★ | ★
Introduction: The Burden of Representation
1. Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” in The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union,” ed. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009), p. 237; Condoleezza Rice, interview on Face the Nation, CBS, November 27, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/condi-rice-us-will-never-be-race-blind/.
2. Quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 18.
3. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, annotated ed. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998); James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; repr., New York: Vintage, 1993).
4. John Campbell, The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, from Grocer’s Daughter to Prime Minister, abridged ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2011); Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).
5. Moore, Margaret Thatcher, pp. 298–333; Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso Press, 1988).
6. When Baroness Thatcher died in 2013, President Obama issued an official statement and noted her gender as a defining element of her legacy: “As a grocer’s daughter who rose to become Britain’s first female prime minister, she stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.” “Statement from the President on the Passing of Baroness Margaret Thatcher,” April 8, 2013, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/08/statement-president-passing-baroness-margaret-thatcher.
7. Although Disraeli was baptized into the Church of England at the age of twelve, his Jewish heritage remained a central feature of his existence and identity. See Adam Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli (New York: Schocken Books, 2008). Thanks to historian Gerald Horne for suggesting the parallel between Disraeli and Obama in a brief, serendipitous conversation in an airport.
8. Thomas J. Carty, A Catholic in the White House? Religion, Politics, and John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Campaign (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). For a fascinating comparison of Obama and Kennedy, see Robert C. Smith, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Ethnic Incorporation and Avoidance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013).
9. Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
10. Dewayne Wickham, Bill Clinton and Black America (New York: One World/Ballantine, 2002).
11. Toni Morrison, “The Talk of the Town: Comment,” The New Yorker, October 5, 1998, pp. 31–32. Chris Rock said in an interview in the August 1998 issue of Vanity Fair that Clinton was “the first black president.” He also said that Clinton was “the most scrutinized man in history, just as a black person would be. He spends a hundred dollar bill, they hold it up to the light.” See Jonathan Tilove, “Before Bill Clinton Was the ‘First Black President,’” Newhouse News Service, March 6, 2007, http://jonathantilove.com/before-bill-clinton-was-the-first-black-president/. In 2008, in Time magazine, when asked if she regretted referring to Clinton as the first black president, Morrison said that people “misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.” See Toni Morrison, “10 Questions for Toni Morrison, Time, May 7, 2008, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1738507,00.html. Indeed, in The New Yorker, Morrison wrote: “Years ago . . . one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” According to Morrison, Clinton’s blackness became even clearer when “the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the [impeachment] persecution.” Morrison, “Talk of the Town,” p. 32. During a 2008 Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina televised live on CNN, journalist Joe Johns asked Obama if Clinton was the first black president.
“Well, I think Bill Clinton did have an enormous affinity with the African-American community, and still does,” Obama said. “And I think that’s well earned . . . [O]ne of the things that I’m always inspired by—no, I’m—this I’m serious about. I’m always inspired by young men and women who grew up in the South when segregation was still taking place, when, you know, the transformations that are still incomplete but at least had begun had not yet begun. And to see [those] transformations in their own lives[,] I think that is powerful, and it is hopeful, because what it indicates is that people can change.
“And each successive generation can, you know, create a different vision of how, you know, we have to treat each other. And I think Bill Clinton embodies that. I think he deserves credit for that. Now, I haven’t . . . I have to say that, you know, I would have to, you know, investigate more of Bill’s dancing abilities. You know, and some of this other stuff before I accurately judge whether he was in fact a brother.” Wolf Blitzer said, “Let’s let Senator Clinton weigh in on that.” Hillary Clinton then humorously retorted, “Well, I’m sure that can be arranged.” “Part 3 of CNN Democratic Presidential Debate,” January 21, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/21/debate.transcript3/.
12. Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 1995); Manning Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy: Reconstructing Race and Politics in the 21st Century (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002), pp. 77–84.
13. President Clinton admitted, both in a foreword to a book on criminal justice and in a speech before the 2015 NAACP convention—the day after President Obama at the same convention offered his landmark speech denouncing mass incarceration—that his policies had been wrong and harmful. “Plainly, our nation has too many people in prison and for too long—we have overshot the mark. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, we now have 25 percent of its prison population, and an emerging bipartisan consensus now understands the need to do better.” Clinton also argued that it is “time to take a clear-eyed look at what worked, what didn’t, and what produced unintended, long-lasting consequences.” He said that “some are in prison who shouldn’t be, others are in for too long, and without a plan to educate, train, and reintegrate them into our communities, we all suffer.” See “William J. Clinton: Foreword,” April 27, 2015, https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/foreword (from the book Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice, ed. Inimai Chettiar and Michael Waldman [New York: Brennan Center for Justice, 2015]). In his 2015 NAACP speech, Clinton conceded his error as president: “Yesterday, the president spoke a long time and very well on criminal justice reform. But I want to say a few words about it. Because I signed a bill that made the problem worse and I want to admit it.” See Eric Levitz, “Bill Clinton Admits His Crime Law Made Mass Incarceration ‘Worse,’” MSNBC.com, July 15, 2015, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/clinton-admits-his-crime-bill-made-mass-incarceration-worse. For the deleterious (racial) consequences of welfare reform, see, by Peter Edelman (who resigned as the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services in September 1996 in protest of Clinton’s signing the welfare reform bill), “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done,” The Atlantic, March 1997, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/03/the-worst-thing-bill-clinton-has-done/376797/. Also see Dylan Matthews, “Welfare Reform Took People Off the Rolls. It Might Have Also Shortened Their Lives,” Washington Post, June 18, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/18/welfare-reform-took-people-off-the-rolls-it-might-have-also-shortened-their-; Zenthia Prince, “Welfare Reform Garnered for Black Women a Hard Time and a Bad Name,” Afro, March 18, 2015, http://www.afro.com/welfare-reform-garnered-for-black-women-a-hard-time-and-a-bad-name/; and Bryce Covert, “Clinton Touts Welfare Reform. Here’s How It Failed,” The Nation, September 6, 2012, http://www.thenation.com/article/clinton-touts-welfare-reform-heres-how-it-failed/.
1. How to Be a Black President:
“I Can’t Sound Like Martin”
1. Associated Press, “Jackson Calls for War on Poverty; Hart Raps Mondale’s Money Sources,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, April 23, 1984.
2. Marshall Frady, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (1996; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
3. In his autobiography An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America, foreword by Quincy Jones (1996; repr., Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), p. 285, Andrew Young recounts this colorful encounter. Referring to the other movement leaders, Young told King, “‘Listen, Martin, I’m sick of being the bad guy; if they’re such “geniuses” I’m tired of arguing with them all the time.’ This really made Martin angry. ‘I depend on you to bring a certain kind of common sense to staff meetings, and you know it,’ he said. ‘Now, if you decide you are going to start playing games, I don’t see why I need you. I need you to take as conservative a position as possible, then I can have plenty of room to come down in the middle where I want to.’”
4. August Meier, “The Conservative Militant,” in Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile, ed. C. Eric Lincoln, rev. ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1985), pp. 144–156.
5. Republican New York congressman Pete King made this claim to the Today show’s Matt Lauer in 2009. See David Edwards, “GOP Lawmaker: Obama Most Threatened President Ever,” Alternet, 2009, http://www.alternet.org/rss/breaking_news/98972/gop_lawmaker%3A_obama_most_threatened_president_ever. Also see therehastobeaway, “President Barack Obama Is the Most Threatened President in History,” Daily Kos, November 25, 2012, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/26/1164628/--President-Barack-Obama-Is-the-Most-Threatened-President-In-History; and Nathaniel Patterson, “The Most Threatened President in History,” Reader Supported News, November 27, 2012, http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/14744-focus-the-most-threatened-president-in-history.
6. Geoffrey R. Stone, “Obama Africanus the First,” Huffington Post, December 6, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/obama-africanus-the-first_b_6282036.html.
7. Peter Wallsten, “Obama Struggles to Balance African Americans’ Hopes with Country’s as a Whole,” Washington Post, October 28, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/obama-after-making-history-has-faced-a-high-wire-on-racial-issues/2012/10/28/d8e25ff4-1939-11e2-bd10-5ff056538b7c_story.html.
8. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches,” March 7, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/07/remarks-president-50th-anniversary-selma-montgomery-marches.
9. See Alvin Benn, “Lafayette on Stopping Disruption: ‘Let President Speak,” Montgomery Advertiser, March 8, 2015, http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/local/selma50/2015/03/08/lafayette-stopping-disruption-let-president-speak/24600725/.
10. Barack Obama, “Selma Voting Rights March Commemoration Speech,” Brown Chapel AME Church, March 4, 2007, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobama/barackobamabrownchapel.htm.
11. Alex Halperin, “Nastiest Conservative Responses to Obama’s Trayvon Speech,” Salon, July 19, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/07/19/best_of_the_worst_obamas_trayvon_speech/.
12. For a different take on the notion of implicit racial agreements between Obama and whites, see black conservative author Shelby Steele’s argument about racial “bargainers” like Obama, who strike an agreement not to speak of race if whites agree not to remind them of their blackness, and racial “challengers”—blacks who accuse whites of being racist and then require them to absolve themselves of the charge by supporting affirmative action and cultural diversity—in A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (2008; repr., New York: Free Press, 2014). The fact that Obama won, and won again, suggests that Steele’s core argument, first published as an essay in 2007 and premised on Obama’s inevitable loss at the polls, certainly possessed some insight but was fundamentally wrong then, and is more wrong now.
13. Barack Obama, “Statement by the President,” July 14, 2013, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/14/statement-president. Obama’s brief and dispassionate statement included the requisite nod to law and order: “I know this case has elicited strong passions. And in the wake of the verdict, I know those passions may be running even higher. But we are a nation of laws, and a jury has spoken. I now ask every American to respect the call for calm reflection from two parents who lost their young son.”
14. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” James S. Brady Briefing Room, the White House, July 19, 2013, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin.
15. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ Initiative,” February 27, 2104, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/02/27/remarks-president-my-brothers-keeper-initiative.
