of the best preachers in the country.
There were times when I found Reverend Wright’s sermons a little over the top. In the middle of a scholarly explication of the Book of Matthew or Luke, he might insert a scathing critique of America’s drug war, American militarism, capitalist greed, or the intractability of American racism, rants that were usually grounded in fact but bereft of context. Often, they sounded dated, as if he were channeling a college teach-in from 1968 rather than leading a prosperous congregation that included police commanders, celebrities, wealthy businesspeople, and the Chicago school superintendent. And every so often, what he said was just wrong, edging close to the conspiracy theories one heard on late-night public-access stations or in the barbershop down the street. It was as if this erudite, middle-aged, light-skinned Black man were straining for street cred, trying to “keep it real.” Or maybe he just recognized—both within his congregation and within himself—the periodic need to let loose, to release pent-up anger from a lifetime of struggle in the face of chronic racism, reason and logic be damned.
All this I knew. And yet for me, especially when I was a young man still sorting out my beliefs and my place inside Chicago’s Black community, the good in Reverend Wright more than outweighed his flaws, just as my admiration for the congregation and its ministries outweighed my broader skepticism toward organized religion. Michelle and I eventually joined Trinity as members, though we proved to be spotty churchgoers. Like me, Michelle hadn’t been raised in a particularly religious household, and what started as once-a-month attendance became less frequent over time. When we did go, though, it was meaningful, and as my political career took off, I made a point of inviting Reverend Wright to do an invocation or a benediction at key events.
This had been the plan for the day I announced my candidacy. Reverend Wright was to lead the assembled crowd in a prayer before I appeared onstage. On my way down to Springfield a day ahead of the event, though, I had received an urgent call from Axe, asking if I’d seen a Rolling Stone article that had just been published about my candidacy. Evidently the reporter had sat in on a recent service at Trinity, absorbing a fiery sermon from Reverend Wright and quoting it in his story.
“He’s quoted saying…hold on, let me read this: ‘We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.’ ”
“Seriously?”
“I think it’s fair to say that if he gives the invocation tomorrow, he’ll be the lead story…at least on Fox News.”
The article itself offered a generally fair view of Jeremiah Wright and Trinity’s ministry, and I wasn’t surprised that my pastor would point out the gap between America’s professed Christian ideals and its brutal racial history. Still, the language he’d used was more incendiary than anything I’d heard before, and although a part of me was frustrated with the constant need to soften for white folks’ benefit the blunt truths about race in this country, as a matter of practical politics I knew Axe was right.
That afternoon, I called Reverend Wright and asked if he’d be willing to skip the public invocation and instead offer Michelle and me a private prayer before my speech. I could tell he was hurt, but ultimately—and to my team’s great relief—he went along with the new plan.
For me the episode churned up all the doubts I still had about running for the highest office in the land. It was one thing to have integrated my own life—to learn over time how to move seamlessly between Black and white circles, to serve as translator and bridge among family, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, making connections across an ever-expanding orbit, until I felt I could finally know the world of my grandparents and the world of a Reverend Wright as a single, unified whole. But to explain those connections to millions of strangers? To imagine that a presidential campaign, with all its noise and distortions and simplifications, could somehow cut through hurt and fear and suspicion that had been f
our hundred years in the making? The reality of American race relations was too complicated to reduce to a sound bite. Hell, I myself was too complicated, the contours of my life too messy and unfamiliar to the average American, for me to honestly expect I could pull this thing off.
* * *
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MAYBE IF THE Rolling Stone article had come out earlier, foreshadowing problems to come, I would have decided not to run. It’s hard to say. I do know that—in a bit of irony, or perhaps providence—it was another pastor and close friend of Reverend Wright’s, Dr. Otis Moss, Jr., who helped me push through my doubts.
Otis Moss was a veteran of the civil rights movement, a close friend and associate of Dr. King’s, the pastor of one of the largest churches in Cleveland, Ohio, and a former advisor to President Jimmy Carter. I didn’t know him well, but after the article was published he called me one evening to offer support. He had gotten wind of the difficulties with Jeremiah, he said, and heard those voices within the Black community arguing that I wasn’t ready, or I was too radical, or too mainstream, or not quite Black enough. He expected the path would only get harder but urged me not to get discouraged.
“Every generation is limited by what it knows,” Dr. Moss told me. “Those of us who were part of the movement, giants like Martin, lieutenants and foot soldiers like me…we are the Moses generation. We marched, we sat in, we went to jail, sometimes in defiance of our elders, but we were in fact building on what they had done. We got us out of Egypt, you could say. But we could only travel so far.
“You, Barack, are part of the Joshua generation. You and others like you are responsible for the next leg of the journey. Folks like me can offer the wisdom of our experience. Perhaps you can learn from some of our mistakes. But ultimately it will be up to you, with God’s help, to build on what we’ve done, and lead our people and this country out of the wilderness.”
