A well-groomed man perhaps in his late thirties reminded us from the chair where his thick beard was being seen to that Obama won in Iowa, which was 98 percent white, and that he was about to win in another state that was 98 percent white. He said that he was ashamed of David Paterson and Charles Rangel, “our elected black officials,” for not endorsing Obama, because no matter who got the nomination, the Democratic Party couldn’t win the presidency without the African-American community, and therefore it didn’t matter how angry at them for not supporting Senator Clinton during the primaries anyone might be down the road.
I was going to point out that Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV had come out for Obama, when an even younger man with a heavy Jamaican accent said from the chair where his head was being shaved that it all depended on how developed your racial consciousness was. This young man, the black sheet still tied around his neck, got up and preached about Obama’s readiness. I thought of the scenes in Richard Wright’s fiction that present the black barbershop as a place where black people reveal what they really think, because black barbershops are more private even than black bars. Denny Moe’s, at 133rd Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, with its polished tiles, pretty receptionist, and flat-screen TV for the playoffs, looked nothing like the small corner shop of my Midwestern youth, but it served the same function as a forum.
The Jamaican youth, exhorting the few patrons in the large shop, seemed to represent the increased percentage of the black population who are immigrants. The youngest barber on the premises looked as much Latino, Italian, or Arab as black, one of those newfangled American youths about whom you can’t guess anything, what nationality they are or where they’re from, until you hear them talk or they tell you. He dapped fists with the dark-skinned Jamaican youth. I felt I was seeing a new youth vote, not just a reinvigorated black vote. There was a woman barber who went about her work and didn’t join in. Because she was young, I wanted to assume that the OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT placard in the window spoke for her as well and that she would be annoyed or defiant if told that she was putting race before gender in supporting him.
In the past two presidential elections, black voters complained that they were taken for granted as the Democrats fought for the center ground, only to find in both contests that there was no center, just one side or the other. On the side that black people for the most part were on, all too many of them found not enough polling stations in their neighborhoods, employers unsympathetic to their willingness to miss work in order to stand for hours on line at what polling stations there were, and challenges to their registration, never mind the shame of the Florida and then the Ohio results. However, dread of what the other side is capable of wasn’t in evidence in my barbershop the afternoon of the New Hampshire primary, not even the mutterings that maybe “they,” whoever “they” are, will kill Obama if he goes too far. Instead, there was excitement, the sense that something historic was happening, that an unprecedented national narrative was taking shape.
I was struck by how far the story had moved since the autumn, when many were saying that Obama’s campaign had unraveled. Back then, Senator Joe Biden was derided for calling Obama “articulate” and “clean,” but George Will was speaking from the same assumptions and in a similar code when on a Sunday-morning talk show shortly after Christmas he called Obama a “great getting-up day in this country” because he wasn’t Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. Obama is the assimilated black, such commentators want to say, as if an assimilated black didn’t think about civil rights or, worse, as if civil rights were a narrow, passé issue. Meanwhile, Obama’s candidacy is somehow separate from the success of black athletes and independent of the trust Oprah Winfrey’s huge audience accords her. He is an expression of a general change, not the product of a star system.
He may not be identified with the Congressional Black Caucus, but his path has been prepared by the thousands of blacks elected to local, state, and national offices since the days of the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in 1972. Though, paradoxically, the low percentage of black people who register to vote has always been a frustration to political activists, black people have been visible in politics—and other professions—for a while. White America got used to black people turning up everywhere, except next door. Obama’s way may also have been prepared by a generation of black anchorpeople on local TV stations and years of hearing their mid-Atlantic accents.
People have been talking about the demonization of black youth since the introduction of harsh sentencing guidelines during the Reagan years, but it turns out that the nation had been absorbing another image of black people right alongside the lurid tales of gangs and guns. Because of affirmative action, the picture of America has changed. However unpopular it has been as public policy, affirmative action has succeeded in integrating the middle class. Obama is not exotic to white Americans. He is familiar, the really nice black guy who went to school with your son.
Though Obama has been praised by some for not making race an issue in his campaign, and for not coming off as the black candidate, his race most certainly is crucial to his broad appeal. Black people can appreciate as much as white people the inclusiveness of his mixed-race heritage and that his story is in part that of an immigrant. But this is not a color-blind election. People aren’t voting for Obama in spite of the fact that he is black, or because he is only half black; they are voting for him because he is black, and this is a whole new feeling in the country and in presidential politics. Forty years ago, Robert Kennedy was sharply criticized for saying that a black man probably could be elected president of the United States in fifty years’ time. “Victory tonight,” my barber, Mr. Sherlock, said as we shook hands.