16. Clarence Page, “Millennials Are Just as Prejudiced as Their Parents,” Chicago Tribune, March 17, 2015. Despite a 2010 Pew Research Report which maintains that more than two decades of research confirms that millennials are more tolerant than earlier generations, analysts like Spencer Piston, an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, argues that a closer examination of the data reveals persistent bias. Piston “examined the 2012 American National Election Studies racial stereotype battery, in which survey respondents are asked to rate whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians according to how hard-working or intelligent they are, and found something startling: Younger (under-30) whites are just as likely as older ones to view whites as more intelligent and harder-working than African-Americans (among the older cohort, 64 percent felt this way, and among the younger cohort the number was 61 percent—not a statistically significant difference). ‘White millennials appear to be no less prejudiced than the rest of the white population,’ Piston told Science of Us in an email, ‘at least using this dataset and this measure of prejudice.’” See Sean McElwee, “Milennials Are Less Racially Tolerant Than You Think,” Science of Us, January 8, 2015, http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/01/millennials-are-less-tolerant-than-you-think.html.
17. “Full Transcript: Obama’s Remarks on Ferguson, Mo. and Iraq,” Washington Post, August 18, 2104, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/running-transcript-obamas-remarks-on-ferguson-mo-and-iraq/2014/08/18/ed29d07a-2713-11e4-86ca-6f03cbd15c1a_story.html.
18. On January 20, 2009, the night of Obama’s first inauguration, several Republican leaders in Congress—along with former House speaker Newt Gingrich, conservative journalist Fred Barnes, and conservative communications specialist Frank Luntz—gathered in the Caucus Room steakhouse in Washington, D.C., to plot, among the fifteen white men assembled, to undermine and disrupt government under an Obama administration and make him a one-term president. “You will remember this day,” Speaker Gingrich said. “You’ll remember this as the day the seeds of 2012 were sown.” For a discussion of their meeting and its aims, see Robert Draper, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives (New York: Free Press, 2012), esp. pp. xv–xxii.
19. Cited in Michael Eric Dyson, April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Death and How It Changed America (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008), pp. 224–225.
20. Keli Goff, “Could Gay Marriage Spur Black Voter Drop?,” The Root, September 17, 2012, http://www.theroot.com/blogs/blogging_the_beltway/2012/09/emanuel_cleaver_on_why_gay_marriage_could_cost_obama_black_votes.html.
21. I am not arguing that these are the only kinds, or groups, of black people to criticize Obama in some measure. For instance, Harvard professor Randall Kennedy offers in his excellent book The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (New York: Pantheon, 2011) insightful criticism of Obama—his views on same-sex marriage, before he changed course; his “excessive cautiousness” on a range of issues; and his failure to stand up for the virtues of liberalism on the Supreme Court in the same way George Bush did for conservative justices during his tenure. But he is not visibly or vocally associated with a camp that was especially critical of Obama. Neither is Joy Reid, national correspondent for MSNBC and author of the very fine Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), an instant classic of political journalism that tackles the use of race against, and by, candidate Obama, and also features, besides a superb chronicle of the noxious racial forces Obama and his administration have confronted, unflinching engagement with Obama’s failure, for instance, to speak honestly about police brutality after Ferguson, and his relentless chiding of black America. I am simply arguing that these individuals and groups named here are among the most visible and vocal critics of Obama and can be easily identified as such.
22. “President Obama, Congressional Black Caucus: No Meeting in 675 Days,” Politics365.com, http://politic365.com/2013/03/18/president-obama-congressional-black-caucus-no-meeting-in-675-days/.
23. April D. Ryan, “CBC Chair Marcia L. Fudge Sends Letter to President Obama over Lack of African American Cabinet Appointments,” March 11, 2013, http://aprildryan.com/2013/03/11/cbc-chair-marcia-l-fudge-sends-letter-to-president-obama-over-lack-of-african-american-cabinet-appointments/.
24. Evan McMorris-Santoro, “After Complaints About Diversity in 2nd Term Appointments, Congressional Black Caucus Thanks Obama,” BuzzFeed, July 9, 2013, http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/after-complaints-about-diversity-in-2nd-term-appointments-co#.reB9WOoO.
25. Jeff Johnson, “Rep. Waters to Black Voters: ‘Unleash Us’ on Obama,” The Grio, August 17, 2011, http://thegrio.com/2011/08/17/frustration-boils-over-at-black-caucus-detroit-town-hall/. For a spirited defense of Waters, see Marcia Dyson, “Take Me to the Waters,” Huffington Post, August 19, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcia-dyson/maxine-waters-obama_b_931276.html. Dyson argued that it “is high time for black folk to stop beating down on those of our race who dare lift their voices to offer constructive challenges to the White House. I don’t mean personal or mean-spirited attacks; there’s no place for that in our public discourse. I’m talking about well-reasoned and principled objections to this policy or that one, or the failure to lead in a political direction that benefits our communities. The stakes are high and the situation is critical in black neighborhoods and households across the land. We don’t have time for bowing down at the throne of unbroken racial solidarity when our children are suffering, our elders are vulnerable, and our poor are teetering on the brink of economic and social disaster.”
26. David Goldstein, “Black Caucus Treads Line Between Criticizing, Supporting Obama,” McClatchyDC, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article24699058.html.
27. Kevin Johnson, “A President for Everyone, Except Black People,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 14, 2013, http://www.phillytrib.com/news/a-president-for-everyone-except-black-people/article_164f06d9-abf2-5f29-a531-10ff57edf5f2.html.
28. Fredrick Harris, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
29. Fredrick Harris, “Still Waiting for Our First Black President,” Washington Post, June 1, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/still-waiting-for-our-first-black-president/2012/06/01/gJQARsT16U_story.html. For the “first gay president” claim, see Andrew Sullivan, Newsweek, May 21, 2012, http://www.newsweek.com/andrew-sullivan-barack-obamas-gay-marriage-evolution-65067.
30. Brittney Cooper, “Stop Poisoning the Race Debate: How ‘Respectability Politics’ Rears Its Ugly Head—Again,” Salon, March 18, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/03/18/stop_poisoning_the_race_debate_how_respectability_politics_rears_its_ugly_head_again/, and “America’s ‘Black Body’ Reality: How Selma, ‘Scandal’ & Ferguson Reveal an Ugly Truth,” Salon, March 11, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/03/11/black_bodies_are_still_white_property_what_selma_scandal_ferguson_reveal_about_america/.
31. Brittney Cooper, “Black Girls’ Zero-Sum Struggle: Why We Lose When Black Boys Dominate the Discourse,” Salon, March 6, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/03/06/black_girls_zero_sum_struggle_why_we_lose_when_black_men_dominate_the_discourse/.
34. Brittney Cooper, “‘Not Going to Lie Down and Take It’: Black Women Are Being Overlooked by This President,” Salon, June 17, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/06/17/not_going_to_lie_down_and_take_it_black_women_are_being_overlooked_by_this_president/.
36. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “The Girls Obama Forgot: My Brother’s Keeper Ignores Young Black Women,” New York Times, July 29, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/opinion/Kimberl-Williams-Crenshaw-My-Brothers-Keeper-Ignores-Young-Black-Women.html?_r=0.
38. Glen Ford, “2007: The Year of Black ‘Media Leaders’—Especially Obama,” Black Agenda Report, January 2, 2008, http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/2007-year-black-‘media-leaders’—especially-obama.
39. Bruce Dixon, “Tired Old So-Called Leftists Give Same Old Excuses for Supporting Obama in 2012,” Black Agenda Report,August 15, 2012, http://blackagendareport.com/content/tired-old-so-called-leftists-give-same-old-excuses-supporting-obama-2012.
40. Glen Ford, “What Obama Has Wrought,” Black Agenda Report, September 5, 2012, http://blackagendareport.com/content/what-obama-has-wrought.
41. Glen Ford, “Angela Davis Has Lost Her Mind over Obama,” Black Agenda Report, March 27, 2012, http://blackagendareport.com/content/angela-davis-lost-her-mind-over-obama.
42. Paul Street, “Obama Ticket Prices and the Invisible Ruling Class,” Black Agenda Report, March 11, 2014, http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obama-ticket-prices-and-invisible-ruling-class.
43. Thomas Frank, “Cornel West: ‘He Posed as a Progressive and Turned Out to Be Counterfeit. We Ended Up with a Wall Street Presidency, a Drone Presidency,” Salon, August 24, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/08/24/cornel_west_he_posed_as_a_progressive_and_turned_out_to_be_counterfeit_we_ended_up_with_a_wall_street_presidency_a_drone_presidency/.
44. See Kimberly Nordyke, “Michael Moore Calls Obama’s First Term ‘Heartbreaking,’ a ‘Disappointment,’” Hollywood Reporter, October 25, 2011, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/michael-moore-calls-obamas-first-253253, and “Michael Moore’s Harsh Prediction of President Obama’s Legacy,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 10, 2014, http://www.ajc.com/news/entertainment/michael-moores-harsh-prediction-president-obamas-l/nhKHP/; Roger Hodge, The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism (New York: HarperCollins, 2010); and four articles by Diane McWhorter, “Don’t Punt on Torture,” USA Today,February 11, 2009; “Redemption in Birmingham,” New York Times (Sunday Review), July 9, 2011; “Good and Evil in Birmingham,” New York Times, January 20, 2013; and “Obama’s Atticus Finch Moment,” USA Today, July 28, 2010. In “Obama’s Atticus Finch Moment,” McWhorter writes: “So far, our first black president has seemed inhibited rather than empowered by [our racial] history. But only by transcending political necessity, risking failure for truth, will he earn a place alongside the heroes of our national mythology.”
45. Chris Hedges, “The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic,” Truthdig, May 16, 2011, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_obama_deception_why_cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516; “Tavis Smiley, Cornel West on the 2012 Election and Why Calling Obama ‘Progressive’ Ignores His Record,” Democracy Now,November 9, 2012, http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/9/tavis_smiley_cornel_west_on_the.
46. “Cornel West: Al Sharpton ‘the Bonafide House Negro of the Obama Plantation,’” Real Clear Politics, August 31, 2013, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/08/31/cornel_west_al_sharpton_the_bonafide_house_negro_of_the_obama_plantation.html.
