Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  WHAT YOU GOT TO SAY?

  While the politicians chased tail and posed for the cameras, graffiti, capitalist realism, and postmodernism had given Fairey the tools to play in the field of radical histories, to clown the business of icon-making while making money off it, and to be received as an artist who might have something to say. Now his work was taking a turn that belied his own public words.

  Fairey was making the largest works of his career. In his wall installations, he simulated the natural decay of the wheatpasted city wall surface the way that New Urbanist-influenced developers mimicked old Gothic, Craftsman, or Classical styles. He tore away posters to reveal layers of images and ideas. He textured backgrounds with Asian and Arabic floral designs or the filigrees found on paper money. Sometimes he printed his images on collaged paper dense with even more images, headlines, signifiers. He seemed to be reaching for a new language.

  He offered a pensive image of Malcolm X, a series of Arab and Asian women he called “Peace Women,” and most compellingly, remixes of Al Rockoff’s Vietnam War–era images in a series called “Duality of Humanity” (which he credited as a collaboration with the photographer). In the series—a clear critique of the Iraq war—Fairey slightly muted his bold Kruger palette, using deep reds, tans, and grays to contrast innocence and war.

  The mischief-maker had hit middle age, gotten married, and had kids. His wife and girls figured prominently in some of the peace images. Perhaps it was time to be serious about the world, and to be taken seriously.

  But many pieces felt visually crammed. The texts were too explicit about what the viewer was supposed to feel. It was as if Fairey wanted to obscure his sources more and at the same time be clearer about what he meant. But was he any clearer about what he meant? “Obey with Caution,” read a poster in which a woman threw her head back, grimaced, shut her eyes, and covered her ears. “Blind Acceptance Can Be Dangerous.” After almost two decades, what did he really want to say?

  Then along came Barack Obama.

  VISUALIZING HOPE

  A youth wave had coalesced around the Democratic senator who had introduced himself at the 2004 national convention by saying, “Let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.” By all standards, and in ways pundits and opponents would never let him forget, Barack Obama’s story was at odds with that of all the nation’s leaders who had come before.

  Born of a mother from heartland Kansas and a father from colonized Kenya, the biracial boy—which in America meant he was Black—had spent his childhood in Jakarta with an Indonesian stepfather and his teen years in Honolulu, Hawai’i; his college years searching for his true self with dalliances in student protests against apartheid and for faculty and student diversity; and had landed in the South Side of Chicago as a community organizer working the same deindustrialized streets that Saul Alinsky had.

  Obama seemed to embody reconciliation. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” Obama had said in that defining speech. “There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”

  When he announced his candidacy on a bitterly cold February 2007 day in Springfield, Illinois, he seemed a curiosity, if not a long shot. But by the end of the year, Obama had not only appeared on the cover of Time, but Vibe, GQ, and Esquire. He was, as DJ Kool Herc would have put it, the people’s choice.

  Yosi Sergant had grown up a Westside Jewish American b-boy, club kid, and graf writer who had gotten his first taste of peace activism at the University of Jerusalem on the eve of the Rabin assassination. A decade later, he was a self-described “couch activist” going nowhere in his tastemaker gig. After seeing Obama’s convention speech he decided to quit selling booze and cars, and volunteered for the campaign.

  But, Sergant said, the campaign was interested only in landing newspaper endorsements. He said, “That to me is not how you win the hearts and minds of youth.” Instead Sergant thought it would be better to engage street artists in reaching their audiences. When the campaign opened an office in Los Angeles in late 2007, Sergant brought his old friend Augustine Kofie to execute a six-panel graffiti mural.

  In October at a nightclub party Sergant threw, Fairey mentioned how intrigued he was by Obama. “Why haven’t you done anything?” Sergant asked. Fairey had doubts about his own effectiveness. “I wasn’t sure if my support would help Obama or brand him as fringe, since I’m a street artist who’s been arrested fifteen times,” he said. But he joked with Sergant about getting the campaign to enlist him in designing an official poster. Sergant went to the campaign staff. Weeks later, as the high-stakes primary showdown with Hillary Clinton on February 5 neared, the consensus came back—don’t bother waiting for an official OK, but go ahead.