Barack Obama was born in 1961, three years before the Freedom Summer of student sit-ins and nonviolent marches, when their political faith helped black Americans face down the power of white mobs, fire hoses, and sheriffs with dogs. We look back on those times as the innocent days before Black Power and FBI shoot-outs, when white allies were still welcomed in the struggle. Obama’s mother, a white, eighteen-year-old coed at the University of Hawaii, married its first African student, a Kenyan in his early twenties. When he went to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D. in economics, he left his wife and two-year-old son behind. After his return to Africa, he saw his son only once, when Obama was ten years old. He died when Obama was in his early twenties.
Obama’s quest for the meaning of his absent father’s life becomes a search for his own identity in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. First published in 1995, beautifully written, it is the story of his youthful disaffection and salvation through community organizing in Chicago. He describes his childhood and adolescence in Hawaii, where “there were too many races, with power among them too diffuse, to impose the mainland’s rigid caste system.” Hawaii had been interrupted by Djakarta, where Obama lived between 1967 and 1971, when his mother married again, to an Indonesian engineer who would teach him how to defend himself and how to change a tire. His stepfather’s brand of Islam accommodated elements of animism and Hinduism, but Obama understood in retrospect that the overthrow of Sukarno in 1965, and the massacre of Communists and ethnic Chinese, had changed his stepfather from the idealist his mother had met at the University of Hawaii to an incommunicative man intent on surviving in the new regime.
Unable to afford the International School in Djakarta and wary of the education he would get in the local schools, his mother eventually sent him back to his grandparents in Hawaii, to Punahou Academy, an elite prep school, where Obama encountered race in the form of white boys amused that his father was of the Luo tribe and a white girl who wanted to touch his hair. He distanced himself from the one other black student—“a part of me felt trampled on, crushed”—and in time was left alone, once the novelty of his presence had worn off, though his sense that he did not belong only increased. Before he left Indonesia, his mother had taken a job as an embassy secretary in order to pay for supp
lementary lessons for Obama from a U.S. correspondence course. She woke him at four every weekday morning to give him three-hour English lessons. Obama realizes that she, “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism,” kept alive his connection to America, to black America:
She would come home with books on the civil rights movement, the recordings of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King. When she told me stories of schoolchildren in the South who were forced to read books handed down from wealthier white schools but who went on to become doctors and lawyers and scientists, I felt chastened by my reluctance to wake up and study in the mornings.… Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne. To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.
This is reminiscent of Langston Hughes, who recalls in his autobiography that in the isolation of his Kansas childhood he was brought up on tales of racial heroism told to him by his grandmother, a widow of John Brown’s raid.
Where Hughes submerged himself in the urban Black Belt to come into contact with a black identity, Obama had a “color-coded” popular culture of television, film, and radio that offered him “an arcade of images” and styles to choose from. He played basketball “with a consuming passion.” He made white friends on the court and reminded his angry black friends that they weren’t “consigned to some heatless housing project in Harlem.” People were pleasantly surprised to meet a “well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”
He learned to slip back and forth between his black and white worlds, “understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.” Yet racial self-consciousness left him on edge. “There was a trick there somewhere, although what the trick was, who was doing the tricking, and who was being tricked, eluded my conscious grasp.”
He read Du Bois, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and concluded—as only a young man can—that each had ended his life exhausted and bitter. “Only Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me.” But in 1979 at Occidental College in Los Angeles he “stumbled upon one of the well-kept secrets about black people: that most of us weren’t interested in revolt; that most of us were tired of thinking about race all the time.” Yet when he remembers that a girl on campus from a multiracial background nearly cried when she said that black people were trying to make her choose sides, that it was black people who always made everything about race, he reflects that integration was a one-way street, that the minority always assimilated into the dominant culture, as though only “white culture” could be nonracial, neutral, and objective. “Only white culture had individuals.”
Because he didn’t want to be thought “a sellout,” he chose his friends from among politically active blacks and foreign students—Chicanos, Marxist professors, structural feminists, and punk rock performance poets discussing Fanon and patriarchy into the night. He had been involved in anti-apartheid and divestment campaigns but feared that he would always be an outsider. After two years in California, Obama transferred to Columbia University. While in New York, he received a call from Africa telling him that his father had died. Polygamous, his father had six other children by three different women (Obama’s mother had a daughter from her second marriage).
Dreams from My Father ends with Obama’s first journey to Kenya in 1987, as he is about to enter Harvard Law School. He tries to close the circle, and he writes movingly of his efforts to understand his father and how Kenya’s postcolonial politics nearly destroyed him. He was, as Obama’s half sister put it, punished by Jomo Kenyatta—dictatorial president of the new republic from 1964 until his death in 1978—for telling people “that tribalism was going to ruin the country and that unqualified men were taking the best jobs.” However, the heart of Obama’s book is about finding himself after his graduation from Columbia, as a community organizer in Chicago.