47. Lesley Stahl reported on the May 22, 2011, show, in a segment titled “Al Sharpton: The ‘Refined’ Agitator”: “Sharpton told us that having a black president is a challenge: if he finds fault with Mr. Obama, he’s aiding those who want to destroy him. So he has decided not to criticize the president about anything—even about black unemployment that’s twice the national rate.” When she asked him if he had told other black leaders not to criticize the president, Sharpton answered: “What I’ve told them is to be genuine about it. There are some blacks that said: ‘He needs to go with a black agenda. He needs to do this.’ He said when he was running he wasn’t gonna do that. Duh. Surprise.” When Stahl asked, despite Obama’s not campaigning on the issue of black employment, why Sharpton wasn’t proclaiming the need for more to be done, the civil rights leader said: “What I don’t want to see is because he is black that we act like he’s not the real president. ‘He ought to be leading the black cause or the labor cause.’ He’s the president. To minimize who he is, I think, is an insult to the achievement of having him there.” http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/al-sharpton-the-refined-agitator/.
48. See these claims, and my extensive engagement with West’s criticisms of Obama and other black figures, in “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.
49. Jonathan Alter, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 272.
50. Just a few months after Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, I said to radio host Davey D—in terms that the left-wing Black Agenda Report, my perennial critic, labeled “scathing words of criticism”—that we “are so grateful for having a black person in the office we don’t demand anything of him,” and “I expect the president of the United States to address issues of race.” I argued that Obama has “fallen short and we must hold him accountable.” In 2010, on a panel convened by talk show host Tavis Smiley, another vigorous Obama critic, I argued in Cornel West’s presence that Obama is “Pharaoh, not Moses,” and that black folk should not expect a politician to be a prophet even as we press him to respond to black needs. Later that year, on MSBNC, I said: “I think that we should push the president. This president runs from race like a black man runs from a cop. What we have to do is ask Mr. Obama to stand up and use his bully pulpit to help us. He is loath to speak about race.” At a 2011 Congressional Black Caucus press conference held to criticize the Obama administration’s failure to address chronic black unemployment, I said that this “is an American crisis that demands an American response at the highest echelons of our government, and that does include the White House. As gay and Latino and other Americans have done, we have to leverage our political power and voices to make this happen.” In 2012, when I replaced Smiley as keynote speaker for a Martin Luther King Jr. luncheon for the city of Peoria, Illinois—Smiley was ousted because of his relentless and heated criticism of Obama—I began my speech by saying: “Tavis Smiley is a very dear friend of mine. I think he’s an extraordinary human being . . . who’s doing what he thinks is best . . . Dr. King would have taken some controversial stances, and did. He got disinvited too, trust me; Tavis is in good company. I support President Obama, but not without criticism, as you shouldn’t. Nobody who’s worth your support can be exempt from your critique.” And in 2014, on Face the Nation, I argued that Obama should be far more vocal about the fires of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police killing of unarmed black youth Michael Brown: “This president knows better than most what happens in poor communities that have been antagonized, historically, by the hostile relationship between black people and the police department.” I said that it “is not enough for him to come on national television and pretend that there’s a false equivalency between police people who are armed, and black people [who] are vulnerable . . . He needs to use his bully pulpit to step up and articulate this as a vision.” Following my remarks on television, I penned an op-ed in the Washington Post, where I claimed that Obama’s remarks on Ferguson were largely tone-deaf and that he should provide more viable leadership on race and policing. These comments riled the White House and caused a heated exchange with a senior presidential adviser.
51. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality,” The Atlantic, May 13, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/color-blind-policy-color-conscious-morality/393227/. Coates has also argued that Obama is hamstrung by a set of facts about race that he can’t afford to state: “What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is [that] the idea of superhuman black men who ‘bulk up’ to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism. What clearly cannot be said is that American society’s affection for nonviolence is notional. What cannot be said is that American society’s admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. increases with distance, that the movement he led was bugged, smeared, harassed, and attacked by the same country that now celebrates him . . . What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works . . . What cannot be said is that America does not really believe in nonviolence—Barack Obama has said as much—so much as it believes in order. What cannot be said is that there are very convincing reasons for black people in Ferguson to be nonviolent. But those reasons emanate from an intelligent fear of the law, not a benevolent respect for the law. The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid,” The Atlantic, November 26, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/barack-obama-ferguson-and-the-evidence-of-things-unsaid/383212/.
52. Coates wrote in “On the Death of Dreams,” “If we are honest with ourselves we will see a president who believes in particular black morality, but eschews particular black policy.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, “On the Death of Dreams,” The Atlantic, August 29, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/on-the-death-of-dreams/279157/.
53. Coates, “Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality.”
55. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America,” The Atlantic, May 20, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/how-the-obama-administration-talks-to-black-america/276015/.
56. Jelani Cobb, The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress (New York: Walker Publishing, 2010).
57. Jelani Cobb, “Selma and Ferguson,” The New Yorker, March 8, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/selma-and-ferguson.
58. Jelani Cobb, “A President and a King,” The New Yorker, January 26, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/president-king.
59. Jelani Cobb, “Chronicle of a Riot Foretold,” The New Yorker, November 25, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/chronicle-ferguson-riot-michael-brown.
60. Jelani Cobb, “Requiem for a Dream,” The New Yorker, August 28, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/requiem-for-a-dream.
61. Mary Frances Berry makes this claim in DeWayne Wickham, Bill Clinton and Black America (New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 2012), p. 110: “I remember the dinner we had in the White House when we were discussing the ‘mend it, don’t end it’ speech the president was planning to give on affirmative action. We were all sitting around the table talking about what he might say. Leon Higginbotham was there that night. So was Cornell [sic] West . . . [W]hen Clinton finally gave the speech at the National Archives, we were all invited there to hear him deliver it. His ‘mend it, don’t end it’ policy was absolutely wonderful, given the way the courts had been cutting back on affirmative action, especially in the contracting area and higher education. For the Clinton administration to be able to go forward—not as much as it would have wished—but for him to find a way to continue to implement affirmative action was extraordinary.” West’s deep and detailed involvement in Clinton’s policy of affirmative action, and the presidential speech to defend it, is exemplary of the very sort of principled participation that he now decries for other black figures involved with President Obama.
62. Cornel West with David Ritz, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir (New York: Smiley Books, 2009), p. 193.
2. “Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching”:
Race, Bi-Race, Post-Race in the Obama Presidency
1. I would also endorse Obama in an article a few months later when The Nation magazine asked eight figures to support their chosen Democratic candidate among the eight politicians then running for president in a November 2007 issue nearly a year before the 2008 election. (Ellen Chesler, for instance, endorsed Hillary Clinton; Katherine S. Newman supported John Edwards; and Gore Vidal endorsed Dennis Kucinich.) See Michael Eric Dyson, “Barack Obama: A Visionary Candidate for a New America,” The Nation, November 26, 2007.
2. Larry Blumenfeld, “Barack Obama in New Orleans,” Salon, July 6, 2007, http://www.salon.com/2007/07/06/obama_172/.
4. Barack Obama’s Democratic National Convention Keynote Address, Boston, July 27, 2004, Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751-2004Jul27.html.
5. Rachel L. Swarns, “So Far, Obama Can’t Take Black Vote for Granted,” New York Times, February 2, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/opinion/11sun3.html?_r=0. Also see Brent Staples, “Decoding the Debate over the Blackness of Barack Obama,” February 11, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/opinion/11sun3.html?_r=0; “The Obama Card: The Discussion of Race and the Senator’s Candidacy Is Really About Whose Side He’s On,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2007, http://articles.latimes.com/2007/feb/13/opinion/ed-obama13; and Gary Younge, “Is Obama Black Enough?,” The Guardian, March 1, 2007, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/01/usa.uselections2008.
6. Stanley Crouch, “What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me,” New York Daily News, November 2, 2006, http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/opinions/obama-isn-black-race-article-1.585922.
7. Debra J. Dickerson, “Colorblind: Barack Obama Would Be the Great Black Hope in the New Presidential Race—If He Were Actually Black,” Salon, January 22, 2007, http://www.salon.com/2007/01/22/obama_161/.
8. For a brilliant rebuttal of Dickerson’s (and, by extension, Crouch’s) position, and one that takes into account a global conception of blackness that accentuates the complicated convergence of multiple ethnicities within black identity, see Joan Morgan, “Black Like Barack,” in Sharpley-Whiting, The Speech, pp. 55–68. Morgan makes the point that Obama’s “presidential run forced all Americans to grapple with the fact that ‘black’ in America is a diverse, multiethnic, sometimes biracial, and often bicultural experience that can no longer be confined to the rich but limited prism of U.S. slavery and its historical aftermath. As a first-generation black immigrant, I also know that Obama’s precarious footing was caused . . . by the confusion and distrust this identity tends to provoke among whites and African Americans alike—precisely because it complicates, quite beautifully, not only existing constructs of race but all the traditional expectations, stereotypes, and explanations we have come to expect from discussions around what it means to be black in America” (pp. 59–60).
9. Victoria Brown, “In Solidarity: When Caribbean Immigrants Become Black,” NBC News, March 2, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/solidarity-when-caribbean-immigrants-become-black-n308686; Jonathan Kaufman, “Help Wanted No Blacks Need Apply,” The Social Contract 5, no. 4 (Summer 1995), http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0504/article_465_printer.shtml; Stephen Steinberg, “Immigration, African Americans, and Race Discourse,” New Politics X-3 (Summer 2005), http://newpol.org/content/immigration-african-americans-and-race-discourse. Also see Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman, “‘We’d Love to Hire Them but . . .’: The Meaning of Race for Employers,” in The Urban Underclass, ed. Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991); and Marcy C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
10. Morgan, “Black Like Barack.” Even as she argues for broadening the palette of identities from which we paint black identity, Morgan acknowledges the thorny intraracial differences and political disputes between native-born blacks and immigrant blacks. “As first- and second-generation immigrants, we are often more conservative in our political ideology, are less likely to publicly embrace social programs like welfare, and tend to be very stalwart in our opinions about black complicity in our own conditions. Racism for us is an undeniable reality, but it is also not the ultimate determinant. At our very core, we view America as a land of infinite possibilities because we know firsthand that it is possible to arrive in this country with nothing and build a life infinitely richer than the ones we left behind. We are, in short, a very up-from-the-bootstraps kind of people, a bit more Republican (although we tend not to vote that way), if not moderately Democratic, in nature than black political leaders care to recognize” (p. 64).