  Fairey had done “Vote” posters in 2000 and 2004, less out of excitement for Al Gore or John Kerry or electoral politics than a duty to register his dislike of Bush. But Obama was different—an antiwar candidate sounding a politics of hope and a theme of unity. Inspired, Fairey decided he wanted to put together a poster for Obama as well. But this one would have to be different, something worthy of the candidate and his message.

  Fairey wanted to make an image that was Korda-esque, something that would convey, he later wrote, Obama’s “idealism, vision, and his contemplative nature.”12 Through a Google search, he found an AP photo that had been taken by self-described “wire guy” Mannie Garcia at an unremarkable April 27, 2006 presser on Darfur hosted by Sam Brownback and Obama at the Washington, DC Press Club.13 Garcia had actually been sent to capture George Clooney, and snapped 275 shots at the event.14 This one featured Obama sitting at a table listening to Brownback, as Clooney leaned forward to Obama’s right.

  Fairey’s eye may have been initially drawn by the fact that Obama’s head was perfectly framed by an American flag and a light blue scrim. But he also liked the direction of Obama’s gaze and the way the light cast shadows on his face. Fairey cropped the photo and tilted it slightly to the right. Now the candidate looked wise, open, even prophetic.

  Working quickly, he hand-cut his illustration into Rubylith, the screen-printing film in which he did much of his work, making four layers for each of the colors—navy blue, bright red, and two shades of light blue. Then he scanned the layers and made the final composition on the computer.15 The darkest shadows in the photo had been converted to the navy hue, the flag removed, and the background reduced to powder blue on the left and red on the right.

  He wanted, he later wrote, to “convey the idea of blue and red states, Democrats and Republicans, who are frequently in opposition, converging.” Fairey had encapsulated what would become the themes of Obama’s candidacy—discernment, unity, vision. He had colorized a Black-and-white man into red, white, and blue.

  The next day, on January 25, eleven days before Super Tuesday, Fairey posted this first image on his Web site. He had replaced the Obama campaign logo with his Obey star, and added text across the bottom: “Progress.” Paying out of his own pocket, he made arrangements to make 3,700 copies—350 to sell, 350 for the street, and 3,000 offset posters for campaigners. He offered the image on his Obey Web site for download, and five days later he began shipping the poster.

  Sergant and other staffers and volunteers were excited. But they came back to Fairey with a suggestion for a critical change. From the campaign’s point of view, Sergant said, “progress” sounded loaded, but “‘hope’ summarized the essence of the campaign.” Fairey wasn’t sure. “At first I thought maybe ‘hope’ was too much about thought and not enough about action,” he recalled. “But then I realized that without optimism people won’t act, so hope is the first step.”16

  Fairey took out the Obey logo, changed the tag from “progress” to “hope,” and altered the print run to feature the new image. As he worked, his wife was due any minute with their second daughter. Super Tuesday was only five days away, and a major rally at UCLA f
eaturing Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy was scheduled for Sunday morning. On his Web site, Fairey posted the redesigned Obama HOPE image. Then he gave Sergant some printed posters to take down to Pauley Pavilion.

  “I literally ran up and down, looking for where the cameras were. And I placed them behind Oprah’s head,” said Sergant. “All over the TV there were the HOPE posters behind Oprah and Caroline Kennedy. Front page of every newspaper the next day were the posters behind Oprah and Stevie Wonder.” By Monday night, the image had gone viral.

