Obama upped the ante by stealing scenes from his elders’ dramatic history and using their lines to benefit his play for power, casting himself as Joshua, Moses’s successor in the Bible, aiming to contrast an older generation’s fiery imperatives to his generation’s cooler delivery. Obama’s clever distinction nonetheless carried risks: Joshua was charged with duties that tied him more closely to his elders than Obama might be willing to admit. Some black figures were willing to press Obama on his failure to embrace the bond between the two generations.
In 2013 Kevin Johnson, a prominent Philadelphia pastor and self-professed “strong supporter of the president” who worked “hard to get him elected in 2008 and 2012,” penned a controversial and widely discussed opinion piece, “A President for Everyone, Except Black People,” for the local black newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune.27 Johnson echoed Marcia Fudge’s complaint that Obama’s second-term cabinet lacked black leaders and advisers. Johnson argued that “when one compared the first African-American president to his recent predecessors, the number of African-Americans in senior cabinet positions is very disappointing: Clinton (7); Bush (4); and Obama (1). Obama has not moved African-American leadership forward, but backwards.” Johnson admitted that while gaining senior cabinet positions does not guarantee economic advance for black folk, it at least puts them in the driver’s seat, though with “President Obama, we are not in the driver’s seat—or in the car.” Johnson argued that such a state of affairs was “disrespectful” to the black community that voted “96 percent for President Obama in 2008 and 93 percent in 2012.”
Johnson contended that an objective survey of Obama’s presidency proved that blacks “are in a worse position than they were before [Obama] became president. At the end of January 2009, unemployment for African-Americans was 12.7 percent,” while four years later “the situation is worse, and unemployment is higher at 13.8 percent.” Johnson said he’d supported Obama not because he was black, but because he was the best person to “empathize, understand, and develop policies to help the African-American community, the poor, and previously under-represented communities.” A disappointed Johnson argued that Obama has not simply “failed the Black community,” but his agenda “appears to be for everyone except Black people, his most loyal constituency.” He concluded that if Obama “does not make some changes soon, at the end of his presidency he will be known as a historical leader—the first African-American president, but not a transformational leader—the president who truly uplifted and catapulted Black people from cycles of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and despair.”
Johnson’s commentary got him into hot water. He had been invited to deliver the baccalaureate sermon at his alma mater, Morehouse College, the day before Obama was slated to give the college’s 2013 commencement address. But after Johnson’s opinion piece appeared, Morehouse president John Wilson, who previously headed the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, informed Johnson that his address would be changed to a multi-speaker event in order to air a broader set of views. Johnson declined to participate under the new format and charged in a letter to Wilson that the college president had “disinvited” him because of his tough talk on Obama. After several alumni of the all-male black college criticized Wilson for his decision, Johnson was reinstated and gave his sermon.
A year before Johnson’s article, an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Columbia University professor Fredrick Harris had also stirred quite a response with a provocative title: “Still Waiting for Our First Black President.” Harris argued in the essay, and in the book from which it was adapted, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics,28 that when he was trailing in the race against Hillary Clinton, Obama discussed issues like “racial injustice in front of black audiences” and supported “targeted and universal policies to address racial inequality.” Harris claimed that this is “the Obama who has been forgotten, who all but disappeared later in his 2008 campaign and during his presidency.” He contended that Obama “has pursued a racially defused electoral and governing strategy, keeping issues of specific interest to African Americans—such as disparities in the criminal justice system; the disproportionate impact of the foreclosure crisis on communities of color; black unemployment; and the persistence of HIV/AIDS—off the national agenda.” Harris charged that, far “from giving black America greater influence in U.S. politics, Obama’s ascent to the White House has signaled the decline of a politics aimed at challenging racial inequality head-on.” He concluded that Obama “may be our first gay president”—referring to a 2012 Newsweek magazine cover acknowledging Obama’s strong support for gay folk—“but if a focus on racial inequality matters at all, we’re still waiting for our first black one.”29
If Harris was waiting for the first black president, some black feminist critics and public intellectuals argued that at least black men got presidential support with Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. The president crafted the program to improve the fate of young boys and men of color after the violent, untimely deaths of Trayvon Martin and other young black males. Journalist and public intellectual Brittney Cooper—who also criticized Obama for his brand of respectability politics, and for his paradoxical version of American exceptionalism30—was at first ambivalent about My Brother’s Keeper.31 Cooper acknowledged that black boys stand in need of help because they suffer high rates of school suspension, incarceration, and unemployment—and low rates of high school and college graduation—and commit a large percentage of violent crimes. She noted that it is black women “doing the fighting, the organizing, the praying, the rearing, the fussing, the protecting, the loving. And the losing. Black women have been their brothers’ biggest and best keepers.”32 Cooper wished that “black men—Barack Obama included—had the kind of social analysis that saw our struggles as deeply intertwined.” She highlights numbers that show just how dire the situation is for black girls:
According to the African American Policy Forum, black girls are suspended at a higher rate than all other girls and white and Latino boys. Sixty-seven percent of black girls reported feelings of sadness or hopelessness for more than two weeks straight compared to 31 percent of white girls and 40 percent of Latinas. Single black women have the lowest net wealth of any group, with research showing a median wealth of $100. Single black men by contrast have an average net wealth of $7,900 and single white women have an average net wealth of $41,500. Fifty-five percent of black women (and black men) have never been married, compared to 34 percent for white women.33
Cooper praises Obama’s efforts to secure his post-presidential legacy by forging policies—beyond the Affordable Care Act—that assist the demographic groups most responsible for landing him in the Oval Office. These include LGBTQ people (a 2014 executive order that prevents federal contractors from discriminating on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity), men of color (My Brother’s Keeper, broadened clemency for low-level drug offenders, a hike in the federal minimum wage), and Latino families (the 2014 pledge to review Obama administration deportation policies that wreaked havoc in Latino communities). But Cooper justly chafes at Obama’s neglect of black women and girls, his greatest voting demographic.34
Arguing that black women “have been the subject of no executive orders, no White House initiatives and no pieces of progressive legislation,” Cooper writes:
Ninety-six percent of black women voters voted for Obama compared to 87 percent of black men. Seventy-six percent of Latinas voted for the president compared to 65 percent of Latino men. Though black and other women of color who are a part of the LGBTQ community will benefit from [the 2014] executive order, no initiative has explicitly addressed the structural issues of racism, classism, poor education, heavy policing and sexual and domestic violence that disproportionately affect black and Latina women. As a black woman who voted twice for this president, despite some misgivings, I find myself wondering how we will fit into the legacy
of progressive policy initiatives that the president is trying to craft as part of his exit strategy.35
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Columbia University law professor and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, whose study on black women and girls is the source that Cooper cited, offered a bracing opinion piece in the New York Times whose title perfectly captured her argument: “The Girls Obama Forgot.” Crenshaw wonders if “the exclusion of women and girls is the price to be paid for any race-focused initiative in this era.” Addressing the needs of black men, she argues, “hits a political sweet spot among populations that both love and fear them,” while “erasure of females of color is regarded as neither politically nor morally significant.” Crenshaw acknowledges that ignoring black women and girls is nothing new; it grows from the belief that black men are at exceptional risk to the plagues of racism and the unfounded notion that black women are faring much better by rough comparison, one that, Crenshaw maintains, is supported by evidence that “is often illogical, selective or just plain wrong.” She notes that “like their male counterparts, black and Hispanic girls are at or near the bottom level of reading and math scores . . . They also face gender-specific risks: They are more likely than other girls to be victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking, more likely to be involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and more likely to die violently. The disparities among girls of different races are sometimes even greater than among boys.”36
Crenshaw questions the way some observers use the high rates of black male incarceration to justify the exclusive focus on black men and boys: “Is their point that females of color must pull even with males in a race to the bottom before they deserve interventions on their behalf?” Crenshaw also underscores the paradox in the failure of the My Brother’s Keeper initiative to gather information about women and girls of color, which feeds the misperception that they are relatively better off than their male counterparts: “The exclusion of girls of color from the data collection means that there will be fewer ‘evidence based’ interventions for girls—because there was no interest in marshaling evidence to support interventions for them in the first place.” She argues that supporters of My Brother’s Keeper use the familiar analogy of the canary in the coal mine to scrutinize the experiences of men and boys of color while leaving aside women and girls: “But the point of the canary’s distress was to alert everyone to get out of the mine, not to attend to the canary and ignore the miners. Implicit in rescuing only the males is the idea that the mine itself isn’t the problem—and that females are resilient enough to survive the toxic air or can hold their breath and wait. What needs to be fixed are not boys per se, but the conditions in which marginalized communities of color must live.”37
If Cooper’s and Crenshaw’s progressive perspectives, like those of Kevin Johnson and Fredrick Harris, aimed to push Obama in the right direction, the left-wing critics from the Black Agenda Report have consistently lambasted Obama as the genial face of American empire. In “2007: The Year of Black ‘Media Leaders’—Especially Obama,” Report executive editor Glen Ford argued that “Barack Obama’s corporate-made-and-financed presidential campaign is the product of three distinct factors.”38 First, there were corporate decisions made a decade earlier to provide media and financial support to “pliant Black Democrats that can be trusted to carry Wall Street’s water.” Second, there was the desire of whites to prove they were not racist—and to dispute black claims of persistent racism—by voting for a black man. Third was the willingness of black folk to ignore the political stances of candidates in order to embrace the philosophy of black faces in high places. “A President Obama would, of course, be the zenith of such narrow, non-substantive, objectively self-defeating visions,” wrote Ford. In 2012, Report managing editor Bruce Dixon, in “Tired Old So-Called Leftists Give Same Old Excuses for Supporting Obama in 2012,” argued that black America formed a “veritable wall around the First Black President,” but that this wall does not protect Obama from “racists or Wall Street predators or Pentagon warmongers.” When black Americans “stifle our own tongues and circle the wagons trying to silence critics of the White House we only protect the president and his party from accountability to their supposed base: us.”39
