★ | ★

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 editor 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.

I’m grateful to be part of the Georgetown faculty and for the collegiality of my fellow faculty in Sociology and African American Studies. I’m thankful for John DeGioia—one of the great university presidents in America, an unassuming, genuinely humble educational leader, whose spirit and heart are in the right place—and for his extraordinarily generous support of my work.

I’m also grateful to Susan Taylor and Khephra Burns—aka “the Queen of Black America” and “Smooth,” two noble embodiments of incredible black humanity and huge intelligence—for their unending well of friendship, love, and support. The same is true for my daughters of the heart Janaye and Janique Ingram, and Angela Rye—inspiring young leaders, thinkers, and activists. And huge thanks to Farah Jasmine Griffin and Obery Hendricks, a dynamic scholarly and intellectual duo, for their big brains and eloquent pens, for their love and support, and their timely discussions of politics and race.

Profound gratitude goes to my dear friend and brother Reverend Dr. Frederick Douglass Haynes III, one of the most gifted sacred rhetoricians on the globe, who discussed many of these ideas with me over the years, and who permitted me to share them with his congregation, the Friendship West Baptist Church in Dallas. And big thanks to my beloved pastor, Reverend Dr. Howard-John Wesley, of the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, a truly phenomenal preacher and exquisite wordsmith, who permitted me to try out these ideas on our congregation in a Sunday school setting. And deep appreciation to the remarkable Dean of Howard University’s Rankin Chapel, Dr. Bernard Richardson, a world-class spiritual leader in the mold of Howard Thurman, who has permitted me to preach these ideas to the good folk of Howard over the last decade.

Finally, I am grateful to my family: my wonderful mother, Addie Mae Dyson, still holding strong at seventy-eight as our matriarch; my splendid brothers, Anthony, Brian, Gregory, and Everett (prisoner #212687—Godspeed and hurry home!); my supremely talented children, Michael II, Maisha, and Mwata, and my lovely daughter-in-law, Wanda; and my beautiful grandchildren, Layla, Mosi, and Maxem.And to my loving wife, Marcia, to whom this book is dedicated: I am grateful for your undying love, your profound commitment to our family, and for your genius as a thinker of deep thoughts and profound ideas. You are one of the most remarkable women on earth. Thank you for being our family’s grace and glue.