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Obama’s Legacy on Race
The eulogy at Charleston gave Barack Obama an opportunity to praise the transcendent moral appeal of black humanity. This was a sharp contrast to the previous six years of presidential reprimands. The shift might be explained this way: If black lives truly matter, they had to matter to the black man under whose presidency a daring new social movement was born. Now that the Obama era has ended, Obama will be remembered as a great, but flawed, president, and many of those flaws have to do with how he addressed race—or avoided doing so.
In his first two years in office, Obama performed Herculean deeds in rescuing the banks, restoring the economy, bailing out the automobile industry, and getting his signature health care legislation passed. It was an astonishing record of success, despite bitter right-wing resistance to his presidency and the alarming racist reaction to a black man being in charge. I twice worked hard to get this president elected. I have known Barack Obama since the early 1990s, and for a time we belonged to the same church in Chicago. Watching him as president, I greatly admired how this highly intelligent and supremely confident figure managed the affairs of state with verve and swagger. No matter how much I disagreed with him about policy or politics, I was deeply moved by his historic achievement. Still, I was frustrated, because the president hit some targets in the path to racial progress but missed a great many as well. And that is not a sentiment I or other fellow black scholars, preachers, and activists are supposed to express.
That’s because black America has carried on an unrepentant love affair with Obama. Everywhere we turn on social media, the love for the Obamas flourishes: a 106-year-old black woman dancing with the first couple during a Black History Month celebration in the White House; a little black girl crying when she realizes Obama will soon no longer be president; and memes and lists cataloguing why Obama and his remarkable wife and daughters are the greatest black family ever.
There is good reason to celebrate Obama’s importance to black America. It is hard to overstate the symbolic significance and positive effects of a black man commanding the most celebrated seat of power. His black brain and tongue have changed America forever. But gales of black pride have swept aside awareness of his flaws, and when those flaws are conceded, gusts of black defiance play down their meaning and significance. Obama’s most ardent black fans ignore how he often failed to ascend the bully pulpit to address race or use his powers to convene commissions or issue executive orders to lessen black suffering; his nastiest black critics lambast him as an ineffectual leader who has done little to protect blacks from racial assault or lift them from economic misery. Neither the haters nor hagiographers do the Obama legacy justice.
Obama’s failure to take to the bully pulpit on race unhappily coincided with the rise of racial demagoguery. Part of the racist reaction to Obama’s presidency has found its troubling apotheosis in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump’s surprising run for the White House amplified our country’s worst racial instincts in a generation. Trump gained political notoriety a few years ago by joining the “birthers” who challenged Obama’s American citizenship. The “birthers” formalized racist attacks into a movement by claiming that Obama, despite his Hawaiian birth certificate, was born in Kenya—or that he was really a citizen of Indonesia, or that he had dual British and American citizenship at birth. The sick attempt to paint Obama as un-American—a closet socialist, a secret Muslim, and a hater of democracy, no less—didn’t stop there, echoing over the years in the feverish rantings of figures like Dinesh D’Souza, who claimed Obama was motivated by “an inherited rage” against American wealth and power from his anticolonialist African father. On television, Glenn Beck asserted that Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” while Rush Limbaugh spewed a steady stream of invective on his radio show, from playing a song dubbed “Barack the Magic Negro” to claiming that Obama wanted Americans to get Ebola as payback for slavery. The most infamous “birther,” Donald Trump, questioned, without basis, not just Obama’s birth certificate, but his college transcripts and whether he had truly deserved a spot at Harvard Law School.
Through it all, Obama played it cool. He brushed aside these comments as unenlightened prattle, having just as much to do with ideological differences as racial animus. To the extent that these insults were racialized—and there’s no doubt they were—Obama deflected them through humor. During a 2012 appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Obama got off a droll one-liner when asked about the clash with Trump. “This all dates back to when we were growing up together in Kenya,” the president deadpanned. “When we finally moved to America, I thought it’d be over.” It wasn’t over. But Obama, while acknowledging that racism is deeply rooted in our culture, for most of his presidency had avoided addressing the plague of race and instead highlighted the progress the country has made. For black Americans especially, that message was encouraging—but it also turned out to be devastatingly shortsighted. Obama is not responsible for the rise of Trump, though the same can’t be said for staunch conservatives who relentlessly hammer supposed black moral irresponsibility and blast alleged black cultural pathology.
