The Making of African America

Although centuries of movement had made and remade African and African American life, few Americans—certainly few black Americans—expected that the Immigration and Nationality Act would have a similar impact on African American life. While black leaders rejoiced at the passage of the Civil Rights Act, they paid little attention to immigration reform. In the decade following the passage of the new law, little happened to alter their response. Even as the number of black immigrants increased during the 1980s, African Americans viewed the new arrivals with a mixture of indifference and suspicion. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the changing demography of black life could no longer be ignored. The large-scale mixing of diverse peoples of African descent, some newly arrived and some deeply rooted in this country, once again began to remake the way African Americans saw themselves collectively. The old story of movement and rootedness was about to play itself out yet once again.

As hip-hop reverberated from boom boxes and then iPods, the presence of black immigrants began to have a more influential role in the politics and culture of African America. At first, newcomers focused on access to visas, the treatment of asylees, and other matters that revealed a greater preoccupation with their old homelands than their new one. However, in late 2006, with the beginning of the American presidential campaign, that changed dramatically. Suddenly, the immigrants’ presence loomed large, as the newly arrived found a candidate who not only looked like them but shared many of their experiences.²

Barack Obama’s father did not arrive in the United States under the new legislation, and his son was born prior to the historic reform of civil rights and immigration. However, Barack came of age in a society shaped by the changes initiated by those two laws. The interplay between them propelled him to a position that suggested how the fourth great migration had begun to redefine the lives of African Americans, and then American life, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. New circumstances demanded a new narrative.

Like the children of immigrants in passages past, Barack Obama struggled to define a sense of self. In his autobiography, he reveals his complex genealogy, his peripatetic childhood, and the discovery that he “needed a race” as he mapped the multiple meanings of blackness between Jakarta and Nairobi until finding his own African American self on the South Side of Chicago.³ As the interplay of movement and place that had made and remade African American life in the past again reshaped lives of black men and women, Obama—like others who shared his experience—became an exemplar of the remaking of African American society and its history.

In 1991, returning to Chicago with a Harvard law degree and ambitions aplenty, Obama gravitated to the Democratic Party, which recently elected a Democratic mayor and which dominated that city’s African American politics much as it did the nation’s at large. He played a small role in a voter registration drive during the 1992 election and began “constructing a political identity for himself.” Four years later, drawing on his record as a community organizer, Obama won a Democratic seat in the Illinois state senate, where he gained a reputation as a political comer.

But as Obama attempted to expand his political reach, he found that his immigrant origins confounded his ambitions. In 2000, he challenged Bobby Rush, the Democratic incumbent representing South Side Chicago, for his seat in the House of Representatives. Obama identified Rush, a former Black Panther who had recently been defeated in the Democratic mayoral primary, with “a politics that is rooted in the past.” Rush, who had spent his life in Chicago, happily conceded the point. He advertised his own place as a founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and dismissed Obama as an outsider with a strange lineage, a foreign upbringing, a peculiar name, and little knowledge of the African American experience. “Barack Obama went to Harvard and became an educated fool,” Rush informed his constituents. “Barack is a person who read about the civil rights protests and thinks he knows all about it.” Others were even more direct. “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community,” asserted one South Side politico. Many believed the charge to be self-evident. Rush crushed the newcomer, winning reelection by a two to one margin.⁴

By 2004, Obama had recovered from defeat, redoubled his ambitions, and declared his candidacy for the United States Senate. His black Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, drawing a lesson from Rush’s victory, sought to undercut Obama’s support within the black community by counterposing his family’s roots in the slave South to Obama’s peculiar lineage.⁵ This time Obama was ready, demonstrating his rootedness not only by rehearsing his community service but also by his choice of recreation—pickup basketball.

