by Keith Boykin
In some areas, Bush did move in a slightly more compassionate direction during his presidency, but his party—and, perhaps, his own instincts—would only allow him to go so far. He called for an end to racial profiling in his first address to Congress in 2001, but a bill to do so garnered little support after the 9/11 attacks. Instead, in 2003, Bush issued vague “policy guidance” on racial profiling in federal law enforcement that was so filled with exceptions that the American Civil Liberties Union condemned it as “little more than rhetorical smoke and mirrors.” He also signed a controversial prescription drug bill for Medicare, but he created no funding mechanism to pay for it, thus blowing a hole in the deficit that would encourage Republicans to call for other vital government programs to shrink. And his crowning achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act, which tried to reform American education by raising standards and imposing rigorous testing requirements, had to be replaced a dozen years later due to teacher and parent complaints of too much testing. By 2015, a report from the Council of the Great City Schools found that students took an average of 113 standardized tests between prekindergarten and twelfth grade. And despite all that testing, the racial achievement gaps barely budged. The math and reading gaps for African American and Latino students actually “shrank far more dramatically before No Child Left Behind—when policies focused on equalizing funding and school integration, rather than on test scores,” former Mother Jones education correspondent Kristina Rizga wrote at the time.
Given the circumstances in which the Bush presidency ended, it would be hard to argue that Black Americans were better off when he left office than when he was inaugurated. During Bush’s two terms, Black unemployment climbed from 8.2 percent in January 2001 to 12.7 percent in January 2009. Black homeownership rates declined. Black wealth disappeared. Thousands of Black soldiers were killed or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. And President Bush’s signature law, the No Child Left Behind Act, did little to eliminate the achievement gap between Black and white students. The “soft bigotry of low expectations” that Bush decried in 2000 turned out to be more of an apt description for his own administration than for the problems facing Black Americans.
Of course, the Bush years were defined by a series of unanticipated tragedies—the September 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the response to Hurricane Katrina—but as his presidency came to a close, one more final tragedy loomed on the horizon. In September 2008, an economic crisis, caused by risky investments in America’s housing market, forced some of the nation’s leading financial institutions to collapse. Investors were shocked. Stocks plummeted. Trillions of dollars in market value vanished overnight. Housing prices tanked. Automobile manufacturers slashed their workforces and threatened to close down for good. And US companies laid off millions of workers in a matter of months.
Only under these dramatic conditions, after the worst terrorist attack in American history; after two long, deadly, and costly wars; after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; after thousands were killed in Hurricane Katrina; after the beginning of the worst recession since the Great Depression, did America finally elect a Black president.
7
BARACK OBAMA’S UNRECIPROCATED OPTIMISM
I was a first-year student at Harvard Law School when I walked into a campus building one afternoon ready to shake things up. I had come to participate in a student-organized vigil for campus diversity that was taking place outside a faculty meeting in Pound Hall. At the end of the meeting, while we stood at attention silently holding our signs outside the door, our law school professors walked out of their room and awkwardly filed past us. A few quietly signaled their support with smiles and warm gestures. Others simply ignored us. Then came the dean of the law school, his face directed toward the ground as though urgently watching his feet move each step along the way. He walked right by me, escorted by a school security official.
I had never met Dean Clark before, and I had only seen him once or twice on campus. My only real memory of him was that he had given a disappointing welcome speech to my class of first-year students a few weeks earlier, in which he seemed to suggest that our principal role as lawyers would be to grease the wheels of commerce and that we should not be ashamed to seek high-paying corporate law firm jobs. This advice seemed to contradict the values of Dean Pound, the namesake of the building in which we stood, who wrote in the Notre Dame Law Review in 1944 that the legal profession should be “guided by something better than the desire for money rewards.”
I subscribed more to Dean Pound’s view of the legal profession than to Dean Clark’s. Inspired by a line I read years earlier in my college brochure that emphasized students who will make a “significant, positive impact on society,” I resented the message of unrepentant careerism that Dean Clark seemed to push. And, thus, at that moment when I stood with my classmates at the faculty vigil, I felt as though the dean had purposely slighted our group by failing to acknowledge our presence, and I launched into an unscripted outburst.
“Hey Dean Clark, why don’t you come back and talk to us?” I shouted.
There was no reply. The dean did not even acknowledge the question. I asked again, more loudly than before.
“Hey, why don’t you come back and talk to us?” I yelled.
Still, the dean ignored me and kept walking toward the door.
At this point, something inside me was so offended by what I perceived to be a brush-off, that I decided in that moment to take action, stepping out of the carefully prepared script for the event.