11. Obama, “Selma Voting Rights March Commemoration Speech.”
12. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; repr., New York: Crown, 2004).
13. Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (1974; repr., New York: Basic Books, 1983).
14. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; repr., New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 4. Writing to his nephew about the youth’s grandfather—Baldwin’s father—Baldwin states: “Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him . . . You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”
17. David Remnick, “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama,” The New Yorker, November 17, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/17/the-joshua-generation. Also see David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 4.
18. Frank Newport, “Obama Retains Strength Among Highly Educated,” Gallup Poll, July 30, 2008, http://www.gallup.com/poll/109156/obama-retains-strength-among-highly-educated.aspx. Also see Janel Davis, “Is Education Level Tied to Voting Tendencies?,” PolitiFact, November 5, 2012, http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2012/nov/05/larry-sabato/education-level-tied-voting-tendencies/. (“Based on the 2008 exit polls of Georgia, Virginia . . . and nationally, whites with a college degree supported Barack Obama at a higher rate than whites without a college degree.”)
19. The most persuasive, and sophisticated, argument for Obama’s being “America’s most progressive president since FDR,” and that “electing a more compelling human being to the White House is probably impossible” in this nation, is made by Gary Dorrien in The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), p. 12.
20. Cited in Tim Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2009), p. 26.
21. “CNN’s Candy Crowley Interviews President Barack Obama,” CNN, December 21, 2014, http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/12/21/cnns-candy-crowley-interviews-president-barack-obama/.
22. Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
23. Frank Rich, “In Conversation: Chris Rock,” New York, November 30, 2014, http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/chris-rock-frank-rich-in-conversation.html.
24. For a powerful, empirically grounded argument about the effects of contemporary racial inequality—in an era when many racist barriers have fallen but racial inequality persists, not primarily because of the harmful things whites do to blacks, and other minorities, but because of the helpful things whites do for one another—see Nancy DiTomaso, The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013).
25. Helene Cooper, “Attorney General Chided for Language on Race,” New York Times, March 7, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/us/politics/08race.html?_r=0.
26. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Random House, 2006), pp. 363–364.
27. “Andrew Young Says Obama Lacks Experience to Be President, Bill Clinton ‘As Black as Barack,’” Fox News, December 10, 2007, http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/12/10/andrew-young-says-obama-lacks-experience-to-be-president-bill-clinton-as-black.html.
28. See Yolanda Putman, “Video: Chattanooga Pastor Challenges City to Deal with Violence at Martin Luther King Jr. Day March,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, January 17, 2012, http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/news/story/2012/jan/17/martin-luther-king-day-challenge-chattanooga/68411/. In a sidebar timeline of King’s life, there is this item: “1953: Interviews to become minister at First Baptist Church on East Eighth Street in Chattanooga. Church overseers were concerned that, at age 24, he didn’t have enough experience.” Also see Lynda Edwards, “Chattanooga’s Black History Sites Are Slowly Disappearing or Forgotten,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, February 9, 2015, which states: “First Baptist Church: Martin Luther King Jr. interviewed for a job as minister of this church at 506 E. Eighth St., but the church thought he was too young at age 24.” http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/life/entertainment/story/2015/feb/09/vanishing-history/287003/.
29. For an appreciation of how Jackson’s progressive, big-tent, multiracial vision of the Democratic Party has prevailed, despite being for a time displaced by the neoliberalism of centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton, see Sam Tanenhaus, “Jesse Jackson Created the Modern Democratic Party,” Bloomberg View, August 27, 2015, http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-26/jesse-jackson-created-the-modern-democratic-party.
30. Jesse Jackson Jr., “Jesse Jr. to Jesse Sr.: You’re Wrong on Obama, Dad,” Chicago Sun Times, December 3, 2007, http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/.
31. Roddie A. Burris, “Jackson Slams Obama for ‘Acting White,’” The State, September 19, 2007, shared on Politico, http://www.politico.com/story/2007/09/jackson-slams-obama-for-acting-white-005902.
32. “Jesse Jackson Disparages Barack Obama: Caught on Tape,” Huffington Post, July 24, 2008, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/16/jesse-jackson-caught-on-m_n_111732.html.
33. Ashley Southall, “Jesse Jackson Jr. Gets 30 Months, and His Wife 12, to Be Served at Separate Times,” New York Times, August 14, 2013.
34. “Quotes in Reaction to Sean Bell Trial Verdict,” abclocal.com, http://abclocal.go.com/story?section=news/local&id=6103450; “Obama Takes Questions on Sean Bell, Clyburn and Wright,” Washington Post, April 25, 2008, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/04/obama-takes-questions-on-sean.html.
35. James Baldwin made the claim, in conversation with psychologist Kenneth Clark, that “most cities are engaged in . . . something called urban renewal, which means moving Negroes out: it means Negro removal.” See Kenneth B. Clark, “A Conversation with James Baldwin,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), p. 42. Also see a video clip of Baldwin’s interview with Clark in which Baldwin makes the statement about urban renewal as Negro removal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Abhj17kYU.
36. Not all critics who argued that Obama wasn’t black, but was instead biracial, were victims of such desires. Some maintained that the very categories of race that trapped us in the past continue to hold us captive, and that the refusal to see Obama as our first biracial president is the surest sign of our failure: “We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black,” wrote the brilliant cultural critic Marie Arana in a thoughtful essay, “He’s Not Black,” in the Washington Post. “Progress has outpaced vocabulary.” Arana pointed to her experience as a mixed-race Hispanic—white American and Peruvian—to argue for a more cosmopolitan view of race as glimpsed in the experience of Hispanic Americans. “Perhaps because we’ve been in this hemisphere two centuries longer than our northern brethren, we’ve had more time to mix it up. We are the product of el gran mestizaje, a wholesale cross-pollination that has been blending brown, white, black and yellow for 500 years—since Columbus set foot in the new world.” One might conclude that Arana is right to criticize the refusal to embrace Obama’s biracial heritage, and instead, lazily and retrogressively, call him black—a term, by the way, which Arana acknowledges that Obama embraces. What Arana may be overlooking in her critique is the politics of race that offers heightened esteem and greater privilege to the whiteness that is contained in such racial mixtures; biracialism becomes an appealing trait because it lessens blackness, generating an eagerness to embrace that whiteness, and therefore garnering greater acceptance in our culture while spurning the virtue of blackness and other nonwhite categories. Arana’s Hispanic point of reference comes with built-in advantages in the dominant culture in regard to whiteness: there is in our culture’s racial vocabulary the category of non-Hispanic white and, though far less frequently, non-Hispanic black, but none for non–African American white, or non-black white. See Marie Arana, “He’s Not Black,” Washington Post, November 30, 2008.
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.
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/.
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).
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).
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.
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.
7. Excerpt from Malcolm X (1992), directed by Spike Lee, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV7yx2y3TtY.
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.
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.
10. Obama, Democratic National Convention Keynote Address.
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.
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.
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.
14. “Biden’s Description of Obama Draws Scrutiny,” CNN, February 9, 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama/.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
25. Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Word That Moved America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 159.
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.
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.
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.
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).
32. Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” pp. 237–251.
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.
34. Ben Smith, “A Ferraro Flashback,” Politico, March 11, 2008, http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/03/a-ferraro-flashback-006934.
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).
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.
37. James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1993).
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.
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.
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.
41. “Obama Interview on March 16, 2008.”
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.
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.”
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).
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.
47. “Reverend Wright at the National Press Club, April 28, 2008.”
48. Transcript, Bill Moyers Journal, April 25, 2008, http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04252008/transcript1.html.
49. “Transcript of Jeremiah Wright’s Speech to NAACP,” CNN, April 28, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/28/wright.transcript/.
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.
51. Richard Lentz, Symbols, the News Magazines, and Martin Luther King (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 176–177.
52. “Priest Apologizes for Mocking Clinton While at Obama Church,” CNN, May 30, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/30/obama.pfleger/.
53. Susan Taylor, “What We Can Do to Reclaim Black Children,” L.A. Watts Times, February 14, 2013, http://www.lawattstimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=920:what-we-can-do-to-reclaim-black-children&catid=24&Itemid=119.
54. Luke 12:48 (New Revised Standard Version).
4. Re-Founding Father:
Patriotism, Citizenship, and Obama’s America
1. Allison Hoffmann, “Oprah Hosts Obama in Star-Studded Event,” Washington Post, September 9, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/08/AR2007090801197.html.
2. Chris Rock has told the story several times, perhaps most famously on the HBO special The Black List (vol. 1), 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q1XU07BIO0.
3. Randall Kennedy draws a parallel between his father’s bitter resistance to American patriotism and Jeremiah Wright’s pungent racial views in The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), pp. 161–195.
4. Michael Eric Dyson, “Understanding Black Patriotism,” Time, April 24, 2008, http://www.webcitation.org/5XKexgdfT.
5. “Frederick Douglass: ‘The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,’” Zinn Education Project, https://zinnedproject.org/materials/frederick-douglass-the-meaning-of-july-fourth-for-the-negro/.
6. Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/let-america-be-america-again.
7. Lentz, Symbols, p. 239; Dyson, I May Not, p. 62.
8. Jordan Goodman, Paul Robeson: A Watched Man (New York: Verso, 2013); David Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981).
9. Martin Luther King Jr., “I See the Promised Land,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperOne, 2003), p. 282.
10. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 9.
11. When quizzed at the National Press Club about whether his sermons were unpatriotic, Wright responded: “I feel that those citizens who say that have never heard my sermons, nor do they know me. They are unfair accusations taken from sound bites and that which is looped over and over again on certain channels. I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did [former Vice President Dick] Cheney serve?” “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.
12. Two military veterans—Lawrence Korb, from the U.S. Navy, and Ian Moss, from the Marine Corps—penned an article in the Chicago Tribune to clarify and defend Jeremiah Wright’s notable record of service in the military not long after it was integrated. See Lawrence Korb and Ian Moss, “Factor Military Duty into Criticism,” Chicago Tribune, April 3, 2008, http://www.webcitation.org/5WoiVsN1X.
13. For more of my thoughts on the subject, see Michael Eric Dyson, Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 85–118.
