by Keith Boykin
At the same time when private citizens, vigilantes, and law enforcement officers were caught on video policing Black bodies on the street, the political class in Washington policed the two most famous Black bodies in the White House. That part was easy to recognize. But in the intoxicating energy of the fight against Obama’s racist critics, I was slow to recognize that President Obama himself slipped into the act of policing Black bodies from time to time, particularly when he addressed Black audiences.
When Obama became the first sitting president to give the commencement address at historically Black Morehouse College, for example, he warned the graduates that “too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices.” In explaining the obstacles that the young men would face after graduation, Obama told them: “Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.” That scolding tone raised questions for a number of Black critics. “It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this White House has one way of addressing the social ills that afflict Black people—and particularly Black youth—and another way of addressing everyone else,” writer Ta-Nehisi Coates observed in The Atlantic at the time. “I would have a hard time imagining the president telling the women of Barnard that ‘there’s no longer room for any excuses’—as though they were in the business of making them.” As Coates concluded, “Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of ‘all America,’ but he also is singularly the scold of ‘black America.’”
Obama’s rhetoric of personal responsibility was not new or unique to him. Black parents, religious leaders, and community activists had been expressing similar sentiments in public forums for as long as I could remember. Young African Americans were repeatedly lectured to stay in school, stay off the streets, support their families, and support Black-owned businesses. We were taught at an early age that racism was ineradicably embedded in the DNA of American society and that we had to be “twice as good” in order to be half as successful as our white counterparts. President Obama’s words to Black audiences barely deviated from that long-established guidance, but much of that advice had been premised on the assumption that African Americans would never access control of the levers of power that could free them.
What made Obama’s remarks different is that Obama controlled the very instruments of government that legions of Black parents and pastors had long critiqued. Yes, racism was inevitable for Black people in America, but for eight years, a Black man actually ran the government that had the power to do something about it. Was it the young people’s responsibility to acquiesce to the inevitable oppression of racism or was it the president’s responsibility to try to stop it? And if Black college students had an obligation to accept personal responsibility, then shouldn’t the Black president of the United States have had an obligation to use every tool at his disposal to fight racism?
Personal responsibility had been a consistent theme with Obama long before he was elected president. Years earlier, in his first major speech to a national television audience, Obama initiated a public conversation on personal responsibility. As the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the new rising star in the party called on “inner city” parents and children to do their part instead of relying solely on government. “Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn,” Obama said. “They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a Black youth with a book is acting white.”
Perhaps we should have seen it then. Those of us who expected Obama to transform into a vehicle for revolutionary racial progress once in office had either misread the moment or the man. Perhaps we had inserted our own assumptions into the blank slates of “hope” and “change” that his campaign symbolized. But Obama the candidate made it clear who he was all along. He did not support reparations for African Americans. He did not support marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples. He did not support legalizing marijuana. Nor did he support the abolition of the death penalty. He preferred an employer-based health care system over a single-payer government health insurance model. And on immigration, he was far from radical. “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States, undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country,” Obama declared in 2005, in a speech where he also called for border security agencies to “deport illegal immigrants.”
Despite the obvious signals of moderation long before he became president, many in progressive communities assumed that Obama was a closet radical. He had reportedly supported gay marriage years before he ran for president, and few of our mutual law school classmates really thought he was opposed to it in 2008. He had also spoken positively about government-run health insurance long before he ran for president. And by his own admission, he had smoked marijuana and taken drugs as a young person. As he wrote in his first memoir, Dreams from My Father, “If the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.”
As a Black man married to a Black woman, both of whom attended a Black church run by a controversial pro-Black preacher, many Black people also assumed that Obama secretly held radical views of Black liberation. Despite his benign public demeanor, maybe there was a secret revolutionary side we missed. I remember during the Democratic National Convention, walking through downtown Denver in August 2008, when my former professor Charles Ogletree cornered me and pulled me aside for a quick conversation. He was worried that the media had gotten access to a video of Obama in law school with law professor Derrick Bell. He remembered that I had been involved in the diversity movement and asked what I knew. I reassured him that the parts of the video I had seen were innocuous and unlikely to affect Obama’s campaign.
Still, there was a sense of trepidation that Republicans had some secret weapon ready to release on Obama at any moment after he secured the nomination. Republican operative Roger Stone even claimed that there was a tape of Michelle Obama referring to white people as “whitey”—a term I had never heard any Black person use in my life—that was about to emerge at any moment. To add to the heightened suspicion, a July 2008 cover of The New Yorker magazine featured an illustration of a gun-toting, Afro-wearing Michelle Obama fist-bumping her husband who wore Muslim headdress and clothing; they stood in the Oval Office next to an American flag burning in a fireplace below a portrait of Osama bin Laden. That was far from subtle. But even Obama’s name raised questions for some. The very idea that America might elect a Black man named Barack Hussein Obama—after fighting a war against an Iraqi dictator named Hussein and an al-Qaeda terrorist named Osama—aroused suspicion in some quarters.
