Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)
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When the general election season opened, an innovative Web infrastructure had already brought in two million grassroots donors and allowed seven million potential volunteers to organize themselves into what Obama strategist David Plouffe called his “persuasion army.” These tools would prove important. The surge of rising interest in the candidate—after such a punishing and divisive primary—also suggested that something deeper might be at work.
Perhaps the most surprising development of 2008 was the emergence of a small but incalculably influential group within the Obama persuasion army, one that didn’t even think of itself as partisan or even as a group—the street artists.
THE OCEAN MOVES
In politics, the artist had long been the romantic outsider of Kennedy’s rhetoric, or the committed cultural worker of Mao’s. But now it seemed that the artist was something else, a seer working in the future imaginary, capturing and gifting people with glimpses of possibility. The artist became key to an extraordinary cultural moment, when something abyssal and indefinable turned and the whole sea seemed to move.
Fairey’s image of hope had inspired thousands more. Once the picture of Obama had been transformed into red, white, and blue, it could be reimagined by tens of thousands of artists in full color, a field of blossoming dreams reaching toward the horizon.
Ron English made a series of oil paintings in which Lincoln morphed into Obama, history as redemption song. El Mac applied his trademark calligraphic strokes—influenced by French graphic novelist Moebius and indigenous tattoo arts—to create an Obama who looked resolute and canny, ready for the world. Jon-Paul Bail made screen-print shirts and posters portraying the candidate, his hair braided, earring blinging, and smiling behind gold fronts, over the words: “Barack Obama: Clean.”
Other pictures seemed even less tied to the moment of the election. Wheatpaste legend Robbie Conal pictured a smiling Obama with the words: “Climate Change.” The multicolored silhouettes of Marlena Buczek Smith’s “Unity” and the stretching, clasping brown and orange hands of Karla Mickens’s “Yes We Did” called back to 1968, summoning the Third World Liberation Front and the Situationists of the Paris Spring. Amy Martin’s HOPE poster featured a young mother lifting her daughter to catch butterflies.
The idea of creating images of Obama itself had gone viral. In Providence, recent RISD graduates Aaron Perry-Zucker and Adam Meyer had set up a Design for Obama Web site. Quickly, hundreds of images were uploaded, offered free by the artists for anyone to print out and use. Obama’s image was now connected to all kinds of histories, emotions, even to public policy ideas that the official campaign had never vetted. Art was overspilling the bounds of a mere election.
By the summer of 2008, John McCain’s campaign was surprised to find it was being forced not just to deal with the man himself, but the image of the man. They put out ads juxtaposing photos of him with those of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. They called him “the biggest celebrity in the world,” said his supporters were just “fans fawning over The One.”21 They had missed the point. As Angela Davis put it, Obama’s visage had become “a canvas onto which many of us are painting our desires and our dreams and our hopes.”22
As the fall began, a wave grew. Across the country, in big cities and small towns, an ocean of images was pouring forth. They were in windows, on telephone poles, at busy intersections, on people’s clothing and bodies. His likeness had unleashed one of the strongest currents of popular art-making since Franklin Delano Roosevelt had funded the Works Progress Administration and the Farm Security Administration art programs.
These pictures were not uniform and they were not random. They could not have bloomed as they did without a mass audience eager to see and affirm them. As the stock market plunged, the images seemed to circulate at an even swifter pace. The art campaigns had tapped something even deeper than the traditional political campaigns.
They were pictures of a new cultural majority, the proliferating projections of a colorized America. The multicultural avant-gardes of decades past had said they were not just about changing representation but changing America—lifting but not forsaking its burdens of history, encompassing the broadness of its present, staking a trust for the future. That was what they had meant by a radical diversity.
In these images were new hopes—that a new majority might forge the first consensus about race and nation since the civil rights movement had led to the passage of legislation around voting rights, immigration, and discrimination; that it might be built on the values of inclusion, opportunity, and diversity, and be bound together with the values of responsibility, reciprocity, and sustainability; that the nation might be able to harmonize diverse modes of expressing Americanness.
TWO SCENES
I
A year and a half after the climax of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver’s Mile High Stadium, the entertainer sat back and thought. He was trying to evoke the feelings he felt that evening—soaring joys that had come from deep wells of pain.
William “will.i.am” Adams had begun that storied evening backstage a mess, emotional and weeping. He looked into the mirror. He was seeing the public housing projects where he was raised—the two-story Estrada Courts in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles—where a 1978 mural by Congreso de Artistas Chicanos en Aztlán featured Che pointing like Uncle Sam straight at the young fathers and mothers pushing strollers and the kids kicking soccer balls, saying, “We Are NOT a Minority!!”
He was seeing his homies—Lalo, Coque, Joselito, Lil’ Georgie; the Mexican and Filipino guys he was bused away from in the morning to schools on the Westside. He was seeing his mother and the uncle who raised him, his grandmother and his grandmother’s grandma, a Mississippi slave.