I picked up my backpack, swung it over my shoulder, placed my protest sign under my arm, and marched toward the dean as he approached the door. Unbeknownst to me, other students in the protest had also begun to follow me toward the door. I suppose that is what startled the dean and his security escort, because something unexpected happened next. When he saw us coming toward him, the dean of the Harvard Law School bolted out the door and began sprinting across the campus to get away from us.
I was shocked. I had never expected him to flee, and I had no idea where he was going or what would happen next. But I knew this was a moment not to be missed. I had run on the varsity track teams in my high school and college, and I was not afraid of a good race. With my backpack still swinging on my shoulder, I caught the door leading out of Pound Hall and chased the dean across the campus. As he approached the International Law Center, he lifted his hands to hide his face from the photographers who were covering the event. I continued yelling right behind him as he moved past the west wing of Langdell Hall and retreated into the lower level of the school’s administration building at Griswold Hall. The campus security officer then blocked us from entering. We were unable to corner the dean, and I had no idea what I would have said to him if I had caught up with him, anyway. But as a tuition-paying student in the law school, I believed the dean had a duty to acknowledge and address our concerns. And simply by forcing the law school’s top administrator to flee from us, we had put the institution on notice that we would not be ignored.
The media played its part in amplifying that message, too. On this particular occasion, one of the media outlets we had invited to cover our protest was the Boston Globe, and the next day a story appeared in the metro section of the newspaper. Along with it was a photo. There I was, in black and white, chasing the dean of the Harvard Law School across the campus as he covered his face in embarrassment.
It was a time of intense controversy on campus, when faculty members, divided by politics, openly fought with one another in the pages of the New York Times and Boston Globe. One of Harvard’s first Black professors, Derrick Bell, had just taken a leave of absence to protest the school’s failure to hire a woman of color. That was the point of our vigil that day—to advocate for greater diversity in the faculty that taught us. While the student population had become increasingly representative of the larger population of the country, the faculty lagged behind
in diversity.
It was in that environment that I had joined an organization called the Harvard Coalition for Civil Rights, whose goal was to push the law school to hire more women, people of color, and other highly qualified candidates from underrepresented groups. The coalition consisted of seven different student affinity organizations—representing Black, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, women, LGBTQ students, and students with disabilities—united for a common purpose. We conducted teach-ins, distributed literature, and held a one-day classroom strike to protest the lack of diversity. But after the faculty meeting incident, we escalated our tactics. We took over the dean’s office twice, sitting on the floor and demanding that the dean meet with us and take action to hire women and people of color. We even tried to take over the university president’s office, but we were blocked at the door when someone tipped off the staff that we were coming. The law school never budged. Finally, we tried the one action we thought Harvard Law School would understand—we took them to court.
In my second year of law school, I joined with ten other students to file a lawsuit against Harvard University for discrimination in the selection of the law school faculty. We argued the case ourselves as students, all the way up to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The court ruled against us because we did not have the legal standing to bring the suit as students. Although our tuition dollars helped pay the salaries for the professors who taught us, Harvard’s lawyers described us as mere incidental third-party beneficiaries of the relationship between the school and the faculty. The justices agreed, and although we lost our case in the court of law, we won in the court of public opinion by forcing the institution to defend its abysmal hiring record to the nation.
At some point during the campus diversity movement, I kept hearing about a student with a slightly unusual name. He was in the graduating class ahead of me, and I’m sure I must have bumped into him several times on campus, but it was not until he was elected the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review that I seriously took notice of who he was. His name was Barack Obama.
Although we shared only a few mutual friends, did not take any classes together, and were not active members of any of the same organizations, our paths—although distinctly different—were destined to cross. I had become a student activist fighting for faculty diversity, and he was the embodiment of what Harvard said it was looking for in recruiting faculty members of color.
The law school had often explained its dismal track record at recruiting women and people of color by citing the absence of candidates who met their demanding qualifications. Harvard only wanted to hire top graduates of elite schools who served on top law review journals and clerked for top judges on the federal bench. And here was Obama, who had graduated from Ivy League Columbia University, was a student at one of the nation’s top law schools, had served on the Harvard Law Review, and had become the first Black president of the hundred-year-old institution.
With that background, Obama could have gotten a clerkship with any of the top judges or justices in the federal court system. Whether or not he wanted it, he was on a career track that would have made him perfectly suited to teach at Harvard. It was a godsend to our campaign for faculty diversity. He did not take part in our sit-ins at the dean’s office. He did not get disciplined, as some did. And he was not involved in our controversial lawsuit. But he did not need to be. His mere existence came to symbolize everything we had been arguing in our case against the law school.