It is unsurprising that the man who led the “birther” movement built a campaign that reflected elements of the “birther” bigotry: anti-Muslim talk, xenophobia toward Mexicans, and hostility toward blacks at his rallies. It’s possible that if the president had spoken more forcefully on race, it might have blunted some of the bigotry that fueled Trump’s rise, or at least provided a compelling alternative to his vision. And in addition to working to get Hillary Clinton elected, Obama has had to more aggressively address the racism that he was never eager to acknowledge or confront and that thrives in deep pockets of support for Trump.
Late in the second term of his presidency, Obama used executive power to fight segregation in housing and discriminatory policing. He also challenged hate more directly. He heaped great contempt on Trump for renewing his call to bar Muslim immigrants after the historically gruesome massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016—even though the gunman was born in the United States. Without uttering Trump’s name, Obama seethed, in a rare show of public anger, about Trump’s disruptive bigotry. “Are we going to start treating all Muslim Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance?” As his voice rose in frustration at such a prospect, one occasioned by desperate hatred of the religious or ethnic other that has blighted the country’s claim of democracy, Obama demanded to know if Trump’s positions reflect the Republican Party’s views, declaring “that’s not the America we want—it doesn’t reflect our democratic ideals. It won’t make us more safe. It will make us less safe.” It makes sense to ask where that anger had been. For the most part, Obama sought to contain his rage against the right-wing hate machine.
It is now clear that his response to these racist haters was both admirable and flawed. He refused to pity himself—but failed, as did so many others of us, to read the anti-Obama signs and songs and social media outbursts as symptoms of the persistence of swirling racist currents in American society. He insisted on celebrating advancements for African Americans like him, but in so doing delayed the acknowledgment of what was festering: a revived siege of race hate that would sweep the country. Obama’s racial optimism—some might say delusion, enhanced by musings in the mainstream that America had entered a post-racial era after his election—denied the president the motivation, the will, even the occasion, to address enduring racism, racism that erupted violently in the killings of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and the Emanuel Nine in Charleston and, more ominously, in the flurry of deaths of unarmed black citizens at the hands of mostly white police.
And it was curious, and hurtful, that Obama responded at times to the criticism by scolding black folk in public for making excuses he said were holding them back. During his last appearance before the annual Congressional Black Caucus gala in September 2016, Obama was electrifying, mostly because it found him reprimanding black folk for the belief that it didn’t matter if they voted, or who the country elected to be president in 2016. “It matters,” Obama shot back. “We’ve got to get people to vote. I will consider it a personal insult—an insult to my legacy—if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. You want to give me a good sendoff? Go vote.” But in his speech a week later on the national mall to dedicate the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Obama was muted, nearly somber, offering a joyless homily that said many of the right words but lacked enthusiasm, energy, and conviction. It was if he were speaking about a reality, a history, that was foreign, distant—something he didn’t feel in his gut or believe in his heart of hearts. It reinforced the perception that Obama just hasn’t shared the black experience in a way that would make him elated to salute the greatest monument to black memory ever erected on the most holy civic landscape in the nation. I heard both speeches live and couldn’t help but conclude that Obama is consistently more engaged when he is chiding rather than championing black folk. Perhaps these were acts of self-defense by the president, perhaps not. Whatever the reasons, the president’s racial reticence highlighted a submerged civil war in black America about how blackness is best engaged in public. Obama opted to signify blackness—he was and is our first black president, and wears that title proudly. But he did not tangle meaningfully with the political responses to the explicit expression of that backlash: his racist haters and the dark cultural current they occupied. Maybe Obama really was personally unaffected by their insults. But the bottom line is that vulnerable blacks ended up dead as victims of the same kind of racist hatred. How did Obama and the rest of us miss—or ignore—all the signs that this might happen?
Obama’s election came with unique historic and symbolic importance, bestowing on him both the honor and burden of choosing how to wear his race. Harkening back to the incident in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, where he describes having to “disguise my feverish mood [of race],” Obama, at various points ever since, seems to have been forced—or chose—to disguise expressions of his race, even though there are many more moods to blackness than the feverish one from which he shrank.
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. Such 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.