14. “Michelle Obama Clarifies: I’ve Always Loved My Country,” CNN, February 20, 2008, http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/02/20/michelle-obama-clarifies-ive-always-loved-my-country/. Initially, what she said was, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country, because it feels like hope is making a comeback . . . not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.” It seems a reasonable statement to make for a member of an oppressed minority group that has been denied critical opportunities and systematically prevented from flourishing on a number of fronts. Now that the country had shown a profound willingness to change, Michelle Obama could understandably take pride in the country’s ability to move forward, seen in the groundswell of support for her husband’s historic candidacy. It seemed disingenuous for her critics to deny the legacy of inequality that might make a member of a minority group not as happy, or as proud, as she might otherwise be if that group enjoyed the full benefits and ripe fruit of democracy that the majority has had access to all along. Comedian Chris Rock captured the ambivalence that many blacks feel with regard to being a member of a society that has begun to open doors yet has a history of injustice: “If you’re black, America’s like the uncle that paid your way through college—but molested you.” http://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/feb/26/awardsandprizes.oscars2005.
15. Herb Galewitz, ed., Patriotism: Quotations from Around the World (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003), p. 27.
16. Salamishah Tillet, Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Tillet argues that “civic estrangement occurs because [African Americans] have been marginalized or underrepresented in the civic myths, monuments, narratives, icons, creeds and images of the past that constitute, reproduce and promote an American national identity” (p. 18).
17. David Wright and Sunlen Miller, “Obama Dropped Flag Pin in War Statement,” ABC News, October 4, 2007, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3690000.
18. David C. Anderson, Crime and the Politics of Hysteria: How the Willie Horton Story Changed American Justice (New York: Crown, 1995).
19. “McCain Distances Himself from Supporter’s Comments,” CNN, February 26, 2008, http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/02/26/mccain-distances-himself-from-supporters-comments/.
20. Barack Obama, “Full Script of Obama’s Speech,” CNN, July 24, 2008, http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/24/obama.words/.
21. Jonathan Weisman and Juliet Eilperin, “Race Moves to Center Stage,” Washington Post, August 1, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/01/AR2008080102970.html.
22. Barack Obama’s Speech in Independence, Mo., New York Times, June 30, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/us/politics/30text-obama.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
23. Barack Obama, “What I See in Lincoln’s Eyes,” Time, July 4, 2005, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1077287,00.html.
24. Thanks to Noelle Braddock.
25. Dinesh D’Souza, The Roots of Obama’s Rage (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2010), and Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2012).
26. Grace Wyler, “John Sununu: ‘I Wish This President Would Learn How to Be an American,” The Atlantic, July 17, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/john-sununu-i-wish-this-president-would-learn-how-to-be-an-american/259948/.
27. Joy Lin, “Gingrich: Obama Is Most Dangerous President in American History,” Fox News, February 20, 2012, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/02/20/gingrich-obama-is-most-dangerous-president-in-american-history/.
28. Daniel Halper, “Senator: ‘I Have Not Been Impressed with [Holder’s] Intelligence,’” Weekly Standard, June 13, 2012, http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/senator-i-have-not-been-impressed-holders-intelligence_647204.html.
29. Kevin Robillard, “McCain: Rice ‘Not Qualified’ for State,” Politico, November 14, 2012, http://www.politico.com/story/2012/11/mccain-rice-not-qualified-for-state-083824.
30. Jamelle Bouie, “From Good to Great,” Slate, September 25, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/09/eric_holder_resigning_as_attorney_general_his_justice_department_was_a_staunch.html.
31. Of the quickly growing body of literature on the modern-day Tea Party, here are some of the best, and the ones that have influenced my view of the Tea Party in these pages: Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks, The Wrongs of the Right: Language, Race, and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama (New York: NYU Press, 2014); David Corn, Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party (New York: William Morrow, 2012); Meghan A. Burke, Race, Gender, and Class in the Tea Party: What the Movement Reflects About Mainstream Ideologies (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2015); Kate Zernike, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (New York: Times Books, 2010); Anthony DiMaggio, The Rise of the Tea Party: Political Discontent and Corporate Media in the Age of Obama (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011); and Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
32. Haley Crum, “Obama Provides Birth Certificate—on a Button,” Washington Post, August 27, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2012/08/27/obama-provides-birth-certificate-on-a-button/.
33. Jim Lobe, “As Iraq Anniversary Fades, America’s ‘Strategic Narcissism’ Stands Out,” Inter Press Service, March 24, 2013, http://www.commondreams.org/news/2013/03/24/iraq-anniversary-fades-americas-strategic-narcissism-stands-out.
34. Adam Shah, “Having Attacked Obama for Overseas ‘Apology Tour,’ Conservative Media Now Attack Him for Not Going to Berlin,” Media Matters, November 9, 2009, http://mediamatters.org/research/2009/11/09/having-attacked-obama-for-overseas-apology-tour/156748.
35. Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama at Strasbourg Town Hall,” Strasbourg, France, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-obama-strasbourg-town-hall.
36. Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama to the Turkish Parliament,” Ankara, April 6, 2009, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-obama-turkish-parliament.
37. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at Cairo University, 6-04-09,” June 4, 2009, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09.
38. Macon Phillips, “Osama Bin Laden Dead,” May 2, 2011, https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead.
39. Barack Obama, “Statement by the President on ISIL,” The White House, September 10, 2014, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/10/statement-president-isil-1.
40. Alex Spillius, “Barack Obama Tells Africa to Stop Blaming Colonialism for Problems,” Daily Telegraph (London), July 9, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/5778804/Barack-Obama-tells-Africa-to-stop-blaming-colonialism-for-problems.html.
41. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President to the Ghanaian Parliament,” Accra, July 11, 2009, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-ghanaian-parliament.
42. “Interview of the President by AllAfrica.com, 7-2-09,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/interview-president-allafricacom-7-2-09.
43. Obama, “Remarks to the Ghanaian Parliament.”
44. Stephanie Hanson, “Angola’s Political and Economic Development,” Council on Foreign Relations, July 21, 2008, http://www.cfr.org/world/angolas-political-economic-development/p16820.
45. Terra Lawson-Remer and Joshua Greenstein, “Beating the Resource Curse in Africa: A Global Effort,” Council on Foreign Relations, August 2012, http://www.cfr.org/africa-sub-saharan/beating-resource-curse-africa-global-effort/p28780.
46. Nancy Birdsall and John Nellis, “Winners and Losers: Assessing the Distributional Impact of Privatization,” World Development 31, no. 10 (October 2003): 1617–33.
47. Marcy C. Diang, “Colonialism, Neoliberalism, Education and Culture in Cameroon,” paper no. 52 (Fall 2013), DePaul University College of Education, http://via.library.depaul.edu/soe_etd/52; David William Pear, “Africa: Incredible Wealth, Exploitation, Corruption and Poverty for Its People,” Real News Network, January 27, 2014; http://therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/170-more-blog-posts-from-david-william-pear/1944-africa-incredible-wealth-exploitation-corruption-and-poverty-for-its-people-.
48. David Levering Lewis, The Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987).
49. Annika McGinnis, “Obama Urges African Nations Not to Make Economic ‘Excuses,’” Reuters, July 28, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/28/us-africa-obama-idUSKBN0FX1WW20140728.
50. For competing arguments about the use of Africom by the U.S. military, see Robert Moeller, “The Truth About AFRICOM,” Foreign Policy, July 21, 2010, http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/07/21/the-truth-about-africom/; and Mark P. Fancher, “Dr. Che Guevera’s Prescription for Africa’s AFRICOM Headache,” Black Agenda Report, July 7, 2015, http://www.blackagendareport.com/che_guevara_AFRICOM.
51. Bret Stephens, “Obama Gets It Right on Africa,” Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2009, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124753013433935785.
52. Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacks,” Time, December 2, 1993, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979736,00.html.
53. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1994), pp. 2–3.
5. The Scold of Black Folk:
The Bully Pulpit and Black Responsibility
2. See Shirley Sherrod with Catherine Whitney, The Courage to Hope: How I Stood Up to the Politics of Fear (New York: Atria Books, 2012). Given the play in her book title on Obama’s “audacity of hope,” one wonders if Sherrod isn’t suggesting that audaciousness isn’t enough in a political atmosphere that demands the courage of one’s convictions.
3. Tony Perry, “Shirley Sherrod Vows to Sue Conservative Blogger Who Misrepresented Her Remarks,” Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2010, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/07/shirley-sherrod-speech.html.
4. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “For Obama, Nuance on Race Invites Questions,” New York Times, February 8, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/us/politics/09race.html.
5. “Racial Disparities in Disbursement of Stimulus Funding,” Hispanic Ad.com, January 22, 2010, http://hispanicad.com/blog/news-article/had/government/racial-disparities-disbursement-stimulus-funding.
6. Mark Kantrowitz, “The Distribution of Grants and Scholarships by Race,” FinAid.org, September 2, 2011, p. 8, http://www.finaid.org/scholarships/20110902racescholarships.pdf.
7. William Julius Wilson, “Race-Neutral Policies and the Democratic Coalition,” The American Prospect, December 4, 2000, http://prospect.org/article/race-neutral-policies-and-democratic-coalition.
8. William Julius Wilson, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), pp. 141–142.
9. Stolberg, “For Obama, Nuance on Race Invites Questions.”
10. As I argue elsewhere: “There were at least a few competing versions of the universal floating around. The trick was to incorporate one version of universalism, black rights, into the legal arc of another version of universalism, white privilege, while preserving the necessary illusion of neutrality on which such rights theoretically depended. Hence a philosophical principle—what the philosopher Hegel might call a ‘concrete universal’—was transformed into a political strategy, allowing both whites and blacks to preserve their specific stake in a universal value: democracy. To miss this process—that is, to mistake politics for philosophical principles, or, in turn, to disregard their symbiotic relationship in shaping American democracy—is to distort fatally the improvisational, ramshackle, halt-and-leap fashion by which American politics achieves its goals.” Dyson, I May Not, p. 26.
11. Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Free Press, 2000), p. 18.