  Fairey’s first campaign on Andre the Giant had been a fluke, an inside joke. But this HOPE campaign had meaning, as if all of his work had crystallized in this singular moment. He later wrote,

  A lot of people thought it was ironic that I made an image directly supporting something, since I’ve encouraged people for years through my Obey campaign to question the visuals they’re confronted with and look at things more cautiously, but with the HOPE portrait I was very sincerely making propaganda to support Obama. I still encourage people to question everything, but irony is frequently a way to be noncommittal with views. Once you’ve examined things, it’s important to actually have a point of view that you’re willing to stand behind.17

  After the Super Tuesday primary, Shepard Fairey took the money he made from the limited-edition poster sales and plowed all of it into making more to be distributed to organizers across the country. He later estimated he had made about three hundred thousand posters and five hundred thousand stickers, the foundation for the largest grassroots street art mobilization in history.

  Fairey referred Sergant to Matt Revelli, the San Francisco Bay Area–based owner of a group of galleries and clothing, music, and furniture shops called Upper Playground, and the editor in chief of Juxtapoz magazine. Revelli’s $10 million business catered to the street art crowd, the kind unlikely to be found haunting Chelsea galleries. It reached the vibrant, lucrative youth underground where graffiti, tattooing, design, illustration, comics, and erotica came together.

  Revelli picked up the poster-selling business and both he and Sergant began asking street artists like El Mac, David Choe, the Date Farmers, and Morning Breath to make their own images. The projects generated perhaps a quarter of a million dollars, which went back into more production. Through commissions and contests, they vastly expanded the volume of images and content generated. Street teams and fans did the rest, blanketing the country with stickers and posters. The team also focused on purchasing billboards in areas they thought might be strategic to the campaign.

  Yet the operation had no formal connection to or coordination with the Obama campaign. They were working on passion and pots of coffee. “There was no one to get approval from. We were able to move with lightning speed,” Revelli said. “There was a certain freedom too because it financed itself.”

  By the time the Democratic convention had come to Denver in the late summer—where Fairey’s HOPE image was everywhere, not just on authorized or commissioned posters and building-size banners, but on bootleg T-shirts, buttons, and coffee mugs—the hottest party was the opening of the Manifest Hope pop-up gallery that the group had set up to accommodate the results of a national contest cosponsored by MoveOn.org, for which they had received more than a thousand entries.

  Irony, fun-ism, the outlaw impulse—all this was growing into something else. “I’m a populist. I’m trying to reach as many people as possible,” Fairey told National Portrait Gallery curator Wendy Wick-Reaves when it bought the poster for the collection. “I love the concept in fine art of making a masterpiece—something that will endure. But I also understand how short the attention span of most consumers is and that you really need to work with the metabolism of consumer culture a lot of times to make something relevant within the zeitgeist.”18

  The street artists had created a process that was driven not from the top down but from self-organized groups working up: street artists and graffitists steeped in the aesthetics of Maileresque self-advertising; entrepreneurial tastemakers working giant steps ahead of the brand marketers; DIY activists with guerrilla strategy and network power. Colorization meant in part the maturation of insurgent cultural energies.

  AFTER MOBY

  Perhaps it was finally time for colorization to hit mainstream national politics. In the late 1960s, Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips had famously predicted a Republican realignment, rooted in the cultural politics of racial reaction. But by the turn of the millennium, political scientist Ruy Teixeira and journalist John Judis were arguing that the demographic and political tide had finally turned toward an “emerging Democratic majority.” People of color, women, young people, and professional white voters, they argued, could form the basis of a new left-leaning coalition.

  Maybe all of this was nonsense—like old predictions of a permanent Republican majority. At any rate, most Democrats were far from ready to accept Teixeira and Judis’s argument. The Southern strategy loomed large over Clinton’s New Democrat agenda. What Cornell Belcher, a pollster who closely studied racial attitudes, called “the culture war realignment” had been so thorough that even Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton had worked within its framework.

  So-called centrism in the 1990s was about catering to the perceived needs of the ficklest white voters. These politics were rooted in a post-’68 critique of the party. New Democrats argued that Nixon had triumphed and the Republicans stayed ascendant because the party was pandering to its loud minorities: Blacks, women, antiwar liberals, and so on. To win, the party needed to escape “identity politics.”