Obama heard Jesse Jackson speak at a rally on 125th Street, but he says he couldn’t figure out how to join Harlem life. He spent three months working for a Ralph Nader offshoot, trying to convince City College students of the importance of recycling. Unemployed, he heard Stokely Carmichael, a.k.a. Kwame Touré, speak at Columbia about a vague plan to build economic ties between Africa and Harlem, and it seemed to him that the movement was dead. Obama doesn’t say much about his New York experiences, but he gives the impression that he took a close look at the coke-addled, hedonist bazaar that Manhattan was for the young at the beginning of the Reagan era and knew it was not for him.
Obama confesses that in high school he found that pot, booze, or “a little blow” could sometimes push away nagging questions. Some critics have called Dreams from My Father almost naive in its candor, but few care about his drug use as an undergraduate. If anything, having brought up the subject, he would be scorned now had he not inhaled then. So many voters by now have similar casual histories, it is an acceptable rite of passage.
Obama corrected his course very quickly. What comes across in his touching memoir is not how lost he was, but how determined on the path to elected office he already was when writing his first book. It is the work of someone positioning himself, someone who understood instinctively Malcolm X’s autobiography as a conversion narrative in the American grain. In 1983, what Obama needed was community. On his third day in Chicago, he passed Smitty’s Barbershop on the edge of Hyde Park, and the laughter drew him in. They were talking familiarly, affectionately, about Chicago’s black mayor, Harold Washington, and how the white man tries to change the rules whenever a black man gets in power:
Clumps of hair fell into my lap as I listened to the men recall Harold’s rise. He had run for mayor once before, shortly after the elder Daley died, but the candidacy had faltered—a source of shame, the men told me, the lack of unity within the black community, the doubts that had to be overcome. But Harold had tried again, and this time the people were ready. They had stuck with him when the press played up the income taxes he’d failed to pay.… They had rallied behind him when white Democratic committeemen … announced their support for the Republican candidate, saying that the city would go to hell if it had a black mayor. They had turned out in record numbers on election night, ministers and gang-bangers, young and old.
Though he was young and hadn’t been in Chicago when Washington was elected mayor, he felt that the older men in the barbershop assumed he understood their feelings. He wondered if they would still have taken his understanding for granted had they known his history, had his maternal grandfather walked in. Obama says he heard in Smitty’s voice a fervor beyond politics. He and his customers weren’t just proud of Harold Washington, they were also proud of themselves. The election had given them a new idea of themselves, holding out the promise of “collective redemption.”
Harold Washington died suddenly, a few months after his reelection in 1987. His second campaign, Obama notes with interest, was very different from his first in that Washington “reached out” to old-time machine politicians, to the Irish and the Poles, “ready to make peace.” Businessmen sent him their checks, but some of his black supporters disapproved of “his willingness to cut whites and Hispanics into the action.”
Obama was at city hall the night Harold Washington’s coalition fell apart. Not long afterward, he received his letter of acceptance from Harvard Law School. He was gratified that, far from resenting his success, his coworkers, with whom he had shared early mornings, thankless meetings, and tiresome door-to-door canvassing on behalf of modest neighborhood and employment initiatives, accepted that he had other options. His mobility was a sign of their progress, but at least one of his colleagues was certain that Obama would return to Chicago.
Obama asked himself if this simple desire
for acceptance had been the reason for his coming to Chicago. He found an answer in the black church, at Trinity United Church of Christ, in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr.’s sermon “The Audacity of Hope”:
I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories—of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world.
He would take this newly discovered communal spirit to Africa, where he decided that what Africa most desperately needed was courage. He gives, as if from memory, the oral history of his father’s family on the banks of Lake Victoria, presumably as it was told to him, just as he earlier re-creates a fair amount of Reverend Wright’s sermon. Maybe some poetic license went into the recounting of so many conversations in Chicago’s projects and churches, but on the other hand, Obama comes across as someone who stored away for future consideration practically everything that was ever said to him, and who had a talent for watchfulness, part of the extraordinary armor he developed at an early age.
In Dreams from My Father, Obama makes it clear that his father’s absence left a hole and that the communal experience, working with and for others, went some way toward fulfilling him. He says that he wanted nothing less than to give black people that fervor about their lives that he saw them get from Harold Washington. He wanted them to get that feeling from him, the same feeling he got from them. The Reagan years in which he came of age were an era of individual advancement and collective decline for black people, he observes, and he’d learned “not to put too much stock in those who trumpeted black self-esteem as a cure for all our ills.” Politics are his solution.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 8