12. Lauren Victoria Burke, “Is Black America Better Off Under Obama?” Black Press USA, January 5, 2015, http://www.blackpressusa.com/is-black-america-better-off-under-obama/#sthash.XlB2XRKv.dpbs; Zak Cheney-Rice, “13 Startling Numbers Reveal the Reality of Black America Under Obama,” IdentitiesMic, December 19, 2014, http://mic.com/articles/106868/13-numbers-that-highlight-the-difference-between-obama-s-post-racial-dream-and-reality. Also see the predictable—and right-for-the-wrong-reasons—attack from the right: Deroy Murdock, “Black Americans Are Worse Off Under Obama,” National Review, May 16, 2014, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/378087/black-americans-are-worse-under-obama-deroy-murdock; and Jennifer G. Hickey, “Race Gap: Blacks Fall Further Behind Under Obama,” Newsmax, January 8, 2014, http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/obama-blacks-poverty-education/2014/01/08/id/545866/. And, of course, from the black left: Dr. Reginald Clark, “The Expansion of Black American Misery Under Barack Obama’s Watch,” Black Agenda Report, February 9, 2013, http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/expansion-black-american-misery-under-barack-obama’s-watch.
13. “Transcript of President Obama’s Remarks at Year-End Press Conference (All Women Questioners Edition),” Daily Kos, December 19, 2014, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/19/1353032/-Transcript-of-President-Obama-s-remarks-at-year-end-press-conference-all-women-questioners-edition#.
14. Ruth Simon and Tom McGinty, “Loan Rebound Misses Black Businesses,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304585004579417021571596610.
15. When Obama came into office in 2009, the national unemployment rate was 7.8 percent, and by April 2014 it had fallen to 6.3 percent, a marked improvement. The black unemployment rate dropped far less markedly, going from 12.7 percent to 11.6 percent, nearly double the national average. For blacks between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, the unemployment rate grew from 35.3 percent to 36.8 percent. To be fair, blacks averaged 5.8 percent higher unemployment than whites under the two presidents before Obama: the rate was 5.0 percent under Bush and reached a 5.5 percent average under Clinton. Under Obama, blacks have had a 6.9 percent higher unemployment rate. Although black unemployment has always been double that of whites, it hasn’t usually been 14 percent.
The labor force participation rate offers an even more accurate and damning sketch of black job health because the prolonged denial of opportunity causes many to abandon the quest for jobs in the workforce. The rate in 2009 was 65.7 percent and fell to 62.8 percent in April 2014. For black adults, the figure fell from 63.2 percent to 60.9 percent. When Obama came into office, 29.6 percent of blacks between sixteen and nineteen were working, but by the first quarter of 2014, only 27.9 percent were employed.
When Obama rose to power, 14.3 percent of Americans were trapped beneath the poverty line, a number that rose to 15.0 percent in 2012. Obama often speaks of the middle class but barely mentions the poor, ignoring the one American in seven who falls beneath the poverty line—a dispiriting total of 45 million citizens. Forty percent of black children attend high-poverty schools, while only 6 percent of white students do. When Obama got to the Oval Office, the number of black food stamp recipients stood at 7,393,000, a number that has since risen to 10,955,000. And black home ownership slipped from 46.1 percent at the time Obama took office to 43.3 percent.
The chasm between white and black wealth has increased to 16 to 1. In Obama’s first term, the top 1 percent of citizens pulled in 95 percent of all income gains, the worst disparity since a year before the Great Crash on Wall Street in 1929. Neither does Obama’s strategic inadvertence successfully offset persistent racial bias in the marketplace. The Justice Department in 2012 struck a $175 million settlement with Wells Fargo & Co., charging that the company had steered approximately four thousand black and Latino borrowers into subprime mortgages, when non-Latino whites with similar credit profiles received prime loans. The company charged approximately thirty thousand minorities higher fees than whites, too. The Justice Department also negotiated the largest-ever fair-lending settlement with Bank of America in 2011 for $335 million. Bank of America’s mortgage unit, Countrywide Financial, had charged blacks and Latinos higher fees and interest rates than whites with the same credit portfolio, a deceitful practice that Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez termed “discrimination with a smile.” “Discrimination with a Smile,” New York Times, January 22, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/opinion/discrimination-with-a-smile.html?_r=0. A 2011 study projected that nearly one-quarter of black borrowers would have lost their homes to foreclosure by the end of the crisis; in 2012 foreclosure rates for blacks were nearly twice as high as those for whites, 9.8 percent versus 5.0 percent. This will have a deleterious effect on new black wealth creation, since entrepreneurs routinely tap home equity to finance new ventures. Because the net worth of black folk is far more likely than that of whites to be tied to home equity, blacks lost a great deal of equity and wealth when the housing bubble burst. Before the crisis, whites were already almost twice as likely as blacks to run their own businesses; the disappearance of housing wealth leaves blacks without a financial cushion to cover college tuition or unexpected expenses while depressing the market for black-owned businesses. Debbie Gruenstein Bocian, Carolina Wei Li, and Roberto G. Quercia, “Lost Ground, 2011: Disparities in Mortgage Lending and Foreclosures,” Center for Responsible Lending, November 2011, http://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage-lending/research-analysis/Lost-Ground-2011.pdf.
16. The Obama administration seemed poised to aggressively reduce racial segregation of residential neighborhoods after the Supreme Court decision upholding that disparate effect is a legal basis on which to judge whether a plaintiff is a victim of housing discrimination. As the New York Times reported: “The new rules are an effort to enforce the goals of the civil rights–era fair housing law that bans overt residential discrimination, but whose broader mandate for communities to actively foster integration has not been realized. They are part of President Obama’s attempt to address the racial imbalances and lack of opportunity that he says have contributed to unrest reminiscent of the turbulent 1960s in cities like Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, where African-Americans have clashed with police officers.” Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Binyamin Appelbaum, “Obama Unveils Stricter Rules on Fair Housing,” New York Times, July 9, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/us/hud-issuing-new-rules-to-fight-segregation.html.
18. “Obama’s Father’s Day Remarks,” New York Times, June 15, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/us/politics/15text-obama.html?pagewanted=all.
19. Martin Luther King, “An Address by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, ed. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), p. 407; Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 104.
20. Rebekah Levine Coley and Bethany L. Medeiros, “Reciprocal Longitudinal Relations Between Nonresident Father Involvement and Adolescent Delinquency,” Child Development 878, no. 1 (January–February 2007): 132–147. Also see Daphne C. Hernandez and Rebekah Levine Coley, “Measuring Father Involvement Within Low-Income Families: Who Is a Reliable and Valid Reporter?,” Parenting 7, no. 1 (2007): 69–97.
21. Eddie Stone, Jesse Jackson: A Biography (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1989), p. 137.
22. Kathleen Hennessey, “In Chicago, Obama Stresses Community, Family in Curbing Violence,” Los Angeles Times, February 15, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/15/news/la-pn-obama-chicago-preventing-violence-20130215.
23. The Melissa Harris-Perry Show, MSNBC, February 17, 2013, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/50858848/ns/msnbc/t/melissa-harris-perry-show-sunday-february-th/#.Vez_iuvdVJ0.
24. “Remarks by the President at Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Phoenix Awards Dinner,” September 24, 2011, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/09/24/remarks-president-congressional-black-caucus-foundation-annual-phoenix-a.
25. Mackenzie Weinger, “Waters: Obama Remarks ‘Curious,’” Politico, September 26, 2011, http://www.politico.com/story/2011/09/waters-obama-remarks-curious-064405.
26. “Transcript: Obama’s Commencement Speech at Morehouse College,” Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/05/20/transcript-obamas-commencement-speech-at-morehouse-college/. Contrast Obama’s Morehouse speech with his 2012 Barnard College commencement address, in which he praised the female graduates profusely and encouraged them to persevere, in which he empathized with them for the sexism and gender limits they confronted, and in which he committed himself to fighting the problems that plagued them without scolding them in the least: “Of course, as young women, you’re also going to grapple with some unique challenges, like whether you’ll be able to earn equal pay for equal work; whether you’ll be able to balance the demands of your job and your family; whether you’ll be able to fully control decisions about your own health. And while opportunities for women have grown exponentially over the last 30 years, as young people, in many ways you have it even tougher than we did . . . I’ve seen your passion and I’ve seen your service. I’ve seen you engage and I’ve seen you turn out in record numbers. I’ve heard your voices amplified by creativity and a digital fluency that those of us in older generations can barely comprehend. I’ve seen a generation eager, impatient even, to step into the rushing waters of history and change its course. And that defiant, can-do spirit is what runs through the veins of American history. It’s the lifeblood of all our progress. And it is that spirit which we need your generation to embrace and rekindle right now . . . Indeed, we know we are better off when women are treated fairly and equally in every aspect of American life—whether it’s the salary you earn or the health decisions you make . . . And I believe that the women of this generation—that all of you will help lead the way. Now, I recognize that’s a cheap applause line when you’re giving a commencement at Barnard. It’s the easy thing to say. But it’s true.” “Transcript of Speech by President Barack Obama,” Barnard College Commencement, May 14, 2012, https://barnard.edu/headlines/transcript-speech-president-barack-obama.
27. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America,” The Atlantic, May 20, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/how-the-obama-administration-talks-to-black-america/276015/.
28. “Remarks by the President at the ‘Let Freedom Ring’ Ceremony Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington,” August 28, 2013, https://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2013/08/28/president-obama-marks-50th-anniversary-march-washington#transcript.
29. Chauncey DeVega, “White America’s Racial Amnesia: The Sobering Truth About Our Country’s ‘Race Riots,’” Salon,May 1, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/05/01/white_americas_racial_amnesia_the_sobering_truth_about_our_countrys_race_riots_partner/; “Major Race Riots in the U.S.,” Infoplease, http://www.infoplease.com/us/history/race-riots.html; Sheila Smith McKoy, When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Cultures (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).
30. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Report), 1967, http://www.blackpast.org/primary/national-advisory-commission-civil-disorders-kerner-report-1967.
31. Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Random House, 2008).
32. Ben Smith, “Obama on Small-Town Pa.: Cling to Religion, Guns, Xenophobia,” Politico, April 11, 2008, http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0408/Obama_on_smalltown_PA_Clinging_religion_guns_xenophobia.html.
33. Lisa Bloom, Suspicion Nation: The Inside Story of the Trayvon Martin Injustice and Why We Continue to Repeat It (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2014).