  That was the theory. In practice, New Democrats were able to secure their agenda only through an increasingly unsustainable kind of identity politics, one that required the periodic Pequod hunt for the elusive undecided white voter. It was the political equivalent of losing the forest to count the trees. It was also a good reason for many Democrats to care so little about electoral politics. But through the late 2000s, it also amounted to the commonsense wisdom around electoral strategy.

  Primaries were about gaining momentum first in nearly all-white early-vote states like Iowa and New Hampshire. General elections were about honing in on the smallest groups of “swing voters” in a very narrow set of “swing states”—usually aging Rust Belt states where union power had been decimated, like Ohio and Pennsylvania, or gap states that had not yet tipped, like Florida or Nevada. But in the gap states, where Black, Brown, and youth populations were considered part of “the base,” most of the attention and resources went to the white exurbs. And in Rust Belt states, focus turned to “independent” white voters who might be attracted by repackaged conservative ideas and messages.

  Clinton’s pollster and strategist, Mark Penn, was a genius at applied market segmentation research and the master of this strategy. His book was called Microtrends: The Small Forces behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes. His job was to find demographic slices of undecided-but-likely-to-vote whites. He had in fact been the Christopher Columbus of soccer moms. His strategy was to bombard these niche voters with strong-on-crime or end-welfare-now messages until they voted blue.

  Penn was capable of poetry, as long as it was poll-tested. He had given Clinton what would become one of the president’s most famous phrases, “building a bridge to the twenty-first century,” after a sample of likely voters gave it the nod. When Penn took over Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2007, he wrote a memo to her about Barack Obama’s liabilities. In this instance he had probably not tested his ideas:

  All of these articles about [Obama’s] boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

  Save it for 2050.

  It also exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture [sic] are at best limited. I cannot imagine electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.19

  During the summer of
2008, as Obama was bodysurfing at Sandy Beach in Hawai’i, ABC pundit Cokie Roberts echoed Penn’s Ahab wisdom, saying Obama’s home vacation to that “foreign” place made him seem “a little bit more exotic than he perhaps would want to come across.”

  But days later, new census projections were released. They asserted that the United States might become majority-minority by 2042, eight years earlier than previously expected. The Brookings Institution followed with an estimate that under-thirties would reach that point in 2028, a single generation. Even the term “majority-minority” seemed stupid now. If everyone was a minority, then what did the word even mean anymore?

  One other development made it the perfect time to test a new theory of the party. In 2004, the Atwater protégé Karl Rove had engineered George W. Bush’s narrow reelection by tossing out the conventional wisdom that elections were won by appealing to the Big White Middle. Pre- and postelection polls had found Republicans were more fired up about reelecting Bush than Democrats were about electing John Kerry.20 So instead, the Bush campaign won by turning out their base, the Great White Right, thus introducing a new term into the political lexicon—“the enthusiasm gap.”

  By 2006 Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean was taking a page from Rove, unveiling a so-called fifty-state strategy that stirred anger among small-thinking New Democrats but put organizers and infrastructure in every state. That year the Democrats succeeded in winning back Congress. Now Obama’s state-to-state primary battle with Clinton had forced him to adopt a fifty-state strategy as well. When Clinton focused on white and Latino voters, Obama moved outside to bring in Black and young voters and build an enthusiasm gap. He prevailed.

  In the general election, Obama’s fundraising prowess could keep local organizations well-oiled and allow him to concentrate on swing states. But as the campaign staff looked at the map they realized that they could be competitive in many more states than just the traditional battlegrounds of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Blacks, youths, and “creative class”–types had put Bush states like North Carolina and Virginia into play. Latinos and independents might help flip Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, and Nevada. As Teixeira and Judis had predicted, demographic and economic shifts had indeed changed the game.