“My brother’s in prison. My homeboy’s in jail for life. It just hit me like, Wow, we just some guys from the neighborhood. I was supposed to be written off,” he said. “No bitch tears. Those were the hardest tears ever. Hot lava tears.”
Then Will was onstage, before eighty-four thousand in the stands and millions more at their televisions, standing alongside John Legend and the Agape Choir on the world’s biggest stage to perform “Yes We Can”—a song that had never entered any charts but that the audiences already knew the words to, because they were Obama’s. When the song was done, Will looked out across the crowd, people of all faiths, colors, and generations gathering in rapt anticipation as the sun set over the snow-capped Rockies, and bit his lip to keep from crying again.
Back in his studio he came up with a chorus for the new song he was writing. “I got a feeling,” he sang to himself, “that tonight’s gonna be a good night.”
II
As the campaign built to its November climax, Charles Stone III decided to reunite his “Whassup?” friends for a new video.
He opens this one with a shot of himself sitting on a plastic chair in the apartment. His hair has grayed. He looks wan and tired. He has the classifieds in hand and moving boxes are scattered through an empty room. He watches McCain give his acceptance speech at the Republican convention and shakes his head. The wonder years are over.
He gets a call from Paul—who has shaven his Afro, his bald head now sitting beneath sand goggles and a combat helmet. Paul is calling from a payphone next to a rubble-strewn house. Helicopters kick up dust.
“Whassup B?”
“Nuttin’. Lost my home. Looking for a job. Whassup with you?”
“Still in Iraq. Watching my ass.”
“True. True.”
Fred walks in and drops a box. His neck is in a wrap, his arm in a cast. He needs painkillers. Really, he needs health insurance. Where’s Dookie? Staring at the screen of his laptop watching his stocks tumble. He gets up on a chair and prepares to hang himself. Maurice buzzes from outside. He is screaming, getting blown away by the force of the hurricane raging outside. The “Whassaaaaaaaaaa’s” have become cries of pain. Dookie’s rope rips out the ceiling plaster and he tumbles to the
floor.
“So, whassup B?”
Stone looks at the TV, as Barack and Michelle face the convention crowd, tickertape and confetti raining down. He smiles.
“Change, that’s whassup. Change.”
The screen goes black. “True,” it says.
“Change,” it says. “Vote.”
MINORITY’S END
Obama’s candidacy had advanced on images of hope and reconciliation. And then, after a summer of seesawing polls, the housing bubble popped and global markets began to unravel under the weight of their moral hazards. Suddenly there was a shared crisis.
The wave broke on November 4, 2008, giving Obama a record-breaking 69 million votes, 365 electoral votes, 28 states—including three, sociologist Douglas Massey noted, of the former Confederacy.
Under-forty-fives overwhelmingly voted for Obama. And, continuing the turnaround begun in 2004, young people, Latinos, Asian Americans, and gays voted for Obama at or above 2–1 margins.23 Almost every African American voter chose Obama. Young Blacks, in particular, registered both the highest increase in youth turnout since 2000 (almost 20 percent) and the highest rate of any racial youth group ever recorded (58 percent).24
Over-sixty-five-year-olds went overwhelmingly for McCain. Baby boomers split down the middle.25 White voters went for McCain by 55 percent to Obama’s 43 percent. Their enthusiasm was decidedly low; their turnout rate actually declined.26 Only young whites gave Obama their vote, joining the new cultural majority.27
Change had come. But exactly what kind? The incoming tide of racial change had once driven white pundits into panic and hysteria. But were those fears dissipating like a threatening line on the ocean’s horizon that merely washes into the sand?
Obama had presented himself to whites as conciliatory. In his famous race speech in March he had refused to “disown” either his former Reverend Jeremiah Wright or his white grandmother. “Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper,” he said. “Let us find that common stake that we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.”
The social psychologist Claude Steele wrote, “In [Obama’s] example, identity wasn’t a source of balkanization and threat; it was a source of wisdom about the challenges of a complex and diverse society that ultimately made him the most suitable person to lead such a society. To the surprise of all, perhaps, it was his stress on identity, not his suppression of it, that made him a symbol of hope.”28
Andrew Sullivan, as the young editor of the New Republic in the mid-1990s, had instigated a famous culture-war battle by championing Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s dubious, neo-eugenicist “Bell Curve” theory that suggested Blacks and Latinos were less intelligent than whites and more susceptible to crime, poverty, illegitimacy, and unemployment. But now Sullivan was recanting, in a way.
At the end of 2007, in a cover story for the Atlantic called “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters,” Sullivan praised Obama for representing “both an affirmation of identity politics and a commitment to carving a unique personal identity out of the race, geography, and class he inherited.” He argued that Obama might be the bridge to the twenty-first century that Hillary’s husband had talked about. Sullivan wrote:
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq … but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.29
Pundits like Sullivan were especially invested in Obama’s racial symbolism. He would be their redemption—proof that the past was past, that we were all post-racial now.