34. Amy Davidson, “If I Had a Son, He’d Look Like Trayvon,” The New Yorker, March 23, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/if-i-had-a-son-hed-look-like-trayvon. Also see Krissah Thompson and Scott Wilson, “Obama on Trayvon Martin: ‘If I Had a Son, He’d Look Like Trayvon,’” Washington Post, March 23, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-if-i-had-a-son-hed-look-like-trayvon/2012/03/23/gIQApKPpVS_story.html.
35. Bernard Goldberg, “If President Obama Had a Son He Might Look Like . . . ,” August 22, 2013, http://bernardgoldberg.com/if-president-obama-had-a-son-he-might-look-like/.
6. Dying to Speak of Race:
Policing Black America
1. “Obama: Police Who Arrested Professor ‘Acted Stupidly,’” CNN, July 23, 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/22/harvard.gates.interview/; “Gates vs. Crowley,” Christian Science Monitor, July 23, 2009, http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2009/0723/p08s01-comv.html; Stephen Brooks, Douglas Koopman, and J. Matthew Wilson, eds., Understanding American Politics, 2nd ed. (North York, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 2013), p. 255.
2. “Obama: Police Who Arrested Professor ‘Acted Stupidly.’”
3. “Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Abe of Japan in Joint Press Conference,” April 28, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/04/28/remarks-president-obama-and-prime-minister-abe-japan-joint-press-confere.
4. Jelani Cobb, “Chronicle of a Riot Foretold,” TheNew Yorker, November 25, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/chronicle-ferguson-riot-michael-brown.
5. Transcript, “Case: State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson,” Grand Jury vol. 5, September 16, 2014, https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1370494-grand-jury-volume-5.html; Josh Sanburn, “All the Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown,” Time, November 25, 2014, http://time.com/3605346/darren-wilson-michael-brown-demon/; Jake Halpern, “The Cop,” The New Yorker, August 10, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-cop.
6. Ann Petry, The Street (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), p. 199.
7. “Statement by the President,” Edgartown, Mass., August 14, 2014, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/14/statement-president.
8. Barack Obama, “Statement by the President,” August 18, 2014, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/18/statement-president.
9. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President After Announcement of Decision by the Grand Jury in Ferguson, Missouri,” November 24, 2014, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/24/remarks-president-after-announcement-decision-grand-jury-ferguson-missou.
10. Devin Dwyer, “Obama on Ferguson: ‘I Don’t Have Any Sympathy’ for Protesters Burning Buildings,” ABC News, November 25, 2014, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-ferguson-sympathy-protesters-burning-buildings/story?id=27181837.
11. Stephanie Smith, “Bill Bratton Takes Tough Questions from African-American Leaders,” New York Post, April 4, 2014, http://pagesix.com/2014/04/04/bill-bratton-takes-tough-questions-from-african-american-leaders/.
12. “Giuliani and Dyson Argue over Violence in Black Communities,” Meet the Press, November 23, 2014, http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/michael-brown-shooting/giuliani-dyson-argue-over-violence-black-communities-n254431.
13. “Statement by the President” (on Iraq and Ferguson), August 14, 2014, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/18/statement-president.
14. Michael Eric Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005), p. 142.
15. Kevin Johnson, Meghan Hoyer, and Brad Heath, “Local Police Involved in 400 Killings Per Year,” August 15, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/.
16. Krissah Thompson, “Rep. John Lewis on ‘Selma’ and the Memories It Brings to Life,” Washington Post, December 25, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/rep-john-lewis-on-selma-and-the-memories-it-brings-to-life/2014/12/25/f28bab8c-849d-11e4-b9b7-b8632ae73d25_story.html; “Leaving Selma: A Documentary from the Acclaimed Series ‘Andrew Young Presents,’” http://leavingselma.com/timeline.
17. Justin Fenton, “Six Baltimore Police Officers Indicted in Death of Freddie Gray,” Baltimore Sun, May 21, 2015, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/freddie-gray/bs-md-freddie-gray-officer-indictments-20150521-story.html.
18. “Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park,” Justice Policy Institute, Prison Policy Initiative, February 2105, http://static.prisonpolicy.org/origin/md/Sandtown.pdf.
19. “MLK: A Riot Is the Language of the Unheard,” CBS Reports, September 27, 1966, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mlk-a-riot-is-the-language-of-the-unheard/.
20. Naomi Martin, “Parking Dispute May Have Lit Fuse in Waco Biker Shootout,” Dallas Morning News, May 18, 2015, http://www.dallasnews.com/news/state/headlines/20150518-parking-dispute-may-have-lit-fuse-in-waco-biker-shootout.ece.
21. Reverend Jesse Jackson, “Remarks at the Funeral of Freddie Gray,” New Shiloh Baptist Church, Baltimore, April 27, 2015; remarks in possession of the author.
22. “Dajerria Becton: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know,” Heavy.com, June 8, 2015, http://heavy.com/news/2015/06/dajerria-becton-mckinney-texas-black-girl-bikini-name-assaulted-video-photo-interview-friends-eric-casebolt/; Doktor Zoom, “Hero Cop Protects Texas from Black Teenagers at Pool Party,” Wonkette, June 8, 2015, http://wonkette.com/587722/hero-cop-protects-texas-from-black-teenagers-at-pool-party; Brandon Brooks, “Cops Crash Pool Party (Original),” YouTube, June 6, 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=R46-XTqXkzE; “Texas Teen Girl Interview After Cops Crash Pool Party, Slams Her to Ground, Pulling Gun on Kids,” YouTube, June 8, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W2IbpHbopY.
23. “Dajerria Becton: 5 Fast Facts.”
24. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and Andrea J. Ritchie with Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women,” African American Policy Forum, July 15, 2015, http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/55a810d7e4b058f342f55873/1437077719984/AAPF_SMN_Brief_full_singles.compressed.pdf.
25. “Remarks by the First Lady at Tuskegee University Commencement Address,” May 9, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/05/09/remarks-first-lady-tuskegee-university-commencement-address.
26. Lis Power, “Right-Wing Media Accuse ‘Angry’ Michelle Obama of ‘Race Baiting’ in Tuskegee Commencement Address,” Media Matters, May 11, 2015, http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/05/11/right-wing-media-accuse-angry-michelle-obama-of/203609.
27. Ronald Kessler, The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents (New York: Crown Forum, 2014 ), p. 41.
28. “Remarks by President Obama and Prime Minister Abe of Japan in Joint Press Conference.”
7. Going Bulworth:
Black Truth and White Terror in the Age of Obama
1. Peter Baker, “Onset of Woes Casts Pall over Obama’s Policy Aspirations,” New York Times, May 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/us/politics/new-controversies-may-undermine-obama.html.
2. Ezra Klein, “If Obama Went Bulworth, Here’s What He’d Say,” Washington Post, May 16, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/16/if-obama-went-bulworth-heres-what-hed-say/; Melinda Henneberger, “If Obama Did ‘Go Bulworth,” What Would He Say?,” Washington Post, May 16, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/05/16/obama-feeling-constricted-longs-to-go-bulworth/. Henneberger quotes Catholic University political scientist Steve Schneck, co-chair of Catholics for Obama in 2012, who said, “He’s done very little for the African American community that went all out for him twice.” Henneberger writes, “Schneck feels sure the community organizer whose idealism got even Washington’s hopes up when he first arrived in the Senate is still in there somewhere, ‘but he’s kept those passions bottled up and out of sight.’”
3. F. Gary Gray’s brilliant 2015 biopic Straight Outta Compton, the story of the irreverent eighties and nineties gangsta rap group N.W.A., impressively mines the same fertile political and cultural territory, except it focuses attention on the plague of police brutality that led to one of the group’s most powerful and controversial hits, “Fuck tha Police,” and thus establishes its relevance to contemporary black and brown struggles against police brutality. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s remarkable 2015 Broadway play Hamilton makes ingenious use of hip hop to explore vibrant political truths centered in the life and death of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, brilliantly fusing the serpentine rhythms of rap and traditional Broadway melodies to engage complicated ideas about democracy, race, class, color, and immigration in America.
4. Bulworth, DVD, directed by Warren Beatty (1998; 20th Century Fox, 1999).
5. Teresa Tritch, “President Obama Could Unmask Big Political Donors,” New York Times, March 23, 2015, http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/president-obama-could-unmask-big-political-donors/?_r=0. As Tritch points out, Obama has talked a good game about the corrupting influence of dark money in politics, so fifty public advocacy and good government groups sent him a letter (http://www.citizen.org/documents/2015-sign-on-letter-for-govt-contracting.pdf) challenging him to, in a sense, put his money where his mouth is—or at least to put his political influence there and sign an executive order “requiring full disclosure of political spending by corporations receiving federal contracts, as well as by their directors and officers.”
6. “Obama Heckled at White House LGBT Pride Event, Tells Heckler: ‘You’re in My House!’ ‘Shame on You!,’” YouTube, June 24, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w71OGC6Jx9w&feature=youtu.be; “President Obama Boots Heckler from White House Event: ‘You’re in My House,’” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 24, 2015, http://www.ajc.com/news/news/national/president-obama-boots-heckler-white-house-event-yo/nmkcs/; Justin Wm. Moyer, “Transgender Obama Heckler Jennicet Gutiérrez Hailed by Some LGBT Activists,” Washington Post, June 26, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/26/transgender-obama-heckler-hailed-by-some-lgbt-activists/.
7. “Remarks by the President at White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner,” April 25, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w71OGC6Jx9w&feature=youtu.be; “Obama’s Full speech at 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Washington Post (PostTV), April 25, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/national/obamas-full-speech-at-2015-white-house-correspondents-dinner/2015/04/25/1ee9a604-ebc1-11e4-8581-633c536add4b_video.html.
8. “Attorney General Eric Holder at the Department of Justice African American History Month Program,” February 18, 2009, http://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-eric-holder-department-justice-african-american-history-month-program.
9. Richard Cohen, “Racism vs. Reality,” Washington Post, July 15, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-racism-vs-reality/2013/07/15/4f419eb6-ed7a-11e2-a1f9-ea873b7e0424_story.html.
10. Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, et al., U.S. Supreme Court (October term, 2012), http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf.