In the same year Ford accused the Obamas of being “a global capital–loving couple, two cynical lawyers on hire to the wealthiest and the ghastliest,” who are “no nicer or nastier than the Romneys and the Ryans, although the man of the house bombs babies and keeps a kill list.”40 Ford also blasted leftist icon Angela Davis for declaring that Obama’s triumph was a “victory, not of an individual, but of . . . people who refused to believe that it was impossible to elect a person, a Black person, who identified with the Black radical tradition.” Ford charged that Davis had “soiled herself, and done a terrible injustice to black history and tradition,” and that “she has diminished herself and insulted our people for the sake of a president who doesn’t give a damn for their history or their future.”41 The Report also argued that Fredrick Harris’s criticism of Obama is insufficiently leftist because his book fails to engage “the plutocratic political cash and the many sided corporate-imperial establishment—to the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire—that pre-select ‘viable’ presidential candidates for popular ‘choice’ in the first place.”42
It is reasonable for a black leftist to challenge Obama’s rightward drift into what public intellectual Cornel West terms “a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency,” in which crooked executives and torturers go unpunished.43 But vituperation clouds West’s political stances no matter their insight or virtue. West has conducted campaigns of vitriol against Obama in the name of social prophecy. White leftists and liberals are angry with Obama too, but figures like Michael Moore, Roger Hodge, and Diane McWhorter have not resorted to the epithets that stain West’s analysis.44 West skewers Obama as “a black Mascot of Wall Street oligarchs,” a “black puppet of corporate plutocrats,” and a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface.”45 He has also accused other intellectuals and leaders of selling their souls to Obama, especially the Reverend Al Sharpton.
West has nastily accused Sharpton of “prostituting” himself for the president, and for being “the bonafide House Negro of the Obama Plantation,” a prospect that would have Martin Luther King Jr. “turning over in his grave.”46 Sharpton told me in an interview that, on the contrary, he is operating in the venerable tradition established by an earlier generation of leaders: “My relationship with Obama is like Dr. King’s was with Kennedy. They were close enough for Kennedy to warn him about the FBI’s surveillance of figures in the movement.” Sharpton chuckled. “Hell, Obama ain’t told me to watch out for nothing! So I’m not even as close to Obama as King was to Kennedy. But I have the freedom to do whatever I want to do, including criticize him.”
Sharpton has been taken to task for allegedly saying on the television newsmagazine show 60 Minutes that he would never publicly criticize Obama. “I never said that I would never criticize Obama,” Sharpton told me; “[60 Minutes correspondent] Lesley Stahl said I said it.”47 Instead, Sharpton contends, “I said I would never criticize him for not having a black agenda.” Sharpton believes it his duty as a civil rights leader to pressure the president to embrace racial justice, and that Obama’s role is to govern with sensitivity toward an agenda brought to him by black leaders. Sharpton says that he and Obama have differences but that he doesn’t exhibit meanness in expressing criticism: “I disagree with [the president] on Afghanistan. And . . . I don’t understand why he couldn’t immediately close Guantanamo Bay. He explained in a meeting the military reasons, [but] I don’t see any reason not to do it. So we’ve had debates—friendly, but firm. And we agree to disagree.”
As for Obama’s policies on race, Sharpton notes: “I always felt in the first term that they were too cautious. They got a little better in the second term.” Sharpton maintains that Obam
a is not being disingenuous when he is highly optimistic about racial progress—though critics view it as profound political naïveté. “He really does think everything is together,” says Sharpton. “But I think he underestimated the venom and rage that were coming at him. And I think as time went on, he began to understand [that] we weren’t imagining that stuff; there is still real [racism] in this country.”
West and his former radio cohost Tavis Smiley also criticized Sharpton for not demanding that the Department of Justice immediately charge George Zimmerman with a civil rights violation in connection with the shooting of Trayvon Martin. “The difference between me and others who commentate is I’m representing real people,” says Sharpton. “I’ve got a real [civil rights] membership. They have nothing. So they’re just shooting off at the mouth. I’ve got to worry whether [criticizing the president and the attorney general] is more important than making sure that Trayvon Martin’s family gets a meeting with the Justice Department.” Sharpton also argues that Obama has not actively opposed black interests in the way that Bill Clinton did when he signed welfare reform and a crime bill that leveled black America. Still, black America gave Clinton a pass because he offered compensating virtues in making cabinet appointments and preserving affirmative action; Sharpton contends that Obama is surely no less worthy of the black benefit of the doubt.
The Black Presidency Page 4