But if the election had made clear that no one could postpone thinking about colorization until 2050, it also revealed again a cultural polarization. Pollster Cornell Belcher told the reporter Marc Ambinder that even white voters most concerned about the economy voted for Obama in much smaller numbers than they had for Bill Clinton in 1992—a nearly 20 percent difference. He said, “You can’t look at that swath of hard-red counties that actually grew even redder and say that we are post-racial.”30
Perhaps, as journalist Ann Friedman put it, all politics were identity politics—all politics emerged from that space between appearance and perception.31 And maybe, in fact, most of what politics had to say in this moment was about who we were rather than who we could be.
Hua Hsu concluded, “This moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was a bridge and we crossed it.” He asked the question that still seemed unanswerable: “What will the new mainstream of America look like, and what ideas or values might it rally around?”32
Perhaps that task was wholly beyond politics, and the answers would have to emerge from the culture—where the clash between colorization and restoration would rage again.
From Staying Cool, published 1974. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.
The Racial Dot Map of Tucson, Arizona, based on 2010 Census data reveals both racial integration and continuing segregation. Blue dots represent whites, green dots represent African Americans, red dots represent Asian Americans, yellow dots represent Latinos, and brown dots represent Native Americans/Multiracial/Other populations. Image Copyright, 2013, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia (Dustin A. Cable, creator).
CHAPTER 14
DIS/UNION
THE PARADOX OF THE POST-RACIAL MOMENT
Screw Diversity, Celebrate Excellence
—A post-millennial bumper sticker
Race was an inescapable text of Obama’s triumph.
In an extraordinary concession speech, Senator John McCain turned his Arizona crowd’s boos at the mention of Obama’s name to applause when he said, “A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and frightful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African American to the presidency.”
How far had we come? Polls taken shortly after Obama’s inauguration found a striking new optimism around race relations. Harvard sociologists Lawrence Bobo and Alicia Simmons asked whether Americans believed Blacks had achieved racial equality. More than four in five whites believed they had or would soon. A much smaller plurality— 53 percent—of Blacks agreed, but this majority seemed significant.1
A few months later, University of Chicago political scientist Cathy Cohen asked the same question of young people aged fifteen to twenty-five. Seventy-eight percent of young whites believed Blacks had achieved racial equality or would soon. A similar proportion of Latinos agreed. Black youths mirrored their elders’ more cautious hope.
Cohen also asked the youths if they felt racism was still a major problem. Here the break was clearer. Sixty-eight percent of Black youths and 58 percent of Latinos said yes. But 67 percent of whites said no.2 The new generation—more culturally desegregated than any previous American one—was already showing the same divides over questions of race as their elders.
Other divides seemed to be emerging. Smaller numbers of each group believed Latinos had achieved or would soon achieve racial equality. When youths were asked if they felt like “full and equal citizens,” 69 percent of whites and 55 percent of Blacks answered yes. But only 39 percent of Latinos felt the same way. Perhaps the 2007 collapse of congressional immigration reform efforts had made them pessimistic.
Still Obama’s victory seemed to point toward a new conversation about race. Majorities of whites, Blacks, and Latinos told the Gallup Poll both before the election and again in the fall of 2009 that they believed an open, honest discussion might improve race relations.3
But how would that discussion begin? And wh
ere would it go? Nothing captured the optimism and confusion of the moment more than the word most often used to describe it—“post-racial.”
THE NEW CONFUSION
The most successful ad campaign of 2009 starred Isaiah Mustafa, a strikingly handsome Black man, in a set of commercials for Old Spice shower body wash called “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.”
Studies had shown that women made 70 percent of all body wash purchases, so Mustafa, acting as “The Old Spice Guy,” began his ads with a hearty “Hello ladies!” In a deep, almost Shakespearean baritone, he pattered on about how attractive he was. He began the ad wearing only a towel and—through set changes that took him quickly from the shower to a yacht to a white horse—he remained half-naked.
The ad went stupendously viral. Its runaway Internet popularity caused the corporate giant Procter & Gamble to commission 185 more video clips featuring the Old Spice Guy responding directly to tweets, posts, and e-mails from fans. The videos garnered hundreds of millions of YouTube views. In all of them Mustafa appeared shirtless.
Katie Abrahamson, a spokesperson for Wieden+Kennedy, the same agency that pioneered the Spike Lee/Michael Jordan ads for Nike in 1988, denied that Mustafa was cast based on his race. “The truth of the matter is, Isaiah was one of hundreds who auditioned for the spot in a standard casting-call and was simply the best performance and overall best fit for the creative idea—it had nothing to do with the color of his skin,” she said. “The challenge was finding someone who would appeal to both genders.”
But did the ad execs really believe that? The witty, de-Ebonicized, confident, but far from threateningly confident Old Spice Guy looked like he had ridden his white horse right out of David Ligare’s painting Areta. He recalled no one so much as Obama himself, who when the paparazzi captured him in some pre-inauguration bodysurfing at Sandy Beach in Hawai’i, appeared shirtless on a news tabloid cover above the headline: “FIT FOR OFFICE: Buff Bam Is Hawaii Hunk.”4