11. Richard Benjamin, “Obama’s Safe, Overrated and Airy Speech,” Salon, July 19, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/07/19/obamas_safe_overrated_and_airy_speech/.
12. Danielle Cadet, “Jordan Davis’ Shooter Rants About Killing ‘Thugs’ So They ‘May Take the Hint and Change Their Behavior,” Huffington Post, October 18, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/18/jordan-davis-shooter-michael-dunn_n_4123805.html.
13. Brendan Connor, “Here Is What Appears to Be Dylann Roof’s Racist Manifesto,” Gawker, June 20, 2015, http://gawker.com/here-is-what-appears-to-be-dylann-roofs-racist-manifest-1712767241.
14. “Statement by the President on the Shooting in Charleston, South Carolina,” June 18, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/06/18/statement-president-shooting-charleston-south-carolina.
15. Jaeah Lee and Edwin Rios, “Obama to US Mayors on Guns: ‘We Need a Change in Attitude. We Have to Fix This,’” Mother Jones, June 19, 2015, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/obama-mayors-charleston-gun-violence-speech-video.
16. “Hillary Clinton: U.S. Conference of Mayors Speech,” San Francisco, June 20, 2015, http://www.shallownation.com/2015/06/20/video-transcript-hillary-clinton-u-s-conference-of-mayors-speech-san-francisco-ca-june-20-2015/.
17. Campbell Robertson, Monica Davey, and Julie Bosman, “Calls to Drop Confederate Emblems Spread Nationwide,” New York Times, June 23, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/us/south-carolina-nikki-haley-confederate-flag.html.
18. David Sims, “The President’s Candid Garage Interview,” The Atlantic, June 22, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/obama-wtf-marc-maron/396488/.
19. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
20. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the NAACP Conference,” July 14, 2015. Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/14/remarks-president-naacp-conference.
21. At a July 2015 press conference on the Iranian nuclear deal, Obama fielded a question from American Urban Radio Networks White House correspondent April Ryan about whether the president would revoke Cosby’s 2002 Medal of Freedom. Obama replied:
“With respect to the Medal of Freedom, there’s no precedent for revoking a medal. We don’t have that mechanism. As you know, I make it a policy not to comment on the specifics of cases where there still might be, if not criminal, then civil issues involved. I’ll say this: if you give a woman, or a man, for that matter, without his or her knowledge, a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape. And I think this country, or any civilized country, should have no tolerance for rape.” See Kia Makarechi, “Obama’s Striking Response to Bill Cosby Rape Allegations,” Vanity Fair, July 15, 2015, http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/07/obama-bill-cosby.
22. See Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005), p. 20; Bruce Alpert, “Transcript of President Obama’s Katrina Speech,” NOLA.com/Times-Picayune, August 28, 2015, http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/transcript_of_president_obamas.html.
23. Alan Borass, “Obama’s Decision on Denali Strikes a Blow for Decolonization and Respect,” Alaska Dispatch News, September 6, 2015, http://www.adn.com/article/20150906/obamas-decision-denali-strikes-blow-decolonization-and-respect.
24. David Smith, “12 Things We Learned from Obama’s Historic Trip to Africa,” The Guardian, July 31, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-trip-to-africa-kenya-ethiopia-2015-7.
8. Amazing Grace:
Obama’s African American Theology
1. Chris Cillizza, “This Was the Best Week of Obama’s Presidency,” Washington Post, June 26, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/06/26/this-was-the-best-week-of-obamas-presidency/; Eugene Scott, “Obama Describes ‘Best Week Ever,’” CNN, June 30, 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/30/politics/obama-best-week-ever-press-conference/; Nick Gass, “Barack Obama’s Best Week Ever (It Wasn’t Last Week),” Politico, June 30, 2015, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/obama-best-week-ever-marry-michelle-119594.html. In typically humorous and self-deprecating fashion, Obama, while acknowledging the historic character of the seven-day stretch, named three superior candidates for the best weeks of his life: when he married wife Michelle Obama, when his daughters Sasha and Malia were born, and when he scored twenty-seven points in a basketball game. For a fascinating portrait of Obama as hoopsman—as a figure whose identity basketball helped to shape, the same game that permitted him to impress his future wife and define himself as a political leader—see Alexander Wolff, The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015).
2. Less than a week after Dylann Roof, on June 17, killed the nine members of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston—known as the Emanuel 9—Governor Nikki Haley called, on June 22, for the South Carolina state legislature to remove the Confederate flag from its grounds; a little more than two weeks later, on July 9, she signed legislation for the flag to be removed, and it came down on July 10, 2015, at a little after 10:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. In calling for the flag to be taken down, Haley made an impassioned speech in which she stated, in part, that for many South Carolinians, “the flag stands for traditions that are noble. Traditions of history, of heritage, and of ancestry.
“The hate filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag. In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it. Those South Carolinians view the flag as a symbol of respect, integrity, and duty. They also see it as a memorial, a way to honor ancestors who came to the service of their state during time of conflict. That is not hate, nor is it racism.
“At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past. As a state we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints. We do not need to declare a winner and a loser here. We respect freedom of expression, and that for those who wish to show their respect for the flag on their private property, no one will stand in your way.
“But the statehouse is different and the events of this past week call upon us to look at this in a different way . . .
“But this is a moment in which we can say that that flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state. The murderer now locked up in Charleston said he hoped his actions would start a race war. We have an opportunity to show that not only was he wrong, but that just the opposite is happening.
“My hope is that by removing a symbol that divides us, we can move forward as a state in harmony and we can honor the nine blessed souls who are now in heaven.” “Transcript: Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Removing the Confederate Flag,” New York Times, June 22, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/22/us/Transcript-Gov-Nikki-R-Haley-of-South-Carolina-Addresses-Removing-the-Confederate-Battle-Flag.html. On July 10, 2015, the flag finally came down. See Richard Fausset and Alan Blinder, “Era Ends as South Carolina Lowers Confederate Flag,” New York Times, July 10, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us/south-carolina-confederate-flag.html.
3. Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer, African American Religion: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), pp. 10–11 [first edition published under the title African-American Religion in the Twentieth Century: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation]; Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), pp. 62–63.
4. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” College of Charleston, Charleston, S.C., June 26, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/06/26/remarks-president-eulogy-honorable-reverend-clementa-pinckney. For a brilliant reading of Obama’s eulogy, one that explores “Obama’s gifts of language and empathy and searching intellect,” and the use of those gifts “to talk about the complexities of race and justice, situating them within an echoing continuum in time that reflected both Mr. Obama’s own long view of history, and the panoramic vision of America, shared by Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as a country in the process of perfecting itself,” see Michiko Kakutani, “Obama’s Eulogy, Which Found Its Place in History,” New York Times, July 3, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/arts/obamas-eulogy-which-found-its-place-in-history.html. For another brilliant reading of Obama’s eulogy, one which says that by “singing a spontaneous congregational song at the end of a sermon—the traditional emotional apex of the ritualized event—Obama performed a familiar trope that united his immediate audience—mostly black church-goers—with their history, that joined himself to that history, and that staged social solidarity among the musicians and the singing congregation,” see Guthrie Ramsey, “Obama’s ‘Amazing Grace’ Is a Sign of Music’s Powerful Role in Black Churches,”The Guardian,June 30, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/30/obama-amazing-grace-charleston-eulogy.
5. Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Viking, 2010); Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Bernard E. Powers, Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822–1885 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999); Steve Estes, Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South After the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Thanks to Henry Louis Gates Jr. for suggesting that I probe this historical dimension of Charleston.
6. Peter H. Wood, “‘More Like a Negro Country’: Demographic Patterns in Colonial South Carolina, 1700–1740,” in Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 131–145.
7. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at a Campaign Event in Roanoke, Virginia,” July 13, 2012, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/13/remarks-president-campaign-event-roanoke-virginia.
8. See Libby Nelson, “The Confederate Flag Symbolizes White Supremacy—and It Always Has,” Vox Identities, June 22, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/6/20/8818093/confederate-flag-south-carolina-charleston-shooting.
9. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1949; repr., New York: Touchstone, 1995), pp. 44, 45.
10. When President Obama was on the Marine One helicopter flying from the White House to Andrews Air Force Base to take his flight to South Carolina for the funeral, he mentioned to White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and Mrs. Obama that he was thinking of breaking into song. “When I get to the second part of referring to ‘Amazing Grace,’ I think I might sing,” Jarrett recalls Obama saying to them. Her response was “Hmm,” while Michelle Obama pointedly asked, “Why on earth would that fit in?” President Obama replied: “I don’t know whether I’m going to do it, but I just wanted to warn you two that I might sing . . . We’ll see how it feels at the time.” Jarrett later said that she and the first lady eventually “both encouraged him to do whatever the spirit moved him to do.” After Obama sang and made a hugely positive impression, Jarrett wondered about the pauses. “So later I said to him, ‘Were you thinking about whether or not to sing?’ He said, ‘Oh no, I knew I was going to sing. I was just trying to figure out which key to sing it [in].’” Jarrett relayed the story at the 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival in a session with Walter Isaacson, the Aspen Institute president. See Peter Baker, “When the President Decided to Sing ‘Amazing Grace,’” New York Times, July 6, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/07/06/obamabaker/?_r=0; and Chuck Ross, “Valerie Jarrett Says Michelle Obama Was Skeptical of Husband’s Plan to Sing ‘Amazing Grace,’” Daily Caller, July 7, 2015, http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/07/valerie-jarrett-says-michelle-obama-was-skeptical-of-husbands-plan-to-sing-amazing-grace-video/.
11. As Liam Viney argues: “Obama sings a bit flat. Naturally, as a singer without formal training, who has had certain other things to attend to in recent years, he may have just not had the best singing technique. Intonation insecurity and dubiously executed melismata were balanced by an undeniable connection to African American musical culture. That flatness was very likely Obama channeling the blues.” Liam Viney, “Obama’s Amazing Grace Shows How Music Can Lift Oratory High,” The Conversation, June 30, 2015, http://theconversation.com/obamas-amazing-grace-shows-how-music-can-lift-oratory-high-44076.
12. See Albert Raboteau’s fine essay “The Chanted Sermon” in his book A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African American History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), pp. 141–151.