In a speech after he was elected to his post at the law review, Obama stood outside the student center with Professor Derrick Bell at one of our campus rallies and articulated his support for greater diversity on the faculty. His presence alongside Bell communicated our message that there were qualified candidates available to be hired. And all he had to do was stand up and introduce the professor to a multiracial crowd of classmates, faculty, and media. Wearing a simple button-down blue Oxford and khaki pants, Obama recalled an encounter when Bell spoke at a welcome session organized by the Black Law Students Association for first-year students. In what would become the now familiar cadence of Obama’s speaking style, he praised the professor for the “excellence of his scholarship,” which he said had “opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards for what legal writing is about.” It was classic Barack Obama, always able to thread the needle between various communities and adept at addressing even the most controversial public issues with a measured tone of reason and civility.
The next time I remember seeing Obama was four years later, after we had both graduated from law school, when he had just published his first book, and I had just finished writing mine. Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree invited the two of us to campus to talk about writing and politics. Obama was running his first campaign for public office as a candidate for the Illinois State Senate, and I had been working at the White House in the Clinton administration. After that event, Obama would go on to win a state senate race, but he did not succeed that first time he ran for Congress in 2000. The loss was not a great surprise—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush notwithstanding, it is very difficult to defeat an incumbent member of Congress. Perhaps that’s why Obama would later describe his decision to challenge the incumbent as “stupid” in his memoir A Promised Land. But that loss to Representative Bobby Rush, in a district that was overwhelmingly Black, prepared him for questions about his identity that would follow him into the 2008 presidential campaign and beyond.
The former president recalled some of the whispers in his memoir: “Obama’s an outsider. He’s backed by white folks. He’s a Harvard elitist. And that name. Is he even Black?” As Chicago political expert Paul Green told National Public Radio (NPR) in 2007, Bobby Rush “basically had a campaign in which the argument was, ‘Obama’s not one of us.’” He was a transplanted Chicagoan who had been educated at Columbia and Harvard with a base of support near the prestigious University of Chicago in Hyde Park, while Rush was a longtime civil rights activist who had founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers in the 1960s.
But what may have appeared to be an embarrassing defeat in 2000 would actually turn out to be an unexpected gift. Losing to Rush may have been the best thing that ever happened to Obama’s career. The loss of the campaign helped to prevent him from being typecast by a white America that would have reduced him to the label of a Black congressman. In white identity politics, whiteness is portrayed as normative and universal, while Blackness is considered suspect. White people are assumed to be neutral and unbiased and fully capable of representing the whole, while Black and brown people are presumed only to hold loyalty to their own. White members of Congress from overwhelmingly white states—even people who’ve never had any meaningful interaction with a Black person—are seen as viable national figures. Black members of Congress, who often rely on white donors and supporters to help sustain their campaigns, are characterized as biased and rarely afforded the same credibility that white members are given when speaking on issues beyond the interests of their Black constituents. This remains the case even though people of color are required to interact with white people in order to function in our white-dominated society, while white people themselves are often able to distance themselves from people of color and remain oblivious to the struggle and experience of Black and brown Americans.
While serving as a US senator representing the overwhelmingly white state of Illinois, Barack Obama would still face these predictable, and sometimes contradictory, questions about his loyalties. As the son of a Black father from Kenya who spent his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, he was foreign. As a Chicago politician who attended a controversial Black church, he was just another radical militant. Even the man Obama would choose as his 2008 running mate had once described him as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” a comment that casually dismissed the historic significance of Shirley Chisholm in 1972, Jesse Jackson in
1984 and 1988, and Reverend Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun in 2004. Obama’s presidential campaign would challenge politicians and journalists to come to terms with their cramped notions of Blackness.
For many white observers, Obama was an anomaly, a unicorn, a mystery, not just because of his blended background, but because he did not reaffirm the existing tropes of Black identity. For Black people, however, Obama was impressive, but not spectacular. As Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in TIME magazine in 2007, what white observers “fail to understand is that African-Americans meet other intelligent, articulate African-Americans all the time.” When white politicians or journalists swoon over a Black person for speaking English properly, their reaction suggests what limited experience they have had with educated Black people.
Keenly aware of America’s racial history, African Americans approached Obama’s presidential campaign with cautious optimism. Most Black Americans had very little knowledge of Barack Obama when he announced his campaign on a cold day in Springfield, Illinois, in February 2007. Contrary to assumptions, they did not reflexively support him because he was Black. In a country where we make up only 13 percent of the population, we have a long history of supporting viable white candidates. It was the reason I had worked for Michael Dukakis after college instead of joining Jesse Jackson’s campaign. Most Black people have learned to be political realists in a society where our options are often limited.