With his Kenyan-born father and “exotic” background, perhaps Obama was a closet radical, conservatives feared. And even in Black America, and in other Democratic circles, many of us approached Obama’s moderate views with a wink and a nod. Those were words he had to say or things he had to do to get elected, we reasoned; while deep down in our bones we knew that he actually shared our values and our beliefs. We understood the game we thought he was playing. We knew that America would not allow a Black man who openly described himself as pro-Black to become president, so we allowed Obama to play the role of being pro-everyone. Surely, we told ourselves, that was the point of his 2004 convention speech, when he resisted the efforts to divide America into red states and blue states. “There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” he said. No one I knew actually believed that. It was aspirational, at best. As much as politicians talk about unity, we all know the country had been divided since the beginning.
But, perhaps, Barack Obama was different. Maybe this child
of a white woman from Kansas and a Black man from Kenya actually did believe in this message of racial unity. We had no way to know for sure. Obama ran for president “on two contradictory platforms,” Emory University professor Drew Westen wrote in an August 2011 New York Times op-ed, “as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue.” He could not be both, but because he presented as a blank slate just being introduced to millions of Americans, voters were free to choose which platform they would embrace.
Barack Obama was, in effect, a Rorschach test. In him, people could see whatever they wanted, depending on who they were as much as who he was. He reflected the person looking at him. Hidden behind the inspirational “Yes, we can” celebrity music videos and iconic one-word poster images, there was an Obama for everyone. You could vote for Obama the reformer in the “Change” poster or Obama the unifier in the “Hope” poster, depending on which made you more comfortable. For his own part, Obama pursued the platform that was “most comfortable” with his character, according to Westen, “consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.”
At the end of eight years in office, it had become abundantly clear that Barack Obama was never the radical revolutionary racial fighter that progressives dreamed of or that conservatives feared. He helped to pull the country out of the twin crises of war and recession that he inherited and set a positive example of Black leadership and “Black excellence,” but he did not radically change America. Nor was this ever his goal. From his very first day in office to his last, Obama governed with the message that prioritized “hope” over “change.” Even after the devastating results of the November 2016 presidential election, while stunned Democrats shrieked in horror, Obama exuded his characteristic optimism in throwing his support behind his archrival Donald Trump. “We are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country,” Obama said. “We have to remember that we’re actually all on one team.”
The presidency had been a humbling experience for Barack Obama, and his two terms in office had been an eye-opening experience for America as well. If anyone had ever held the mistaken belief that one Black president could dismantle hundreds of years of racism and white supremacy, that idea should have been destroyed by the lived experience of the Obama era. If anyone felt that a Black president, for whom most white Americans did not vote, could serve as adequate compensation for centuries of racial injustice, that notion should have been dismissed long ago. And if anyone believed that America had magically evolved into a postracial society because of the election of one biracial Black official, that myth was shattered well before his eight years had lapsed.
As a realist, Obama knew from the beginning that he could only accomplish a few big things in his presidency. But as an optimist, he understood at the end of his presidency that the work would go on. “I think of this job as being a relay runner,” Obama said after the disappointing 2016 election. “You take the baton, you run your best race and hopefully by the time you hand it off, you’re a little further ahead, you’ve made a little progress.” Yes, it was just “a little progress” in the eyes of some, but it was deeply threatening to others. He clearly did not advance racial justice as far as many of us would have liked. And yet, he just as clearly threatened millions of nervous white Americans that the race against time had reached a critical juncture that threatened to dislodge them from power. As America continued to become Blacker and browner, fearful white people worried that they would soon lose control of their country unless they took dramatic steps to limit the growth of or to disenfranchise the new emerging majority. For them, a crisis loomed, and the time had come to make one last-ditch effort to preserve white patriarchal privilege in society.
In walked Donald J. Trump.
8
DONALD TRUMP’S WHITE NATIONALISM
The glow of jubilation from the night before had barely begun to dim when the phone rang in Denver. I had spent Thursday evening—my birthday night—on the field of a football stadium with eighty thousand people around me to watch my former schoolmate accept his party’s nomination for president of the United States. I covered the national convention for Black Entertainment TV that night. I had expected to wake up on Friday to celebratory newspaper headlines and positive television coverage of Obama’s soaring acceptance speech. The convention had achieved its goal. It had successfully consolidated warring factions of Democrats for a common purpose. The party was finally united. The wind was at their backs. Then came the news that would ruin the day.