Obama dispatched Keyes but not the concerns Keyes had raised about Obama’s relationship to the historic African American experience. When Obama announced his presidential bid, the issue exploded on the national stage. Stanley Crouch, a combative African American music critic and syndicated columnist who sounded more like the nativist Henry Cabot Lodge of another era, reiterated Keyes’s campaign screed—“lived the life of a black American”—in a manner that soon found its way to the front page of the New York Times, Newsweek, and other like venues. Is “Obama really black?” asked Crouch in a manner that anticipated his answer. “Other than color, Obama did not—does not—share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves. So when black Americans refer to Obama as ‘one of us,”’ Crouch concluded, “I do not know what they are talking about.”⁶

The question of whether Obama was “black enough” soon reverberated across the Internet as bloggers of all persuasions seized the issue; simultaneously, the debate animated neighborhood barbershops and beauty parlors.⁷ While some fixated on matters of Obama’s mixed racial origins, class standing, and elite education, in his broadside Crouch kept the focus on the increasingly tangled relations between African Americans and the newly arrived people of African descent. As yet another commentator described it, “In such distinctions between black immigrants and African Americans lay buried a history of competitive intraracial tensions and cultural differences that have never been resolved.”⁸ Again, the tensions that once played out between Africans and creoles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between old-timers and newcomers in the nineteenth-century black belt, and between Old Settlers and the new middle class in the twentieth-century urban North were manifesting themselves, although this time for a national audience.

Debra Dickerson, a journalist whose work explores matters of African American identity, drew the lines even more sharply. “ ‘ Black,’ in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics. At a minimum, it can’t be assumed,” she insisted with mind-chopping logic, “that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won’t bother to make the distinction. They’re both ‘black’ as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black, as we use the term.”⁹

Parsing the differences between Nigerian cabdrivers and third-generation residents of Harlem was no idle matter, for, at base, Dickerson saw them as central to the very meaning of the African American experience and who would define it. “We know a great deal about black people,” Dickerson observed in defining the intraracial struggle. “We know next to nothing about immigrants of African descent (woe be unto blacks when the latter groups find their voice and start saying all kinds of things we don’t want said).”¹⁰

Much the same could be noted of immigrants of African descent from other parts of the world. Louis Chude-Sokei, a professor of literature at the University of California, whose mixed Nigerian and Jamaican origins suggest that he may have heard those voices of woe and hence understood the matter precisely as had Dickerson. “As the numbers of black immigrants and their progeny grow to challenge the numerical supremacy of the native black minority, can a challenge to African Americans’ cultural dominance, racial assumptions and politics be far behind?”¹¹

Obama eventually defused the controversy over whether he was black enough. Reiterating the traditional American measure of race, he pointed to the inexorable function of the one-drop rule. “When I leave this interview and go out on the street and attempt to hail a taxi,” Obama told television interviewer Charlie Rose, “there is no question who I am.”¹²

But Dickerson had already conceded that litmus test—“a cop won’t bother to make the distinction.” While the fealty of cabdrivers and policemen to the one-drop rule may have satisfied the “rank-and-file black voters”—“as long as Obama acts black and does us proud”—it did nothing to satisfy Dickerson and perhaps others, except to confirm that such men and women were “no less complicit in this shell game we’re playing.”¹³

The shell game—the shifting meaning of blackness under the cover of the persistence of race—had been played in mainland North America at least since John Rolfe purchased those “twenty Negars.” It had hardly ended at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Obama’s struggle “to raise myself to be a black man in America” spoke precisely to the reality that the millions of other black immigrants and children of immigrants had confronted and continue to confront. After graduating from Columbia University, Obama took his search for groundedness to Chicago, with its charismatic black mayor, and began a job as an organizer in a dilapidated Chicago housing development. Later he joined an African American church and married into a family with deep roots in the city and, beyond that, in the slave south. Obama had found his place; he was rooted, finding in Chicago “a vision of black life in all its possibilities, a vision that filled me with longing—a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history.”¹⁴

Obama, in short, had moved beyond the blood quotient of the one-drop rule to the ideological terrain upon which race had always rested. But in convincing some that he was black enough, Obama had become too black for many white Americans. While the suspicions of some white Americans—along with his own electoral successes—affirmed Obama’s racial credentials in the eyes of black Americans, his new position required a fuller, more public explication of race. He found the occasion in quelling the firestorm created by the angry racial musing of his pastor.

In Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia in March 2008, his tone was philosophical and his subject historical as he unraveled the American dilemma from the site where three centuries earlier the Founding Fathers had drafted their call for a more perfect Union. Obama emphasized that the Union created with the ratification of the Constitution had never been perfect but “a union that could be and should be perfected over time.” Thus the nation, like himself, was made and remade.¹⁵

Beginning with the “nation’s original sin of slavery,” Obama traced the American struggle through the “successive generations... [of] protest and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience—and always at great risk—to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.” Obama thus retold the tale of the “long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.” It was a progressive tale, which conceded past errors but celebrated “the greatness and the goodness” of the American people.¹⁶

Obama’s remarks on race were politically astute as well as historically informed. In placing the question of race within the familiar confines of the master narrative of African American history, he then found his own place in the story as the “son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas... raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners,” Obama continued, “an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.”¹⁷

In reiterating the story spanning from slavery to freedom Barack Obama affirmed his place in the long course of African American history. He was at one with the Africans who had crossed the Atlantic in the Middle Passage, with Frederick Douglass, for whom a slave “was pegged down to one single spot,” with the African Americans who had crossed the continent and whose children Booker T. Washington advised to “cast down your bucket,” and with Martin Luther King, Jr., whose “arc of justice” always bent toward freedom.

But even as Obama retold the story of slavery to freedom, he too had lived the story of movement and place. The contrapuntal narrative—fluidity and fixity, routes and roots—began with the Middle Passage and continued through the massive migrations that propelled peoples of African descent across the continent, first from east to west and then from south to north, and finally the diaspora which brought Obama’s father and millions of others to American soil.

Each of these titanic passages had created major discontinuities in the lives of black men and women. They broke families, impoverished peoples, despoiled communities, and produced worlds of oppression and exploitation that wore on self-worth and promoted the most heinous inhumanity. Yet these same migrations also promoted hope, opportunity, and life. They forged new families, strengthened peoples, and promoted mutuality and reciprocity and revealed the best of human qualities. They produced new expectations and institutions, at once altering the migrants’ material world and moral sensibility and setting the ground for a creative cultural explosion. In remaking African American life blackness was redefined both for the enslaved, and later for the free. What had been true in the seventeenth century was also true in the twenty-first.

The same can be said of place, which, after all, was a product of movement. As a people often forced to be on the move, black men and women developed a firm attachment to place. They became, in succession, the archetypal agriculturalists, with a deep knowledge, appreciation, and love of the land, and then the quintessential urbanites, with a streetwise understanding of city life. A love of locality celebrated—by turns—Africa, the South, and the inner city, which became the stock in trade of a succession of black artists who wrote, painted, photographed, and sang about the particular places that were at the heart of the black experience. Frederick Douglass’s postemancipation return to the eastern shore of Maryland and the Great House Farm, Booker T. Washington’s visit to the mines of Malden in West Virginia, the reverse migration of thousands of immigrants to the rural South, and the swelling number of heritage tourists who pilgrim to the Door of No Return all reflect the hold of place on African American life.

The cumulative impact of the repeated interplay between movement and place has required continued innovation in black society: movement set loose the creative impulse and place gave it a platform to develop. Over the course of four centuries, cultural innovation—in language, cuisine, rhetoric, theology, music—became the signature of the African American experience. The repeated reinvention of self and society created patterns of expression that prized the originality of an Edisto Island spiritual, a Bessie Smith blues, a John Coltrane riff, or an LL Cool J rap. Looking backward while moving forward, black people created a society with a deep reverence for what was as well as an obsessive concern for what would become. Memories of what had been done to them as well as of what they had done for themselves helped to create a sense of peoplehood.

The transformation of peoples of African descent was about more than an exchange of bib overalls for a zoot suit, for with it came new meanings of blackness. The definition of race has changed even as the concept may seem impervious to alteration. Some of the new meanings had been foisted upon unwilling subjects by white slave masters, planter-merchants, xenophobic politicos, or well-meaning reformers. But in a more important sense, it was black people themselves who did much of the making, refusing to be the product of others, no matter what their power or intentions. The repeated reinvention of self created new identities, as newcomers became Americans.

As a representative of the most recent passage—the renewed diaspora of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Barack Obama embodies the collective experience of those who have journeyed, found new places, and constantly remade themselves—as well as African American life and, with it, the nation. Obama—like so many before him—articulated the master narrative of slavery to freedom. But, also like many before him, he has lived the narrative of movement and place. His experience—like theirs—suggests the utility of the new narrative.

The conjunction of the two great histories returns me to my memorable discussion with the group of black Americans for whom the Emancipation Proclamation was part of a great history—even a heroic history—but not their history. Like previous new arrivals, they are remaking African American life by combining their own histories with the histories they inherited in a new land. How and when it happens will be a new chapter in the story of African America.