Late Friday morning, I learned that Obama’s opponent had selected a running mate. The announcement was purposefully timed to steal the thunder from the Democrats at the end of their convention. Republican presidential nominee John McCain was expected to reveal his choice at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, that afternoon. And the person who would take the stage that day? A little-known forty-four-year-old mother of five who had struggled to graduate from college and never traveled outside the United States until a year before she was nominated. At the time she was picked, she had been governor of Alaska for less than two years. Her only completed term in government had been as mayor of small-town Wasilla, Alaska, with a population of about ten thousand people.
“For God’s sake, this woman is totally unqualified,” I complained on CNN Headline News that day. “And for the Republicans, who have been arguing all along that experience is the most important issue, this is an outrage,” I said. Republican strategist Chris Wilson shot back: “Keith, I really hope all the Democrats are as dismissive and condescending toward this pick as you are because I think what it’s going to do is show the attitude, the true attitude, that Democrats and many of the Barack Obama supporters have had towards women throughout this campaign.” Wilson’s attempt to conflate criticism of the woefully unqualified Sarah Palin with criticism of all women struck me as a transparent deflection. It had been Democrats who selected Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 as the first woman to be a major party nominee for vice president, twenty-four years before Republicans nominated Sarah Palin. And it had been Democrats who gave Hillary Clinton eighteen million votes for president in 2008, long before any Republican woman would come close to winning the GOP’s presidential nomination. What the Palin selection actually revealed was the Republican Party’s own dismissive and condescending attitude toward women. Instead of picking a qualified, talented Republican woman with experience in government, McCain chose a noisy lightweight to compensate for his own failure to excite his base. His approach toward diversity reflected the same condescending and dishonest attitude George H. W. Bush had displayed in picking the inexperienced Black Republican Clarence Thomas to replace the legendary civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Bush chose Thomas because he was Black like Thurgood Marshall, and McCain chose Palin because she was a woman like Hillary Clinton. Bush and McCain both denied the real reason behind their selections. We were supposed to believe it was just a coincidence that Bush chose a Black man to replace a Black man and that McCain chose a white woman after a white woman had just run a historic campaign for president. This disingenuous Republican approach to “identity politics” fundamentally misunderstood that Democrats had selected highly qualified Blacks and women, while Republicans were simply playing politics.
Before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall had served as executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and had argued successful cases before the court, including the famous Brown v. Board of Education case. He had also served as US solicitor general and a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. His Republican-appointed replacement, Clarence Thomas, had never argued a case before the Supreme Court and had only served a year as a judge when Bush nominated him to a lifetime seat on the highest court in the country. Putting Clarence Thomas in Thurgood Marshall’s seat was like substituting an amateur boxer to fill in for Muhammad Ali.
The s
ame held true for Sarah Palin. She had been chosen, in large part, in direct response to the energy and excitement generated by Hillary Clinton’s historic 2008 campaign. But Clinton, unlike Palin, came to her campaign with decades of experience, including her service as a staff member on the House Judiciary Committee during the 1970s Watergate scandal. Before her husband was even elected president in 1992, Clinton had twice been named as one of the one hundred most influential lawyers in America by the National Law Journal. She served eight years in the White House as the most politically engaged First Lady in history and served nearly eight years in the US Senate. Even putting Sarah Palin in the same sentence with Hillary Clinton was like comparing a failed first-round American Idol contestant to Barbra Streisand.
Palin, a self-proclaimed “hockey mom,” would go on to embarrass herself repeatedly on the campaign trail. She claimed she had foreign policy experience because “you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.” She could not name a single newspaper or magazine that she read when asked by journalist Katie Couric. And she wrote crib notes on the palm of her left hand to answer questions when she spoke at one of her events. But on that Friday afternoon, as I watched John McCain introduce her to the adoring crowd of white people, as I watched them cheer for her and wave their American flags at a campaign rally outside of Dayton, Ohio, I had a hunch that she represented something much bigger than herself. It did not matter if she won the election or not. The energy in that room told me that her brand of snarky, demagogic politics would be the future of the Republican Party. She was the opposite of Obama and Clinton, with their Ivy League degrees, intellectual curiosity, and federal government experience. She could speak to that elusive group of working-class white people that Democrats and Republicans ceaselessly courted. And she was the culmination of decades of Republican politicians who had sought to dumb down their party for the masses.